Kenwood KDC-HD942U painful to listen to

[Tom Wells]

Finally I installed a whip antenna on my wife's Hyundai.
Two or three years ago I put the Kenwood KDC-HD942U in and was unable to hear enough on the AM to have any
idea what the AM really sounded like with the original antenna.

Firstly, the blue/gray display has a convex multi-layer plastic lens that is almost impossible to read
in daylight due to the convex "lens" doing a much better job of displaying reflections than the showing data.

Many functions are controlled by "knobs" which are not knobs, but must be "bumped" up or down, sideways, or
a "centered" push. It often does not notice these user inputs, requiring several attemps to get the radio
to notice what it is you're trying to do.

The operator interface and menu structure is beyond annoying.
It doesn't have instant sound like a transisitor radio, but has to has to "warm up" for a few seconds
before there's audio. Yes, I know it has to "boot up", but I'm equating that to having to wait for tubes to warm up.
If it was OK to ridicule such a delay due to tubes, it's OK to ridicule such a delay due to "digital".

The last car I remember waiting so long for the radio in was a friend's 1955 Oldsmobile back in the 70s.
It had tubes and a vibrator high voltage supply humming gently under the dash.

The FM won't tune to 87.7. Otherwise the FM gets an "A" grqade for reception.
Does OK with weak stations between strong stations, goes in HD OK, subchannels work well.

The AM is a complete travesty. Now that the sensitivity is what it should be with the new whip antenna,
it possible to TRY to listen AM, but the sound is so repellant, that I cannot.

The audio is brickwalled at a VERY low frequency and I can only compare it the sound of
ancient cylinder recordings. 78 RPM records have a much wider frequency response than this
radio.

There is a DSP (digital signal processing) mode, selectable to "bypass or "through".

As it pertains to AM, the 2 modes would be "awful" or "awful and smashed into no dynamics".

The EQ settings apply to all modes, so any attempts to cure the frequency distortion on the AM
results in FM or other sources being painfully screechy, without really having made very much difference at all on AM.

If you ever have occasion to use AM, it would be wise to avoid this radio entirely, unless you're willing
to somehow install an actual AM tuner elsewhere in the vehicle.

Or just consider it to be an FM and CD player only.

 

[tomservo]

I hate to hear this; I had a really good Kenwood radio (pre-HD) that had a horrible AM section but great FM/RDS performance. It also had separate EQ controls for each input, which mitigated the AM performance by a small margin. But it was a dog on AM, with the same wax cylinder bandwidth and enough birdies for an Audobon guide. The rest of the unit was pretty stellar, though.

I imagine the market for high AM performance on aftermarket stereos is really, really low. I don't think I've ever heard a good AM section on any modern aftermarket radio. They're more about iPod inputs and satellite radio now.

 

[KB1OKL]

I have a high end standard Blaupunkt system in my car and the AM section while sensitive sounds like there is a pillow over the speakers. The difference in the AM section from my 95 Buick to my 09 Pontiac is dramatic, the Buick AM sounds good, the Pontiac is terrible.

 

[MRFLASHPORT]

The Kenwood UI on those "buttonless" Excelon series are downright dangerous to use while driving.
I'm not surprised at the lack of AM performance. A friend of mine has that radio and it's a complete nightmare to operate while parked. At a Drive In theater in Atlanta, he couldn't even get it to manually tune to the FM frequency used for the audio of the movie we were trying to watch.

I have a JVC KD-HDR44, which was the cheapest in-dash HD enabled radio (paid $79 for it at Best Buy last November). FM performance on analog and HD is astounding, super sensitivity and selectivity on analog (even has switchable narrow and wide bandwidth). HD doesn't sound bad, certainly better than Sirius/XM. AM however, has the typical 300-5000Hz response. It's a shame, because it has EXCELLENT sensitivity and selectivity. Why they won't build a radio with wideband AM, it's not hard. I've only heard one AM HD on it (WQXI 790) which recently turned off their IBOC, and it sounded tinny. But it was sports talk.
This JVC has button presets, it's got a menu system too- but at least it has real traditional present buttons. You can store HD subchannels too.


The best AM (analog) aftermarket I had was an Eclipse 5441. The FM was superb too. Eclipse exited the aftermarket business, but their parent company, Fujitsu Ten, has been building OEM stereos for automakers for years. Not sure if the 5441 had wideband AM, but is sounded awesome on AM. If it had C-Quam, on a good AM Stereo station, you would swear it's FM. I miss that radio.

 

[nd2023]

It seems like they're trying to accelerate the death of AM by making it sound horrible. The FM radio not tuning to 87.7 isn't that big of a deal, unless your favorite station is on 87.7. If I were in the market for a new car in 2008 or 2009, a radio that doesn't tune to 87.7 would be a dealbreaker.

 

[jim8230]

The stock radio in my 2007 Saturn Aura is, by far, one of the best car radios I've ever had for AM reception. The audio quality is pretty good too....not great, but pretty good.

 

[Darth_vader]

Re: Kenwood KDC-HD942U painful to listen to

My Kenwood is strikingly painful to listen to. Pretty much deaf to almost everything except absolutely the strongest FMs in the market, and its mediumwave/AM section is a joke.

I think it may have been from a bad batch; a cousin has exactly the same rig in his car and it works fine. But then, I suppose I shouldn't expect too much to begin with from a display model that I mainly bought for the CD player!