Customer Reviews

Pioneer DEH-P4000UB In-Dash CD/MP3/WMA/iTunes AAC/WAV Receiver

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This is my review i did for Crutchfield since i purchased it there, but i also do so much shopping here, it made sense to share my review on this product:

Fantastic value
Written By patrick, Upstate NY on Saturday, March 29, 2008

I purchased this unit a few weeks ago after some extensive research to
find something under $200 that not only fit my car with no/minor
modifications, but also had a USB input (rear), at least one auxiliary input,
support for aac, at least two 4v preouts, and a remote. This fit the bill
nicely.

Thanks to the included harness (not included from Amazon) I had this installed in about 15 minutes (not
including soldering or crimping). I've done quite a few installs in the past
so this was a piece of cake for me, but beginners will have no trouble
installing this unit with the included accessories and easy directions.

I use this unit with my 4GB flash drive and will be using it with my 30GB
wifi unit which will be here next week. If Pioneer made a unit just like
this without the cd drive, I would have bought it instead. Absolutely no
need for CD's in the car (all of my CD's are ripped upon purchase to FLAC
then converted as I see fit).

Sound quality is subjective of course, especially when you're listening to
compressed files, but being an audio enthusiast, I can tell you that this unit
plays my VBR mp3's as well as my Nero aac's as well as any other digital
audio player I've used and sounds as well as expected without onboard
amps and component speakers. This is definitely a good base for upgrades
in the future.

I'm a big fan of the wireless remote since I'm able to browse files/tracks
with almost no glancing at the unit itself.

Pros:

*Good sounding unit and ready for future upgrades
*Scans and plays my flash drives quickly with almost no wait between
tracks
*Display very readable in almost any lighting situation.
*Works well with ID3 tags.

Cons:

*The multicontrol knob would be cumbersome to use if i needed to use it,
but it works. It moves in all directions, but isn't flimsy. Learn to use the
included wireless remote.
*It would be nice to have a display option of Artist - Title using the ID3
tags, but you only have the options of Filename (I don't name my files
Artist - Title and I don't care to see what extension the file is), Folder, Artist,
Track, Comments. Not a deal breaker, but since the information is there,
I'm sure Pioneer could fix that.

I went to Best Buy to check out the new Pioneer P4000UB car stereo, I brought a flash drive with mp3s on it to test out the usb port. The usb port is in the back of the unit and the salesman had no way to let me try it out. I figured it would work fine so I bought it anyway. It comes with an extension for the usb port that basically hangs loose or where ever you can find to put it. The first time I tried it I got an Error 23 on the display, so I was slightly unhappy. The unit is really too new to have much feedback on the internet so I was stuck figuring it out by myself. After a day of research I finally figured out the problem. My flash drives were formatted as NTFS and needed to be refomatted as FAT32 or FAT16. It was really a simple fix that after reading more was in the manual but not in the troubleshooting area. I'm very happy with the unit now.

At its most basic, this is an OK product. The whole multi-control business is pretty flaky and I use the included remote whenever possible. The sound quality is great, however, and the price is fair.

But there are some really, really big drawbacks:

1. If you have an early iPod as I did, this isn't going to work for you. Way in the back of the manual it states that only 5th generation or later iPods are supported. Check page 57 of the manual (Google for a copy) and see if your iPod is listed. For older iPods, I understand that there is an external cable that you can buy for another chunk of cash, but I've heard that that has its own problems.

2. Since I couldn't use my iPod, I opted to use an external USB hard drive (a Seagate FreeAgent Go). While I did have to reformat the drive to Fat32 and buy a USB cigarette-lighter adapter to boost the power to the drive, it works well. EXCEPT that the DEH-P4000UB only recognizes 500 folders! If you have a significant music collection, and if that music collection is organized like most with a folder for artist and subfolders for albums, the 500 folder limitation is hit very, very quickly. I can't imagine what the thought process was that brought about this limitation. Since the unit can read 15,000 songs, and say an average album is 12 songs, you're talking over a thousand folders just for albums. Then artist folders on top of that! The P4000UB just ignores folders that go over the 500 limitation. The only way to work around it is to flatten out your music collection. This ends up being very time consuming and almost impossible if you're using something like iTunes with its default folder-based organization to manage the music on the external hard drive.

3. You can't specify the order the songs play in. Really. I'm not sure what the P4000UB is using to determine playback order. Since I had to flatten out my music collection as described in 2, I just have a bunch of songs in a few folders. Sometimes they play back in the correct order. Sometimes not. There is no recognition of song order in tags, alphabetization or anything else. The manual claims that you can force the playback order by prepending a sequence number to each song, and then subsequently says that this probably won't work (!) (manual pages 53 and 54). I suspect it might be playing back based on something like the file creation time or something.

