JVC KD-PDR30 CD receiver Video

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Created: 08/13/2007

Video description: The JVC KD-PDR30 receiver looks and sounds good, and its standard iPod connectivity will endear it to those looking to take their iTunes on the road. However, its lack of a decent search mechanism for navigating large iPod lists means that it fails at a p

JVC KD-PDR30 CD receiver Video Transcript

[ Music ] ^M00:00:01

>> Hi, I'm Kevin Massy and you've joined me for a very special first look from CNET Caltech's very own Chevy Aveo. Now, today we are in the car and we're having our first look at the JVC KD PDR30. You can see this is a single den sized in car stereo that has many of the attributes of a modern digital aged car stereo. It's got AM FM playback. It's got a singe disk slot here on the top of the faceplate, which can be used to play CDs and MP3 and WMA disks. Put a disk in there, it will read ID3 tag information from MP3 disks and display it on its monochrome LCD display on the front of the faceplate. The headline feature for this stereo is its iPod compatibility. It comes standard with an iPod dual connector. And that allows drivers to plug in their iPods when on the road and hide them away. With iPod connected, all of the controls for the iPod's library are transferred to the stereo faceplate itself. The KD PDR30 has one of these JVCD pads, which is based on the design of the iPod wheel itself and allows drivers to skip through tracks, select tracks, play lists, artists, and albums in much the same way as you would on the iPod player itself. We generally like this interface so for example we are here selecting between artists, albums, songs, you get to songs, press the down button and that gives you the list of songs in that category. One of the drawbacks of this stereo is that it takes a long time to navigate a digital audio library. You can skip one track at a time or ten tracks at a time using the forward and back skip buttons. It's still gonna take you a long time to get from you're A's to your Zs if your music library is four or 5000 song long. A final point about this stereo that we do like, it comes with a standard generic auxiliary input jack, which means that non-iPod owners can play music from their portable audio players as well. This system is on sale now. It comes with as standard iPod playback for a price of around 150 dollars. I'm Kevin Massy and today I've had a first look at the JVC KD PDR30. ^M00:02:24 [ Music ]

JVC KD-PDR30 CD Receiver Review

Editors' rating

6.6

out of 10

Price range

$99.99-$115.00

See all 2 stores

The good: The JVC KD-PDR30 comes ready to play iPods out of the box. Its bright display, simple faceplate design, and innovative D-pad make the system easy to use on the move, and we like its auxiliary input jack for non-iPodrians.

The bad: As with many other "made-for-iPod" car stereos, the KD-PDR30 fails to give users a means of quickly and easily navigating large iPod libraries.

The bottom line: The JVC KD-PDR30 looks and sounds good, and its standard iPod connectivity will endear it to those looking to take their iTunes on the road. However, its lack of a decent search mechanism for navigating large iPod lists means that it fails one of its primary usability functions.

Read full review