Blaupunkt Brisbane SD48 AM/FM SD/MMC/MP3 Receiver with CD Changer Controls

by Blaupunkt

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 10 x 9.1 x 4.5 inches ; 3 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 3.1 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B0018B9VG4
• Item model number: Brisbane SD48
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #87,439 in Electronics (See Top 100 in Electronics)

Product Description

AM/FM SD/MMC/USB/MP3 Receiver (No CD) - Detachable faceplate - VarioColour Display (Choose from 4,096 Colors) - Red night design - Clock - 25 Station Preset - MP3/WMA playback from SD/MMC and USB - 3-Band preset equalizer lets you adjust sound for your car and tastes - X-Bass for improved deep bass - 4 channel preamplifier output for sytem expansion - 1 Front Auxiliary input - 1 optional rear auxiliary input (AUX-1 RCA required) - USB interface cable included - iPod Ready - Bluetooth Ready - Remote control included

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Almost Great, July 28, 2008

By 

Randy Remote (Laytonville, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Blaupunkt Brisbane SD48 AM/FM SD/MMC/MP3 Receiver with CD Changer Controls (Electronics)

I bought this unit for the SD card reader. I'm kind of amazed how few units have this feature, considering that it is tailor made for mobile audio.
GOOD: SD CARD READER-I live on a bumpy dirt road-no skips, ever! And I can put a dozen CDs on a $10 2 gig card in 256k MP3. (Also has aux input
on front. USB cable connects in the rear, so you have to route it
out somewhere).
SOUND QUALITY
PRICE/VALUE
BAD: TUNER is weak (Blaupunkt doesn't even publish specs for tuner
sensitivity, it is so bad-even the American distributor didn't know.
If you really dig, you can find them on the Blaupunkt website, but
they use a different measurement than everybody else, I assume
this is to avoid comparison.) If you live in an area of good reception,
you will probably not have a problem. In fringe areas, expect static.
Also, oddly, if you choose "US" type radio frequency allocations, it does not recognize odd frequencies for FM ie 93.5-you have to choose European, and if you do that, AM frequencies are missing. Design flaw?
TONE CONTROLS-I would appreciate a couple of faders on the front, as
tone adjustments are the most frequent thing you want to access
to make up for differences in sources. As it is, you have to scroll
through several menu levels to change the tone - a pain while
driving. That said, the tone circuits are flexible, 3 band, with tunable
Q points, and there is a "mega bass" boost that is easily accessible
from the front......and I do appreciate the volume control, a good old
rotary knob.
CONCLUSION: I don't know why a company that is known for it's tuners is
so far behind all the other brands in reception. Other than that, a
pretty cool unit.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Works but major usability flaws, October 20, 2009

By 

Papoulka - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Blaupunkt Brisbane SD48 AM/FM SD/MMC/MP3 Receiver with CD Changer Controls (Electronics)

#) The SD48 is very cheaply made of low-quality plastic with feeble control hardware. A sorry comment on the Blaupunkt name.

#) Unless your vehicle has a DIN-1 slot already capable of taking third-party equipment, you will need a mounting kit and cable adapter. These vary by car make and model. The vendor of this player (Midwest Audio) has none of them.

#) The installation instructions are: install it according to the instructions you presumably got with the mounting kit they don't discuss.

#) The vendor knows very little about the product. Typical comment "yeah, lots of people have that problem... don't know what to tell you..."


In discussing the SD48 features I will use "SLF" to abbreviate "Stupid Lazy Firmware". This is, or ought to be, a registered trademark of Blaupunkt. This reflects the fact that the designers and programmers did almost nothing beyond the absolute minimum necessary to support the main marketing bullets. Exceptions to this are noted.

#) The SLF will only play files in the order they were copied to the media... NOT in alphabetical order! This is unlike personal media players which are 10% the size of this, 50% of the cost, and get by on a tiny fraction of the power. So you usually have to recopy everything, a folder at a time, when you add music. Most people will be doing this manually unless they run across the extremely helpful freeware "CopyInOrder". Even with this aid, the process of redoing 4GB+ is a royal pain. Blaupunkt should be ashamed.