All in all, if I had it to do over again I would have researched it more carefully. I am sticking with it for a variety of reasons, but mostly because I put so much time into making it work that I want to get some kind of return. Because of the sound quality and price, I maintain that it's an OK product. But not really worthy of a recommendation.

I've never undertaken any kind of car audio or electronics work. I decided to try my hand at it with this one and bought the head unit (installation at our local big box store would have been free, but I wanted to learn this for future reference). I have a 99 Saturn and the existing head unit was an aftermarket deck as well. This is important only because it meant that I didn't have to buy any extra parts to install this (as the existing aftermarket deck had already warranted its own wiring harness and dash kit). The install went pretty smoothly considering it was my first. I wound up splicing some wires together using some crimp connectors. Getting everything back into the dashboard took a little finesse, but wasn't complicated.

If you're going to do this yourself, my only reminders would be to:

1. read the install instructions first
2. disconnect the negative terminal from the car battery before starting
3. start by connecting the ground wire from the stereo to the dash frame before any of the other wires
4. Make sure you have plenty of extra USB cable run through to your glove box...or wherever you're running the USB extension cable...as this will not be easy to do after everything's installed, and
5. reconnect the car battery and test the sound before putting everything back in the dash (I didn't think to do this, and ended up having to take it all out again when I realized one of the speakers wasn't getting sound because a wire had become disconnected)

Installation aside, the unit sounds great and was worth the work.

However, one detail I haven't seen mentioned in other reviews for this unit has become apparent when using a USB flash drive with the deck (and MP3 CD's, too, for that matter). This model does not support .M3u playlists; a detail that's buried deep in the owner's manual in subscript. What this means for the user is that when you plug in a USB drive with, say, 800 songs on it, it will not recognize a playlist order...only the order in which the songs were dragged/copied onto the drive. In my case, I have my computer natively set up to organize all music by artist folder/album folder/file name. When I plug in my 8 GB drive, it plays all the songs from one artist, then all the songs from the next artist, and so on.

Because of this, the random play option on the unit is very necessary. However, it will only randomize the order of songs within a given folder. Again, not very useful as a shuffle feature if I have 26 folders sorted by artist. Adding to the confusion and limited randomization is the fact that, in random play mode, skipping to the next song will not bring you to the next random song, just the next song in the folder. For example, during random play mode, if you're listening to the randomly-selected track "M" and you're bored with it and decide to skip to the next song, going forward one track will simply bring you to track "N" as opposed to a new randomly-selected track (say, track "R" or track "B"). I won't belabor this point, but suffice it to say that this can be frustrating when using a USB drive with 800 tracks and when true shuffled playback is desired, and keeping in mind that playlists are not supported.

This may be a minor issue, but I really value randomization in my music listening, and having all my songs clumped together by artist takes some of that away from my listening experience. Perhaps, though, this won't bother most users of this stereo. All around, I'm still happy with my purchase, and would do it all again if faced with the need.

And now my entire music collection fits in my glove box.

I've done the homework: now you can all reap the benefits. I purchased a Seagate FreeAgent Go 160GB usb external hard drive, reformatted it to fat32 with the program SwissKnife v3 (check out download dot com), bought a usb power hub for my cigarette lighter, and voila! 160GB's of jams to go!

If you check the manual, the receiver only reads fat16 or fat32 file systems. The FreeAgent Go ships with NTFS installed, hence the need to reformat. The receiver alone isn't powerful enough to power the hard drive, hence the cigarette lighter adapter.

Man, I love this deck! It's stylish, has an excellent feature set, and I'll never need to buy or burn cd's ever again. Don't be intimidated by the complexity of the unit: you really just have to spend a few minutes with it.

I have an 05 mustang coupe with the shaker 500 stereo system. the new stereo is much more powerful than the stock one. For the record, Zunes do not work with with ipod direct control stereos. They wont even charge it. its only ipods and mass storage devices like a thumb drive that do. Anyone who swears they will are WRONG! I learned this the hard way.

All in all, its a very good stereo for the money but i cant seem to get the dimmer to work with the rest of my dash. Its very bright and annoying at night.

1. no phone-interrupt wire

I didn't know anyone would make a car stereo that didn't have this feature. Even one of my older stereos from 4 years ago has a phone interrupt line. Lucky for me, my Parrot bluetooth device cuts the audio coming in over the speaker wires, but I still have the subwoofer sound coming through.

Workaround: manually pause/mute the stereo, and maybe build a relay system to kill power to amp (triggered by Parrot)


2. defaults to usb (if plugged in)

When the stereo is powered on, it auto-detects the usb port looking for a device, and if detected, auto-plays. Extremely annoying, to say the least. I bought this stereo to run my Passport usb drive with all my music from the glovebox, which I don't want to have to unplug all the time.

