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Another great car CD Player from Pioneer, May 3, 2010

For the past 4 years I’ve been using a Pioneer DEH-P6700MP car stereo which is almost identical to the Pioneer DEH-P670MP. I really liked the Pioneer as it seemed to really be able to liven up my 1998 Toyota Corolla factory speakers and had several features I regularly used and loved. I decided it was time to upgrade recently as my old Pioneer was having difficulty playing CDs while the AC was on, and it was making ticking sounds with many of my CDs. I decided right off the bat I was going to stick with Pioneer.

I spent a few days researching units and the main thing I kept noticing with many of the new 2010 Pioneer CD Players was the choice of going with one that had HD Radio or going with one that had Bluetooth functionality. It doesn’t appear you can get a Pioneer with both. I decided to go with the HD Radio functionality due in part to the talk about how FM broadcast quality was greatly improved. (I’ll post a small rant on this at the end of my review.)

It seems like all Pioneers have the ability to read MP3 CDs still which is great, but one of the nicer additions is the USB port on the front. You can plug in your iPod, Zune, or USB thumb drive and play music off it instead of burning a CD or MP3 CD. It also works for charging USB devices. I tried plugging my Black Berry 8350i into the USB slot, but it would not recognize it as media and would only charge the phone. Another input on this Pioneer head unit is the aux audio input jack on the front of the face that you can plug into with a male to male stereo audio cable. An unannounced features this unit has that will be useful for many is RDS support. The unit will display the song/artist when listening to radio stations that broadcast this information.

Installation: I thought going from one Pioneer to another would be a breeze and that the stereo wire harness would be the same as my old Pioneer. Just to be sure I contacted Crutchfield whom said many stereo manufacturers use the same harness for several years. Unfortunately I want to confirm in my review that the one from my DEH-P6700MP and the one in this new DEH-P5200HD are not the same. They look similar, but they are wired like a mirror image of each other and will not fit each other. *A note to the beginners, if you’ve still got a factory stereo in your vehicle, do yourself a favor and buy a harness adapter so you do not have to cut the factory wiring in the dash. That way if you ever go to sell your vehicle or you decide you do not like the stereo, you can just disconnect the harness and put the factory stereo back in.

I’ve been using the Pioneer DEH-P5200HD for a few weeks now and I like the unit a lot. Many of the various equalizer settings are the same as what was available on my old unit, and MP3 CD playback is about the same as well. Having the USB slot on the front is extremely convenient and I use it frequently to plug in a 8gb USB thumb drive full of songs. When you pull out the drive and plug it back in, the unit remembers where you were at in the last song and picks right back up. One major thing that takes some getting used to is the control knob on the radio. It seems to control everything in that one knob and it takes time to get used to. The remote control will help ease you into things as all the buttons are easily spelled out on it. It’s also worth noting the remote is identical to my previous Pioneer remote and both were even cross-compatible.

Pros:

-Same fantastic EQ options Pioneer is known for. Includes bass frequency filtering options.

-USB & Aux input on the face

-USB input plays immediately when you plug in a USB drive, it also remembers what file and where it was at when the device was last plugged into it.

-iPod control from the face or remote

-RDS support for showing titles of songs from broadcast radio

-No lights and animated character distractions flashing all over the display.

Cons:

-Face detaches to the left side instead of flipping down which may be harder to remove depending on your dash

-HD Radio is not much of an improvement in quality of FM radio.

-USB input when reading from a USB thumb drive appears to read the folder order from last to first. (Song order is also affected if you add more songs to a folder later.)

-Control knob is an awkward all in one with a bit of a learning curve.

Do you remember upgrading from a tube TV to a flat screen? Do you remember the difference in picture quality? HD Radio is NOT that same upgrade. The HD FM radio broadcast quality is almost the same as what you’ve heard for years except now you don’t get static, instead you get cutting in and out for seconds at a time when the signal starts getting weaker. Sometimes you hear the radio…

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Nice little head unit – with some quirks, August 23, 2010

By 

D. Matheny (Austin, TX) – See all my reviews

  

  

  

I installed the P5200HD in a Mustang with a Mach460 sound system. I chose to go old school and hard wired it without using a wiring harness; but, please save yourself a few hours and get the wiring harness!

The things I like about this receiver are:

1) The unit puts out incredible sound and the HD radio is crystal clear. I live just North of Austin and haven’t noticed any of the cutting out that other reviewers have described. I’m sure the quality of your local HD radio stations will impact your experience quite a bit.

2) I love that I can plug a USB thumb drive full of songs into the receiver! To me, this is far more convenient than using CDs or even pluggin in my iPod most of the time.

3) Although I prefer using the USB thumb drive, the ability to use my iPod through the radio is also great. I hadn’t played with iPod tagging before now, but it has turned out to be a nice feature.

Although this receiver has been very nice overall, there are a few problems that I’ve run into:

1) For some reason the unit automatically came with the clock feature turned off – it took a while to find that and turn it back on.

2) I felt that the method for setting up preset channels was a little antiquated and the instructions were limited. Once I played with it for a while, I got the hang of it.

3) If you plan on removing the face, the side mount is a bit of a pain and it gets hung up on my dash. I really have to play with it to get it off – so I suspect I’ll probably just leave it in place.

Overall, I am very pleased with this head unit. It looks great, sounds awesome, and has more features than I have ever had single-DIN car stereo.

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Nice head unit. Good feature set. Poor implementation of reading USB storage devices., March 17, 2011

By 

David Pearlman “sound fanatic” (Arlington, MA) – See all my reviews

  

  

  

This is a typically good Pioneer head unit. The sound quality is good. The ergonomics are pretty decent. The ability to shape the sound (equalizer settings, etc.) are fine. The detachable faceplate works fine and is useful for those who live or park in higher crime areas. Pioneer makes some of the better head units, and this one is perfectly in line with the typical qualities of their lines. The current price for feature set is also reasonably attractive.

What I don’t like, and why I’m docking this to three stars, is the implementation of the one set-apart feature of this head unit, namely the ability to connect an iPod of USB storage device through a USB port in the head unit. Sounds like a great idea, and I was quite excited to be able to use it. I duly copied a bunch of folders of music to a multi Gb USB storage “thumb drive”, attached the drive to the unit, and started to navigate the music on the drive…

…only to discover that the unit presents the music on the storage device in order of the timestamp on the files (????!???) You’re reading that right. If you have 50 or 100 albums on that storage drive (easily accomplished on a 8 or 16gb storage drive), you’ll get to flip through them in a relatively arbitrary order. Not alphabetical order. Nope. By the timestamps. This is ridiculous. And the same problem applies to the files within each album folder. So unless you’re careful to make sure files in each folder are copied in the order you want to play them…the albums will play out of order.

In 2011, I think this is simply unacceptably amateurish coding of the USB navigation.

If you don’t plan to use the USB input, I’d say this is a solid 4 head unit, especially at the current street price. But if you don’t plan to use the USB input, there are other attractive options at the price.

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