JVC KD-G700 car stereo
Written: Dec 24 '04
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Pros: High quality, does everything you could possibly ask of it except DVD-audio.
Cons: The printing on the buttons is too small for some people to read.
The Bottom Line: Great overall unit. Technically-inclined people will find it very easy to use. But it won't make a good gift for grandma, instead go with a cheaper unit under $100.
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| cf-5's Full Review: JVC Sirius KD-G700 Car CD/ MP3 Player |
I've had this CD player for a few months and it's fantastic. Over the summer, I thought up the brilliant idea of burning 4.7 GB of mp3 songs to a DVD, and even smarter, I thought it would be cool to play them in the car. I looked around and around all over, and most of the sales people thought I had two heads. Just a few short months later, the concept of DVD-audio isn't as foreign to some people. But in my journey, I realized it's far from being affordable (if you can even find it) for a car stereo.
So I settled for being able to play mp3/WMA files off CD-R/W and went from there. I found both the KD-G700 and KD-G800 at very affordable prices (under $140 shipped for my KD-G700) and installed it myself in my 1985 Camry. The KD-G800 has more outputs for connecting it to a separate amp or other equipment, but because I'm just using the unit by itself with the 4 speakers in my car, I didn't need all that. I bought the less expensive, less complicated KD-G700.
This unit is sleek, and even without the bezel frame around the faceplate, it looks very comfortable in the dash. Cosmetically, the pipe-style design of the faceplate does all the work of the bezel frame and more.
AM/FM reception is excellent, overall sound quality is excellent, the scrolling mp3/WMA text is based on the information listed in the properties section of the file data, NOT the name of the file itself, so song titles with /*"? and other characters prohibited in Windows file names will still display properly. There are display options for artist, album title, and song title.
There are 4 angles that the faceplate can be adjusted to if you want to reduce sun glare or just change your viewing angle. It's motorized, and the front display remains fully functional even when it opens for you to put in a CD.
All my discs work in it. I even have some really old generic CD-RW discs I got at a flea market for about a dime a piece back in 1999, and I burned (at 2X because that's all the discs can handle) over 600 MB of WMA and mp3 songs to each disc. It played those without a problem. Fast search both forward and reverse work well, jumping about 10 seconds a clip for WMA files. I haven't played many regular audio CDs but I would imagine the search feature would be more refined than for WMAs.
There are 4 buttons that make it very easy to navigate from folder to folder and from song to song when playing a 700MB CD-R/W of mp3/WMA songs. I haven't even read the owner's manual, which is about 3/4 inch thick. But this unit is so easy to use, I've already mastered about 90% of the functions on my own. If you're a novice, some of the functions may be hard to figure out, but if you have experience with car stereos, you'll love this one.
This unit has only one drawback. The buttons are small, but they're spaced far apart so you don't accidentally push the wrong one. However, because they're so small, the writing on the face of each button is barely readable - I'm talking like 2-point font, if that. Once you familiarize yourself with the buttons and memorize which button does what, you'll begin pushing the buttons without even thinking about it, and this minor flaw shouldn't be a problem for you.
It was the bells and whistles like a motorized faceplate and scrolling text that attracted me to this unit, but the quality of JVC is what makes the KD-G700 really stand out. I highly recommend this car stereo.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 139
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Epinions.com ID:
cf-5
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Reviews written: 1
Trusted by: 0 members
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