Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

#) 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.

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.

Poor quality and signal strength. Fits and looks well but installation instruction are limited. Does not contain internal CD as stated. Spend more and buy better.

good points:
- 100% solid state - no moving parts to break
- decent ergonomics - real volume knob
- inexpensive - don't have to pay for cd mechanism
- sd card slot easy to find and use
- USB connection on the back for higher capacity
- iPod integration with add-on adapter (radio doesn't control ipod though)
- supports bluetooth with add-on adapter
- hold power button for a few seconds to turn on without turning on car

but:
- gets confused by non-audio files on memory card (like ._song.mp3 on mac)
- wish you could configure more colors (blue power LED?)
- wish power antenna output would switch only when radio selected
- mute doesn't make sense with digital music - should pause it.
- wish there was a skip-back-10-seconds button for audiobooks

As many others have stated, it is quite a puzzle to go through the user's interface, and the manual has little info about it.

I still have no idea how to use the bluetooth feature, but seems I need to buy some optional gadget that no one seems to sell.

There is a wide range of equalization and the sound is crystal clear, much better sound than my sony. There is a drawback of not having a dedicated output for the subs, because you have to run it out of the other rca lines and use the amp's crossover to play with it.

As far as the colors go, they are quite limited and the red looks more like an orange at night time and pinkish during the day.

Using the menu at first is kind of difficult but I guess it only takes time to get used to it.

I don't like that there are many functions in the menu that you don'r really need like C'N'C "control and command" or the CDC ON the cd changer option, but that's a minor issue.

What i REALLY HATE is that whenever the stereo is on, the antenna goes up... unlike other head units that only push the antenna out when using the radio, this one puts it up at ALL times (if you got an electric antenna that is)

I also think the usb cable could have been a bit longer, but that is a quick fix using an extension usb chord.

I must say for the money I paid, I'm pretty much satisfied with what I got. The sound quality is pretty good and can be customized plenty, and as long as you don't look for a specific track and just let it play it suits the purpose very well.

Would I buy it again? I'd say I'd shop around a little more.

Great head unit! I have it installed in my 2000 VW Passat and it blends in perfectly with the interior lighting and style. I have the USB cable running through the tray below the deck where it is unnoticeable. I have always paid more than $300 for top-of-the-line Pioneer and Kenwood head units in the past (which were all great) but this deck at $100 is a much better value.

The SD card slot is awesome, and the USB port is tremendous! The SD reader has a max of 2GB so I usually load it up with my new music purchases. The USB port will read any size USB stick or hard drive, so I use this for the music I want to keep in my car for longer periods of time.

I have my digital music very organized on my home HDD's so file viewing on the Brisbane is not an issue for me. I pick up FM radio crystal clear, and the lack of AM reception is more of a VW issue (if you own a VW you know this) than the Brisbane's. It is easy to change the tuning to pick up the odd numbered stations like 100.3 or 105.1, just read the manual! The overall usage and controls are very easy to learn and use and I feel this head unit is extremely user-friendly - plus there are no CD's in my car anymore!

The Brisbane is supplying power to the rear stock speakers, while the pre-outs feed the music to a Blaupunkt 2-channel amp powering a set of Blaupunkt 6.5" components up front and a mono Alpine amp which powers a Boston 10" subwoofer. I have finally built the perfect system thanks to the Brisbane! I highly recommend the SD48 to anyone with a large digital music collection.

One big reason for buying this car radio was the SD SDHC slot option, shock proof, good sound. Only the sequence, in which the music was played and presented, did not seem to make any sense, making it hard to find certain tracks.

The Blaupunkt helpdesk advice was to re-format the card and re-copy the files or maybe try a different SD card. The second option did not help much, the first option however did have an effect, but some strange behavior persisted, a folder with 4 files also appeared to give problems. Coming across the review by Papoulka on amazon.com I was surprised to find that the copy order determines the play order of the tracks. Checking the manual at the chapter on preparation of the data carrier, it says: if you like your files to be played in a specific order, save the files on the card in the desired sequence in which you want to play them later.
Well how about that! I really did not expect this, especially from Blaupunkt.

About the track order:
So this is purely based on the sequence in which the files and folders are copied on the SD card, files are played first then folders. So the order is initially determined by how the copy action is handled by the copy tool, this can differ per tool. With windows explorer the copy order may differ from the order in which the files are displayed. The xcopy /s function in the command prompt, copies alphabetically by default.

Later added files and folders, will appear at the end of the list. A workaround for this could be to keep a copy of the card content in a prep folder on the pc. When the content changes, update the prep folder, clear the SD card and re-xcopy the content from the prep folder to the card, in one go.

About the problem with the 4 mp3 files:
When one folder contains four mp3 files, after the first track, playing and searching continues in the next folder, skipping the other 3 tracks. Adding an empty dummy file (with mp3 extension) seems to help as a workaround. I reported this bug to the Blaupunkt helpdesk.

This unit has every feature I want in a head unit; mechless, media card, ft aux input, ipod capable, etc.. It looks great, matches my interior and fits just right. It just doesn't sound that great. The navigation is a nightmare. Another disappointment is that the usb connection will not charge my blackberry or iphone. It didn't promise to, I just hoped it would since it charges my ipod.

This is a very nice unit. The audio quality is excelent, the unit itself is very sturdy, and the controls feel nice. The SD slot is a big letdown, as it glitches with cards over 2GB. Even with smaller cards, there is a big problem with the slot: it is very hard to remove a card once ejected...it gets stuck and must be wiggled free. The USB works much better, even with an SD card reader and a 8GB SDHC card. It also supports USB hard drives, and the manual claims that you can have up to 10,000,000 MP3s...that's a big collection! The display is clear and big, but there are issues there as well. You can change the color, but only to colors that have blue in them (no yellow, red, green, etc...). The text also scrolls very slowly, and the letters are big; so it has to scroll a lot just to get to the name of a song. It only supports 4-ohm speaker setups...this was the biggest dissapointment, as my last blaupunkt supported 2, 4, and 8 ohm speakers...and my system was setup as 2-ohm with 8 speakers. I was forced to remove 4 of the speakers, and will have to get an aplifier for them at some point in the future. Also, there is a lot of empty space where they could have put some much needed navigation keys, yet they chose not to. There are 6 buttons for the radio presets...four more would have made a 1-10 keypad that would be a big help when navigating large music collections. My car does not have an antenna...so I can't comment on the radio other than to tell you that it has a L-shaped swivel connector that might make it difficult or impossible to connect the factory radio cable without an extension. As others have stated, the blue dot in the center of the volume knob (the mute button) is very bright. There is no adjustment here (it does not even dim when the display dims for night mode), though I believe it will be easy to dissable this LED, or maybe even replace it with a weaker LED.

While I found a lot of faults with this unit, I would still recomend it. Overall, it is the best disk-less car head unit I have found under $400. My biggest complaint is that this unit has been discontinued, and replaced with a model that costs over $600, while providing only a few more features...so get one of this version while you can.

BTW...I bought this unit as an upgrade from my old blaupunkt. After 4 years of abuse in a car with rock-hard suspension, it was still working (only replaced it because it had no SD or USB support). This makes me feel confident that this unit will also outlast it's technology.