doReviewz.info

Overall Rating

Love It, With Some Caveats
My wife and I decided to get each other car stereos for the holidays. Our requirements for both of them were:

1. front USB port
2. iPod AND iPhone compatible, without requiring you to disable the radios in the iPhone (and requiring no “special” cable purchased separately)
3. it had to allow you to control the music BOTH via the iPod/iPhone directly, and via the stereo’s controls.
4. front-panel aux input

These requirements were, it turns out, quite limiting (particularly #3 above). Most iPod-compatible stereos from other vendors completely lock-out the iPod’s controls when you plug it in via the dock connector. This is even more important on the iPhone and iPod Touch, because the navigation controls on the Apple touchscreen devices are so much more capable than the stereo controls. If all you want to do is select an album or genre of music and let it play through, then using the receiver’s controls is fine. However, for selecting Genius Playlists, navigating through Audiobooks, selecting and navigating through Podcasts, and all of the other features I use my phone for, the receiver’s controls just aren’t going to cut it. Apple’s UI design is just better (though I do strongly recommend getting a windshield or dashboard mount for your phone to avoid a fiery crash).

Armed with these requirements, we settled on the Pioneer line of receivers. We selected a DEH-P4100UB for her car, and the slightly upgraded DEH-P5100UB for my car. To make a long story short, if I had it to do over again, I would have chosen the DEH-P5100UB for both cars, and not gone with the lower-end model in her car. I really like the DEH-P5100UB, but it isn’t without issues.

First, though, I’ll get to the differences between the P5100UB and it’s cheaper cousin. The primary differences are: the display, the UI control labels, and the connections available on the back of the unit. The P5100UB has a full-motion OEL display, where the P4100UB has a more traditional segment OEL line display. When deciding what model to get and looking at the models in a store, we decided that this really wasn’t important at all. Also, the factory-settings of the P5100UB (and all of the full-motion Pioneer receivers) is INCREDIBLY garish. There are TONS of modes for the display, and literally all of them except 1-2 are horrible with cheesy cars racing around, terrible “visualizers” that obscure any information on the display, flashing lights, and anything else “loud” you can imagine. However, if you spend some time in the settings, you can disable all of this and get yourself a very nice display. The P4100UB didn’t have any of this in the store, which is why we initially probably picked it over the higher-end model The Segment OEL display is fine, but the full motion display really does help the clarity of the information you get from the system. For example, instead of being limited to the display of the Artist, or Album, or Track Title for a particular song, the P5100UB can display all three at once. On the P4100UB, every mode and menu choice is abbreviated or oddly named to work around the display limitations, which makes you feel like you need to have the (equally poorly written) manual out whenever you need to set something new in the options or navigate through the menus. The P5100UB has much more “display area”, which allows everything to make much more sense.

Secondly, the UI Controls. Most operations on the entire Pioneer line of stereos are performed using the central “multi-jog” control. This works okay, if not ideally. However, there is an array of other buttons surrounding it that perform important functions (mostly the source input, the iPod vs. Stereo control toggle, the display toggle (changing the format of the display), shuffle, continuous, and other similar functions). The problem is that these button on the P4100UB are only lit with simple square green LEDs, where the P5100UB has the actual function symbol lit in blue. This means that on the P4100UB at night, it is impossible to tell what each button does other than by remembering its location. That’s fine once you learn it and can use it intuitively, but up until then, it is very difficult to use the stereo at night. The P5100UB does not have this issue at all. Plus, the blue display of the P5100UB matches the color of its lit buttons. On the P4100UB the button LEDs are green and the display is blue, which doesn’t look fantastic.

Lastly, the P4100UB is lacking some of the output options of the P5100UB (including a second, rear, USB input that I wired over into my glove box). Check out Pioneer’s web site for a full listing of the output options if this matters to you.

Once you get everything set up, though, other than these superficial and UI differences, the two stereos actually function identically. And in this regard, they are quite good. I’ll say this first, if you only intend to use the stereo with a “traditional” iPod (Nano, Mini, Shuffle, or Classic) then you will have nothing to worry about. Both stereos perform perfectly with our iPod Nano and my friend’s iPod classic. No issues at all, it charges them, and they work flawlessly. However, the iPhone and iPod Touch performance is more hit-and-miss. When you plug in your standard iPod dock connector to USB cable, the phone immediately starts charging, and will auto-resume whatever audio file was last playing. This works fine probably 90% of the time. However, about 10% of the time you will get “Error-19″ on the stereo display. Fixing this USUALLY just means unplug the USB from the stereo and re-plug it in. Every once in a while, though, you have to actually change to a different track on the iPod before the stereo will properly detect the phone and work. This seems to happen more frequently with podcasts than with regular music files. I suspect it has to do with the size of the files (the podcasts are often 1-2 hours long), but I have no proof. This is, though, pretty rare. (This repeated “Error-19″ problem has happened to me twice total since I’ve had the stereo, about four months including her P4100UB.) Also, once or twice I’ve had the stereo suddenly stop playing and display “Error-19″ right in the middle of a track (again, always a podcast or audiobook with a longer run-time). Same story, unplug and replug and it usually fixes it. Lastly, I have an iPhone 3G and my wife has a newer iPhone 3GS. Her’s seems to be MUCH more stable with the stereo. It “syncs” and starts playing about twice as fast, and it has not yet ever done the “Error-19″ problem mid-track (and it seems to be much rarer when you first plug it in as well). So, this could be a function of the processor power and RAM improvements on the newer 3GS. If you have a 3GS iPhone (or current generation iPod Touch), I think you won’t have to worry about this problem much at all.

