Great Features - Poor Implementation

Bottom line, at first glance, everyone should own this deck, however there are some downfalls.

Although the display is amazing, it’s highly glare prone, in the daytime there are times that I can’t see the display at all, which is an issue when the phone is ringing and the main purpose of this unit was the BT interface. I cannot imagine that engineering at Pioneer hasn’t noticed this or isn’t going to offer a solution to the users, a revision should be designed and provided or my brand loyalty is back to Sony very soon. This is a hazard while driving if you have to bend over and down and use your hand to block the sun to see the display!

Next, as a sound engineer, I’m a naturalist, design engineers need to come up with a basic EQ and scale back on the dependency of DSPs. The sad thing is that you can’t get GREAT sound without turning on most of the filters, the sound then becomes so over processed that it really doesn’t sound that good anymore. I played with Time Alignment and even measured the exact distance from my speakers to my headrest, however it shifts the sound too far front for my taste.

The menus are not intuitive, if you’re playing a CD and you’re on track 35 and you want to see what is on track 50, the LIST mode starts you back at 1 so you have to dial all the way through to get to where you are then to where you want to go, I have several MP3 CD’s with 200 songs on them and to have to go all the way to the start each time is a total killjoy. One other thing about the CD interface, if you set to Random, the unit will play randomly, however if you manually skip songs, it goes to the next track, not a random track, Sony had this right, Pioneer has it wrong.

Finally the manual is not clear on many cases, it’s geared towards features and not practical implementations, example, you can’t assign a Custom EQ to the CD player and a Preset EQ to the XM, but you can assign Custom 1 EQ to both inputs and each can be customized to taste, this is not documented at all and drove me nuts while trying to figure out why the curves were different when I switched inputs. It would be nice to know more about the features and not a ‘bullet point’ about what they are called and the ‘in theory’ of what they are.