Pioneer DEH-5000UB USB AUX Car Stereo Mini Review

[joshwa]

Sorry to hear the stereo isn't quite as good as you were hoping! Anyhoo, is that a drive that's powered over USB, or did you have to get a power source from elsewhere?

And to anyone else really, if you were to buy a car stereo with a USB interface, what would you go for?

I put the HD (IDE) in a "VAIO" Laptop USB Caddy off ebay - this is powered with a mini-usb cable and works with just one usb cable.

[mrk]

I have the 5000UB which I upgraded to the other day from a Sony XPLOD HU for my e46 coupe.

I have quite the opposite experience, the sound quality is much better than the Sony whilst the SOny was much better than the BMW head unit.

With the BMW HU I thought I'd need new speakers and a sub for nice treble and bass but not too boomy but the Sony solved that.

I then wanted a better looking HU with USB support down the line (4GB+ USB cards are getting cheap!) and looking around the 5000UB looked great especially with lcd/key colour combos (amber for me).

The bass is very nice and tight, reminds you of a mild sub without beeing boomy whilst the treble is excellent.

You HAVE to play with the sound options though as there are LOADS from high pass filter to low pass filter to the various cuttoff frequencies depending on your car speakers being used and custom EQ with bass control and sound retriever.

Mine is set to "Powerful" mode but then EQ adjusted to lower bass by 2 and lower treble by 1. I have retriever set to 2 and have the high pass filter off to get the better bass and can;t remember off the top of my head the others.

Here's how it looks:

Night:


Day:


And the old HU:


I actually got it at no extra major cost as I sold the BMW HU for £140, the Pioneer cost £113 + £30 for the steering wheel control I/O box.

[MrTea]

Thanks for the mini review.

I have a couple of questions

1) Is the unit housing black matt or gloss plastic?

2) Regarding the play order of tracks:

"It also seems to have the typical flaw of playing MP3s in "computer order", eg I've got my tracks labelled as 1 - track 1, 2 - track 2 ... 10 - track 10, 11 - track 11, but instead of playing 1, then 2, it will play, 1, 10, 11, then track 2 "

Does it play them in correct order if you prefix the filenames of tracks that are less than 10 with a zero? Is it capable of reading the track # from the ID tag?

e.g.

01 - track 1.mp3
02 - track 2.mp3
etc
10 - track 10.mp3

Thanks