Kenwood KDC-BT47SD 1-DIN CD Tuner with Bluetooth, SD, Front USB & Aux-In
Product details: Single DIN, CD/AM/FM/Bluetooth/SD card slot/USB/iPhone/iPod/Aux in
Manufacturer: Kenwood
Phone: 01923 816 444
Website: Kenwood
Typical Selling price: £149.99
In a Nutshell
An affordable unit that lets you play digital music any way you like: CD, MP3 CD, SD card, smartphone or tablet including iPhone/Pod/Pad friendly USB. It has everything most people could need, with the possible exception of DAB.
SCORES
Overall 9.0
Sound Quality 9
Appearance/Display 8
Ease Of Use/HMI 8
Features 9
Value For Money 9
Scoring Sufficiently well to garner a Talk Audio Recommended Flag:
Long-term test by Caramel Quin
I’m an ordinary person. (FOUR words in and the editor disagrees, Caramel is in fact an exceptionally talented woman! Ed.) Admittedly I write about consumer electronics for a living, but I don’t normally review in-car entertainment. So for the purposes of this review I’m ordinary. In fact I’m a busy mum who wants the family to be able to listen to the music stored on my smartphone in my ordinary Toyota Avensis (more on the challenges of that installation later).
So it was with delight that I ditched the crackly iTrip and replaced my Toyota’s OEM hi-fi with a head unit that could bring our in-car listening into the 21st century. And, on the whole, the Kenwood didn’t disappoint.
The display is a tad lairy, if you’re ordinary like me. The vivid key illumination likes to circulate through a trippy rainbow of bright colours; I either haven’t found time to change the settings or I secretly like it.
Bluetooth pairing is a dream. I would have been perfectly satisfied to plug my phone into an aux input, but linking up wirelessly is better still. A quick flick of my smartphone settings and I discovered the Kenwood straight away. My music actual music from my phone, praise the Lord! was filling the car within seconds.
Bluetooth on a day-to-day basis though is the one thing I’d fault the Kenwood on. Once connected, it’s a beautiful thing: works well, sounds great. And the phone and head unit are BFFs once paired. The problem is that every single time you start the car up and the phone and head unit start talking to each other, they insist on synchronising phone contacts. The Kenwood’s display shouts ‘DOWNLOADING’ and the unit can’t be controlled until the process is over. This sometimes takes a minute or two (I have a lot of contacts). If music’s already playing on your smartphone then it will play through the car hi-fi during the download but you can’t control it from the head unit, not even to adjust volume. So it’s blaringly loud, your only option is to fumble with the phone volume controls to tame it.
This is a problem with both my Motorola Razr i and my other half’s Nexus 4. I’ve checked with Kenwood and there is no way of turning off the automatic phonebook download feature. I find myself wishing I had a not-so-smart phone that could only download contacts manually as it would save me so much annoyance. I might have to start deleting some contacts.
Everything else is very impressive. CD, radio, Bluetooth hands-free calls. And the sound is great: I was always happy with the Avensis’s speaker setup and the Kenwood sounds superb through it.
I would have ideally liked DAB for a few stations like 6 Music and 1Xtra that you can’t get the old fashioned way. But having lived with the Kenwood for several months, if it was one or the other I’d take the convenience of Bluetooth over the extra DAB stations every time. After all, it’s my music that I want to listen to most.
The, er, challenging installation
It should have been simple. Remove one head unit, replace it with a new one. Or so I thought. Like most ordinary people, I’d never actually looked at my car hi-fi. The fact that it was built into a large facia in my 12-year-old Toyota Avensis a thin CD slot and then a massive display with buttons for all sorts of things I’ve never used would have been a dead giveaway. The car and hi-fi were as one. This was not going to be simple.
A call to consult with the expert (warning: link contains spoilers Link and I was talking to James Patterson at Bloomz, a nearby car audio specialist who usually installs far flasher car hi-fis than this modest Kenwood into far flasher cars than mine. It should have been a simple job for a man of his talents, but because I happened to have an Avensis with an unusual fascia (thanks to the state-of-the-art-in-2001 sat nav system) it was not. This job of fitting an ordinary head unit into an ordinary car for an ordinary person was fast becoming extra-ordinary.
So James did what any obsessively driven in-car entertainment specialist would do he hit breakers’ yards looking for a standard Avensis fascia that would welcome the Kenwood. And when he didn’t find one, he instead bought a fascia just like mine and completely remodelled it and then resprayed it to match my car’s interior. To my untrained eye, it looked like he just cut a rectangular hole in it, but I understand that it’s a bit more complex than that. And that he’s won competitions for making people’s custom car sound systems look and sound great.
Anyway, James the crazy perfectionist will tell you that the result was far from perfect. But for this ordinary music lover it’s amazing and certainly looks at least as good as the Kenwood sounds. I can’t believe I even considered going to Halfords instead of a specialist like Bloomz
Bloomz