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The unit had a few glaring flaws when it came out, all but one of them can be corrected. They are:
1. Display is excruciatingly bright at night, no dimmer option.
2. Unit comes with pewter/silvery faceplate.
3. Unit produces artifacts, ie chirping, ticks, pops, etc, on some MP3s.
4. Unit does not resume at the same spot on an MP3 if you switch to the radio and then back, or turn power off. Rather, it resumes at the start of the track that was playing.
#1 has no official fix yet, save affixing some window tint to the faceplate.
#2 can be fixed by using the faceplate front piece from a different model that is black - I believe the Houston, Key West, and Boston all work. Ditto for the trim ring.
#3 and #4 have been fixed by Blaupunkt themselves. There's a chip in the unit that needs replacing on older units, which fixes any playback issues, and also lets the unit resume exactly where it left off. Newer units should have the update already installed, ones bought in July or older may not, but all until approximately this coming October/November (and possibly all, period) will be fixed free of charge by Midwest Electronics.
What I like about the Blau are the very good ergonomics, and the extremely short (less than one second) pause between tracks, compared to the lengthy delay for the Pioneers. Also, unlike any Kenwood, the Blau will let you do random within folders, or across the entire disc. I also does WMA, but I decided not to use that after discovering that ID3 tags aren't supported with WMA. The Blau display is excellent, having both upper and lowercase characters in a highly readable font.
A final flaw may be that the subwoofer output does not have an adjustable level, much less frequency, so adjusting on the fly from the dash isn't possible. Your taste of music will I suppose determine whether this is a must have item.
I frequently peruse the selection of new MP3 head units, including the HD based units, and haven't yet seen one short of a $500+ Alpine unit, that offers a better combination of what I need.
If you want pictures of how the San Jose looks in Black, feel free to email me and I'll send some to you.
Aaron Gilbert
1987 9000T 279k miles
posted by 205.215.216...
, Thu, 8 Aug 2002 16:05:12
, Sun, 11 Aug 2002 12:45:42, Sun, 11 Aug 2002 15:35:50, Fri, 9 Aug 2002 15:51:56, Thu, 8 Aug 2002 20:23:48
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