Workaround: manually hit source button to change back to radio EVERY SINGLE TIME the stereo powers up, or disconnect/kill power to usb device so it isn't auto-detected.


3. not enough power for some usb devices

Apparently the stereo outputs a max of 0.5mA to usb devices. This is a wonderful feature that puts my stereo in an infinite loop. There is just enough power to spin up the Passport drive, which then allows the stereo to auto-detect a usb device. As soon as it starts playing, it draws too much power, which kills the stereo and usb drive. Now there is enough power to spin up the drive again, so I get to go through this again and again.

Workaround: bought a mini-usb power cord for a gps device, and spliced it into a data usb cable so I can provide power to the usb drive via the gps power cord, and data to the stereo.


4. reads files in order they were copied to usb

Microsoft Windows has a neat feature they use, called a table of contents. This feature allows one to access the data stored on a drive in any order they wish (alphabetically is usually the primary choice). This stereo, however, does not have the means of reading the TOC from the usb device. Instead, it physically reads the folders/files from the drive in the order they appear on the device. In other words, the music files are most likely not going to be in alphabetical / numerical order, which is great if you like random play, but sucks when searching for anything.

Workaround: wrote a vb app that forces windows to copy folders/files in alphabetical / numeric order to the usb device.


5. folder/file search defaults to beginning

When listening to, say, the 5th song of the 26th folder on my usb device, I sometimes would like to jump down a couple of folders to look for another song. However, the wonderful file search feature of this stereo doesn't start at the current song that is playing, it starts at the beginning of the device. Extremely annoying when you have over 200 folders of music and want to get to the middle quickly.

Workaround: created folders A, B, C, etc. and placed the group folders in these based on the first letter of the band's name. Now I have 27 primary folders (gotta have one for bands that start with a number), and can now delve down into the subfolders to reach the bands.


6. skipping during random play is not random

Random play on this stereo works great. It truly is random (unlike JVC, which apparently hard-codes a random pattern into their units so the 'random' pattern is the same every time). The problem is, if you don't want to listen to the current song and you skip to the next song, it doesn't pick a random song, it skips to the next song on the hard drive (i.e. if you are listening to song 3 in folder 5 during random play and skip ahead, the next song played is song 4 in folder 5 - not very random).

Workaround: rewind the song as it plays. It will rewind to the very beginning, and actually rewind into the end of the song that appears on the drive right before it. Then let the previous song play to the end, and then the stereo will pick the next random song.

If you are like me, you may have an Iphone 3G and may be wondering if this deck will have you suffering the fate many have suffered: getting the dreaded "incompatible" warning on your Iphone. Well, rest assured, this WORKS with your Iphone 3G. Not only does it work, it charges it as well. Grab your USB cable, plug it into the included adapter, but don't freak out when you see the warning message about putting the Iphone in Airplane Mode, which turns off all antennas (turning your Iphone into a Touch, basically). Cancel out of that and your Iphone will continue working as it had before, allowing beautiful sound to come through the head unit and through your speakers. When a call comes through, the sound is muted and the Iphone rings (not your speakers, in case you were worried about that.)

Aside from having a complicated menu system to deal with to modify your sound, this is a great head unit. After spending a good number of hours over many days, I wound up with a carefully honed sound. It takes a while and it really helps if you know what it all means, but skipping the preset equalizers and heading straight in to the custom settings is your best bet. Just don't give up when it doesn't sound great at first. Due to a one-line display, it takes a while jumping back and forth through the system to get things set up the way it sounds best to your ears. I really wish there was a way to permanently save your settings, because once the power is disconnected, say, when the battery is changed, all those carefully, painstakingly crafted settings are GONE. But you can only expect so much from a headunit in this price range, and this one makes up for it with the great Ipod/Iphone interface.

I have this unit in my car and i really love it. I never have to make cds anymore. I just bring my flash drive around and load it with music easily, then just plug it in and hear it boom! I love the simple ipod control. If you plug an ipod in the ipod screen goes blank and displays a pioneer logo across the screen. Then you able to control the ipod with the remote or the actual receiver. Im planning to add the HD Radio unit to this so i can listen to those stations too. One other thing i really like is the great controls for you sub woofers. I have my Pioneer TS-W257D4 really perfectly set with the great tweaking options available on this unit. I really recommend it and for the price you get alot of great features.

Great unit. We bought 2 mainly because of the USB port. No longer do we have 50 CD's all over our cars. We put all the songs on a 1 or 2G thumb drive and plug it in. Pioneer's Supertuner brings in stations more strongly than our old factory radios. I really recommend the thru-amazon dealer we purched the units from as well...first class speedy shipping. 5 stars all-round.