My wife's Hyundai needed a new radio, the original was really insensitive and sounded pretty bad even on strong signals.
So, for her birthday, I put in the new Kenwood, about 300 dollars.
Its only upside is that it has two "knob" controls, so it looks like a radio.
The pause and wait feature............while the radio thinks about doing what you told it to do is absolutely maddening.
The switching back-n-forth feature on FM (or dropping out on HD2s) is annoying enough to make me wish it weren't even trying to decode HD.
The one or two AM stations in HD switch back and forth continuously, with about 60% analog and 40% digital.
When it does decode AM in HD, all the voices have the garbled "chorus" effect and the sound that the announcer has bad loogie in their throat and needs to cough it up.
This vehicle has the normal "window" antenna all modern vehicles suffer with, the AM is legally deaf, and should apply for disability.
I presume all HD car radios will work this poorly, as no one wants a mast antenna anymore.
We are 7 miles from the FM antennas in downtown, 20 miles from WBBM AM, and 40 miles from WLS AM.
In analog AM, the frequency cutoff sounds like it's at about 1500 hz, so it sounds much worse than old-fashioned telephone land-line audio,
which was at least 3 khz. Ibiquity has effectively eliminated all percussive sibilants on AM, turning all reception into a mush-mouthed
muffle-a-thon.
Bottom line, this thing is barely a radio at all. It is a hobbled radio-emulator, and would drive anyone to rely on CDs or the mp3 input.
Audio is fine with CDs, but it makes me consider adding an outboard tuner that is an actual radio so I can ignore the clunky
"Human-Machine interface", and hear AM signals in some meaningful fashion.
A mast antenna will probably help whenever I get around to adding it, but I'm sure most buyers will just think the radio is worthless.
I held off on making this report until we had tried it a while, just in case the poor showing were a result of squirrely propogation.
But it's this bad all the time. Nothing will ever help the problem with the AM section's IF bandwidth being so narrow.
Still eagerly awaiting a new production radio that doesn't trip over its own feet on AM, and come somwhere near the performance of
of the AM radios of 1963.
Your mileage may vary, but it won't be much better, and could be much worse.
So, for her birthday, I put in the new Kenwood, about 300 dollars.
Its only upside is that it has two "knob" controls, so it looks like a radio.
The pause and wait feature............while the radio thinks about doing what you told it to do is absolutely maddening.
The switching back-n-forth feature on FM (or dropping out on HD2s) is annoying enough to make me wish it weren't even trying to decode HD.
The one or two AM stations in HD switch back and forth continuously, with about 60% analog and 40% digital.
When it does decode AM in HD, all the voices have the garbled "chorus" effect and the sound that the announcer has bad loogie in their throat and needs to cough it up.
This vehicle has the normal "window" antenna all modern vehicles suffer with, the AM is legally deaf, and should apply for disability.
I presume all HD car radios will work this poorly, as no one wants a mast antenna anymore.
We are 7 miles from the FM antennas in downtown, 20 miles from WBBM AM, and 40 miles from WLS AM.
In analog AM, the frequency cutoff sounds like it's at about 1500 hz, so it sounds much worse than old-fashioned telephone land-line audio,
which was at least 3 khz. Ibiquity has effectively eliminated all percussive sibilants on AM, turning all reception into a mush-mouthed
muffle-a-thon.
Bottom line, this thing is barely a radio at all. It is a hobbled radio-emulator, and would drive anyone to rely on CDs or the mp3 input.
Audio is fine with CDs, but it makes me consider adding an outboard tuner that is an actual radio so I can ignore the clunky
"Human-Machine interface", and hear AM signals in some meaningful fashion.
A mast antenna will probably help whenever I get around to adding it, but I'm sure most buyers will just think the radio is worthless.
I held off on making this report until we had tried it a while, just in case the poor showing were a result of squirrely propogation.
But it's this bad all the time. Nothing will ever help the problem with the AM section's IF bandwidth being so narrow.
Still eagerly awaiting a new production radio that doesn't trip over its own feet on AM, and come somwhere near the performance of
of the AM radios of 1963.
Your mileage may vary, but it won't be much better, and could be much worse.