Kenwood Quality at it's best.
Written: Sep 20 '02
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Pros: Looks great, sounds great, cool features, great quality.
Cons: Somewhat difficult to operate some features.
The Bottom Line: Great quality deck, at a very nice price. Lots of features you'd find on higher priced decks and it sounds great. Another great product from Kenwood!
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| reign's Full Review: Kenwood KDC-5019 Car CD Player |
Though not an eye popper this deck defiantly does look great. There are two versions of it. A backlit LCD display version and a non-backlit LCD Display version. I bought the Backlit version. Its soft blue backlight is easy on the eyes and not too bright in the dark. Plus it looks great in the dark.
Sound Quality:
Though this category is based much upon your speakers, even with my former stock speakers this system sounded great. A nice 50-Watts peak for each channel was plenty to power the stock speakers. The sound was clear and crisp and had very little distortion. Then I threw in some top of the line Polk Momo M455 component speakers with a Kenwood amp and the sound took real form. This deck doesn't even start to distort until you reach peak power. And I believe some of that can be contributed to the amp.
CD Compatibility:
This deck is one of the more CD friendly decks I've seen. It plays through most CD's with bad scratches. My Tool - Anemia CD would skip on Stinkfist on my two previous decks and every one of my friends, but on this one it doesn't. Plus this deck plays any burned CD I throw at it, which my previous CD Player didn't. The only major problem is that it sometimes has trouble ejecting CD's. Like it can't quite grip them (though I've seen this happen on many different brands). To get around it most of the time I had to take a pen or other smooth object and rub down the 'rough' edges around the CD. This fixes that problem for most CDs.
Features:
It has a lot of features, many that I don't use but it's still nice to have them. The coolest feature is its theft protection. When you turn off your car, the faceplate slides down and turns it self over, and the opposite when you turn your car on. It's completely motorized unlike most of the cheaper decks so no pushing your faceplate back up when you insert a CD. You can also angle the faceplate, which is kind of useless, but cool none the less. CD-changer control is also a feature, though it is limited to Kenwood CD changers, which I thought was kind of a drag. It has 4 pre-amp outs, so you'll have no trouble easily throwing a 4-channel amp on your speakers. It has a CD Naming utility so it will display the name of your CD's if you input it, this is a feature I've been meaning to use but am just too lazy to figure out how :). It also has 6 preset audio settings (Rock, Pop, Jazz, etc.).
Ease of use:
This is where this deck falls short a bit and why I won't give it a 5 out of 5 stars. If you're like me, you never read the manual to anything, so it took me quite awhile to find out how to change the bass, treble, balance, etc. Switching from CD to stereo to all off was a little more hidden than it should be too. Not to mention I only found out how to turn the power completely off like a month ago (have had it for 4 or 5). Also, the clock I have determined to be impossible to set without looking at the manual, I sat down and messed with it for a good 20 minutes and still could not figure out how to set the clock. Luckily those are pretty much the only difficult things and if you actually read the manual, something I should do more often, you'd actually know all this already.
Installation:
Nothing special here, you installed one deck you've installed them all.
Skipping:
This is seemingly the one thing everyone wants to know. How much does it skip? Well, this deck skips very, very rarely. In fact, so rarely you could even say never. Most of the time it will never skip, the only times I've had it skip was going on a dirt road with lots of washboard. Even going off road, or hitting a big pot hole, or a speed bump I didn't see it hasn't skipped, but those roads with wash board seem to be able to bump it just right.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 185.00
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Reviews written: 8
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