The San Jose MP41, Is it worth the money?
Written: May 22 '03
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Pros: 200Watts, ID3Tags, 700MB-CDs, 3 4V pre-outs,
Remote, MPEG1-2-2.5, VariableBitRate/320kbit-FixedBitRate MP3 files, Lots more...
Cons: Face too bright on dark nights - no dimmer control, Remote is chintzy, no Equilizer.
The Bottom Line: The San Jose MP41 is a feature packed MP3 head unit that won't break your bank account.
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| Spikey's Full Review: Blaupunkt San Jose Car CD/ MP3 Player |
My Decision
The Blaupunkt San Jose MP41 wasn't a first choice when I started looking for a replacement deck for my 1991 Chrysler LeBaron Convertible. I actually started looking at Pioneer and Kenwood. I am always looking for the best bang for my buck and I'm sure I got it with the San Jose MP41. At $195 after shipping and taxes I couldn't go wrong. You gotta love search engines and eBay! I first found this deck in my Crutchfield catalog [$299] amongst all the other MP3 decks. They have a nice table that shows some of the basic features of all the decks so you can scroll down and decide which one you like. According to their table, the MP41 has more pre-outs, more RMS wattage, and more CD signal-to-noise ratio than either the Pioneer or the Kenwood while being $50 less than both! Also, I'm not positive but from the pictures in the catalog, it looks like those other decks don't have any lower case lettering. It seems to be the only head unit in its class that has a dot-matrix display. Anyway, enough about my findings let's talk about features!
Features
The Blaupunkt San Jose MP41 has all the trimmings of your standard CD deck and then some.
Standard Features:
Fold-down/Detachable face, Bass/Treble control, balance/Fader control, Attenuate button (mute), Clock (a very nice clock because it is located on a separate part of the display and always shown), 50 Watts/channel Peak (25 Watts/channel RMS) [this amount of power is perfect for my taste, it sounds very clear and loud... even with the top down!], CD-Text, Track randomizer (mix mode), Repeat play, Cue/Review (fast forward and rewind inside a song), Seek/Manual/Scan (1st 10seconds)/Preset-Scan tuning.
Cool Bonus Features:
MP3 Player of course. You can cue/review through MP3 songs (like fast forward and rewind, and it's fast). Pressing the "DISP" button will display the clock while the engine and car are in the off position, this is a nice touch. It comes with a slim, credit-card-like, remote. It has 4 fully programmable on and off messages (12 characters each) with upper and lower case and special characters, 30 possible programmable AM/FM station names and 99 Compact Disc names for non CD-Text capable CDs. Station recall from the name of the station (if programmed). It has a 10 second anti-skip buffer (no skips yet!). If you like adding lots of power and speakers onto your system you'll like that it has three sets of 4.0V pre-amp outputs. With the purchase of an adapter you can also have an auxiliary input (mini headphone jack). Four XBASS levels for piling on the deep frequencies, if your into that sort of thing.
Cool, MP3 Specs
The MP3 decoder supports MPEG1, MPEG2, and MPEG2.5 sampling rates, it supports variable bit rate encoding (for keeping files small and retaining quality) or from 32kbps to 320kbps on fixed bit rate encoding. The ID3 tag support reads Artist name, Album title, and Song title for tag versions 1.0/1.1/2.2/ or 2.3; automatically scrolling through them one after the next. The MP41 supports folder hierarchy that can be as much as eight levels deep such as: d:\1\2\3\4\5\6\7\8\song.mp3. It has a great randomizer function that will either randomize in the current folder or if you want, it will randomize the entire disc of songs including all the folders in it's decision. The MP41 supports 80minute/700MB CDRs and CD-RWs. It will also play WMA files, I haven't tested this but it's another feature. One of the best things about the MP41 is the fact that it caches the entire MP3 CD in such a short amount of time. My wife has the Awia CDC-MP3 in her car and it takes, no joke, like 20 seconds to create a list of all the files on the disc. The MP41 does this in less than five seconds.
Drawbacks
Even in the best products there is usually one or two things that stand out as drawbacks. The drawbacks on the MP41 are little nuisances that I found annoying or bothersome, but more likely it's just me being anal or nit-picky.
1) Bright Display. The display on the unit is a very bright shade of blue and during the day it's great because you can read the white text on the blue background; when it gets dark outside, however, that thing glows like a lamp. It was quite distracting the first few days but now I'm used to it and it doesn't bother me as much, but it was a shock. The options in the menus include a "Contrast Control" but this doesn't do what you'd think.
2) Remote Buttons. Another thing that's bothersome is the remote buttons, I like everything about the remote, except that the buttons don't always register a key press; especially if your trying to use it fast. I have learned to use the remote buttons with patience and that solves the problem, but it also took some getting used to.
3) Display Speed. There is a "Display Speed" option in the options menu that is supposed to adjust the scroll speed of your ID3 tags and CD-Text info, this speed control doesn't do much and fast certainly isn't fast.
Conclusion
As I stated in the Drawbacks section the issues I have with the deck are really non-issues because I am so anal. They most certainly wouldn't keep me from recommending this deck to a friend. I'm very pleased with all the superfluous features that Blaupunkt has included. And let me restate that I am extremely happy with it's power. I am running four 5.25" Kicker Impulses and two 3.5" Clarions and I can crank this baby's up to volume level around 60 before it begins to distort and it's crystal clear!
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 195
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Epinions.com ID:
Spikey
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Member: Greg
Reviews written: 6
Trusted by: 1 member
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