#) The SLF only displays the first 32 characters of each track's title! Not the whole thing! Counting spaces and dashes etc this doesn't leave much for words. With negligibly more code the display could scroll each title through to its end. But no - the programmers took the laziest possible way out and just scroll a fixed number of characters. This is maddening.

#) Another SLF shortcoming is that the player can't handle non-English characters in the filenames or MP3 tags. This from a European company! So if your files have umlauts or accent marks, you first need to find all of these and substitute something else. If you have many such files, get the superb utility "Magic File Renamer" and use its 'Replace List' function.

#) The SLF won't let you step rapidly between folders. At each button push you have to wait while that folder is scanned. Then you can go to the next folder. At least you'd better wait, because otherwise you'll end up skipping a folder and having to go back. So it's tedious to move far in your music list. The player should be able to scroll rapidly through folders with the control knob, especially considering the massive storage space you can connect.

#) The SLF will only tune the FM radio in 0.2 MHz increments which default to the even numbers eg 99.8, 100.0, 100.2 etc. So if your favorite station is on 100.3 MHz you can't get it. The manual, of course, does not mention this. It only tells how to change between USA and foreign frequency sets. The half-baked fix for being on the wrong subset of USA frequencies is to 1) Change to European mode (pressing Menu at the end) 2) Immediately press up-arrow then down-arrow 3) Power off then back on 4) Change to USA mode 5) Immediately press up-arrow then down-arrow. Now you can receive 99.9, 100.1, 100.3 etc.

#) The blue control knob LED is fixed at about 2 million candlepower. While the SLF can dim the display, that's pointless because THIS light can't be dimmed! At night you can read by this LED, and so can folks in the car behind you. So watch out - you may get cited for improper running lights or even attract aliens from space.

#) The SLF buries the L/R balance and F/R fader controls in the menu to render them totally inaccessible while driving. In contrast, there is a large, dedicated "X-Bass" button which has no visible or audible effect. Another stupid design choice.

#) Going beyond the obvious, with so many basic mistakes you wouldn't expect the SLF to have useful features such as a low-level boost (automatic volume control) to make listening on the road more practical. And it doesn't.


On the plus side, mostly:

#) The SD48 plays from an SD card and, via a rear connector cable, a USB stick. You can easily select between these sources and the half-tuner, and the player will remember where you were. So you can have a basic music library on a USB stick tucked under your dash, and put more often changed material on SD cards which plug into the front panel.

#) The player resumes from where you turned the power off, as is necessary for listening to audiobooks.

#) Mine has so far read OK from an 8GB SD card and a 16GB USB stick, so you can connect a lot of raw storage space. Navigating through this with the SLF is another matter.

#) The spectacular control knob LED is great for folks with cataracts; they can see it fine AND will get free laser surgery while they drive.

#) The SLF will cycle the display through umpteen thousand color variations. Wowee. We get nonsense like this instead of attention to basic usability problems and worthwhile features.


Bottom line: Despite the many disappointments, I'm keeping my SD48 because it will play from SD and USB, which is great. If it fails, I'll try to buy something better. I would happily pay $50 or $100 more to get a player with none of these issues.

To try and help everyone I will send these comments to Blaupunkt too. But they must know already since it's all obvious. I think they are just incapable of managing international product design, and would expect nothing better from them in the future.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good product, could be better, February 16, 2009

By 

Lance Robinson - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Blaupunkt Brisbane SD48 AM/FM SD/MMC/MP3 Receiver with CD Changer Controls (Electronics)

I noticed the same tuner oddity as the other reviewer, sometimes it starts trying to tune in the even freqencies (93.2, 93.4) instead of the odd frequencies (93.1, 93.3, etc).

I *love* the SD card, that is the reason I bought this unit. It will remember the exact spot in the song that it was playing the last time you left off.

My only complaints:
- The "blue point" is pretty bright and cannot be dimmed.
- You can change the color of the main display, but not the color of the "blue point" or the other controls on the faceplate, which is always red.