I also did test the stereo with “alternative” USB devices. It worked quite well with a simple USB flash drive loaded with MP3 files, so if you don’t own an iPod, this would be a cheap way to get computer audio in your car. I did, however, test it with a USB pocket hard drive. Unfortunately, the USB port didn’t provide enough power to run the hard drive, and I had to use the drive’s Y-splitter and plug it into a second USB port to get it to operate. I had hoped to keep a 320GB USB hard drive in my glove box, loaded with ALL of my music. I can do this if I want, but I have to run a second USB power cable out of the glove box and plug it into my lighter socket, which is less than ideal. My USB pocket drive is quite hit-or-miss on whether it will need one or two USB ports to power it: my Macbook Pro power it fine on only one port, but my ASUS UL30V and also even one of my desktop machines at home doesn’t without using the Y cable. So, your mileage may vary here, but be aware that this could be a limitation.

My only other issue on the stereo is with the controls. It is mostly fine, and better than I expected, really. You turn the “multi-jog” control to turn the volume up and down, and you can tap it left or right to skip to the next or previous track (this works even when you are in “iPod control” mode, which is nice). The left/right and up/down tap controls are a bit touchy. For example, you hold the control left or right to FF/RW, and tap it left or right to skip forward/back. This works okay, but I do occasionally skip ahead (or back) when I intended to just fast forward through a commercial or boring part of a podcast (shh, don’t tell Leo). This control is also used to navigate through the menus and to select music when in “stereo control” mode of an iPod. For all of this, it works quite well. However, oddly, there is no pause function on the stereo itself. The included IR remote control has a pause button (which works fine), but there is no way to do this on the face of the stereo without going into a menu. This seems like a silly omission, especially since the tap UP/DOWN on the multi-jog are unused completely when you are in iPod or CD player mode (so they could have easily had that pause the playback). If you change sources (or turn it off by holding the source button) it does pause the playback and auto-resume once you turn it back on or switch back to the source, so you can use that as an effective pause. Still though, this is needlessly complex. I’d really prefer to have a more traditional Play/Pause and FF/RW controls on the face, rather than the fancy multi-jog control be used for everything.

The menu system also seems needlessly complex, but it isn’t terrible. If you are reasonably computer savvy, you’ll have no problems setting options (like getting that terrible display stuff turned off). Please note: There is a “hidden” menu that only appears when you push the multi-jog button in with the stereo turned off, that allows you to set “system” settings including date/time, and the “display reverse flash” setting, so be sure to check that menu out.

That said, I’m very satisfied with the stereo, and I would certainly buy it again. Other than these problems, which really only happen occasionally, it works very well. The audio automatically fades out when you get a phone call, which is very nice. The USB charging has worked flawlessly even on my iPhone (which isn’t true for many of other brands like Alpine and Sony). On the P5100UB, the second USB port stays powered even if you are using the primary USB port, so you can charge one device and listen to another. The built-in amplifier in the stereo is plenty for my car’s speakers (which are not aftermarket, but are pretty nice), but it has plenty of connectivity options for using it with aftermarket amps and speaker sets. Audio is clean and clear. I’ve had no issues with that at all. The CD player and radio Tuner functions work well, whenever I’ve used them (though I’m primarily using my iPhone, certainly). Navigating through the music lists using the stereo controls was actually surprisingly well designed and through out, and worked well (and wasn’t slow like older systems would be). I was quite surprised by this, actually. I didn’t expect to EVER want to use the built-in stereo controls for navigating through music, but I do use it when using one of our non-phone devices. They obviously put a lot of thought and design work into it. I love that you can just use your regular iPod syncing cable and plug right into the front of the stereo. This was an essential feature for me, and I’m glad I insisted on it. The front-panel aux input is great, and we used it on a few longer trips with our laptop,.

If you upgrade to this from using one of those radio RF transmitters for your iPod, the difference will be spectacular in ease-of-use and clarity (and far outweigh any occasional crashiness you might experience with an iPhone). All-in-all I’d give it a 4 out of 5 stars. It could be perfect, if not for these few issues. If you have a standard iPod or an iPhone 3GS, I’d probably give it 4.5 out of 5, as most of my issues were limited to my iPhone 3G. I haven’t reviewed the P4100UB here on Amazon (we bought it from another vendor because we needed it same-day), but I’d probably give it a 3 out of 5 because of the UI design issues and the display. All-in-all a good buy, but don’t expect perfection from a stereo in this price-class.