14.09.2012 21:03
12.09.2012 10:43

BLAUPUNKT London 120

After six years Sencor SCD 5255 gave up in most of its functionalities. Years ago I bought it as it was mostly only cheap radio with USB. Market has changed in those year. I'll not buy anything from Sencor in near future, as this auto radio proved to be a cheap crap. Choosing a replacement was not easy - today for the same price of the old Sencor, you can find a hand full of radios also from well established companies. This really drives me nut, as you can hardly find any useful info about radios. The best documentation I found was from Kenwood, also it looks like Kenwood is offering a lot of various features, others do not present - at least. Well, this is exactly what I do not want - looking for KISS products narrows down the selection in many ways. Blaupunkt made me happy here. They do even a car radios without CD drive - type Melbourne 120. This is awesome and I had a hard time deciding to get with or without CD. Finally I got the one wih a CD as we already have some in the car.

What is KISS by Blaupunkt

KISS in that manner means keep it simple (stupid). Blaupunk proves, they do car radios for years. Compared to Sencor, the radio is hell easy to operate, there are no stupid small buttons with unreadable labels. Actually all you need is to use the turn knob and the arrows. All is big and easy to find just with a finger touch.

Turn knob and arrows

The turn is used to change the volume, short press is mute (I could never find a mute when needed on Sencor), long press is Goodbye  (after goodbye clock stays on display if set to do so). Tuning is done by arrows, either by hand - left-right, or scan to next radio station - up-down. In playback mode, arrows either move to next track, or next album. Simple.

Menu

In the menu you may set all the things you normally change only once in a time. You can choose to display clocks on the panel - God bless Blaupunkt! You can choose volume after power up.

CD with MP3

The CD with MP3s are read almost immediately. Sencor was always reading for almost a minute the content of the media.

Display and backlight

Backlight is really decent for buttons. Display backlight has a mode for night and day - while it is not going to work for me, as new cars set this by and extra wire to radio, it makes clear they know what they are doing. Shame it does not apply to buttons too.

The thing I may complain about is a display. It has a long fade out time, the scrolling text is hard to read. But the display does not contain any fancy inidicators and various mess, just the text line with info and few icons underneath it to show various states.

Sort order of the played mp3 files is according to FAT directory order. If you want to have files sorted during play (wich is fine e.g. for a documents, tales etc.) then use something like "fatsort /dev/sdx1".

Connectors

Connectors are all ISO format - including antenna. Sencor has mixed connectors - speakers and supply were ISO, antenna was DIN. While ISO connectors are standard, there really is a lot of connectors on radios, same as in cars. If you want to be sure, you can connect any radio to your car, you have to be careful to have a reduction from car proprietary to ISO and then often ISO to you radio. Not a case here. This Blaupunkt also does not have any additional RCA connectors. I do not need them, it fits in KISS. Great.

Various

You can fit-in the front panel even in complete darkness.

Radio remembers stations even after power is disconnected, clock is forgot.

USB devices

If USB contains some directories the radio does not understand, it says USB ERROR and does not pick up the tracks that are there. According to manual it is limited to FAT16/32 file system with max 20000 files and filename max 32 chars.

I made a bit bad experience with USB devices connected to this radio.

This is a disappointment - especialy the players behave very strange.


Email comment