Home > Consumer Reviews > Jvc KDSX980 Am/Fm/Cd/Mp3 Detachable Face

JVC always performs to its best. I have had this HU for about 3 months now, its a great product! Plays burned cd's as well as mp3 cds, and it even shows the tite on the display for mp3's! Overall, great HU for the common user!

i found the face plate for this stereo in a case on the street (don't leave things on the roof of your car, especially expensive things). After unsucessfully trying to locate the owner I am curious if you can buy the rest of it from jvc or elsewhere....anyways like the reviews of the product sounds like a decent unit but....

Coming to the realization that mp3s could be burned onto cd's, it was readily apparent that this is a must buy. I researched a few contenders, but this model was the the cheapest, and thats what I needed. The mp3/cd capabilities revolutionized the way I listen to music. Also, with its ability to organize music in folders and to randomly play music from those folders gives you a variety of music. Furthermore, I just got an ipod for Christmas, (an amazing machine) and with the mp3 portable auxillary jack, this eliminates the need for cd burning all together and allows me to listen to new tracks with out having to compile an entire play list of about 200 songs. This was by far the best electronic investment I've made in a very long time, and coincidently the cheapest.

Let's face it - if you're buying a head unit that plays MP3 CDs, you're buying it TO PLAY MP3 CDs. And most of the cheaper units [are bad] sure they play MP3 CDs - as long as you are careful about what format you burn in, what bitrate the files are, whether or not they're VBR etc. When it came time to put a decent system in my car, I just couldn't do this. I already had many discs full of MP3s from MP3ing my entire very large CD collection, and I was not about to re-burn it all.

The main competition for this unit to me is the Alpine CDA-7894 - which costs about twice as much. Price wasn't real important to me - I checked out the Pioneers (including the 8400 and 9400 - for that kind of money I'm not waiting 6 seconds between tracks!), and the Kenwoods, and neither cut it when I threw Mp3 discs at them. The Alpine's controls didn't seem as intuitive to me as the JVC's, and that was where I made my final decision.

In the end I went with the JVC because it had superb MP3 playback with very fast between-track time, ID3 tag support, controls that are easy to use ...and sounds great. The Auxillary-input on the front panel is a real nice touch too - sometimes I've got stuff on my PDA that I want to listen to and this makes that very simple. Get the optional auxillary rear input cable and you can hook up a TV or DVD player too - for a cheaper unit there's a whole lot of flexibility built in!

The KD-SX980 is a no-BS, great sounding head unit with superb MP3 playback. It doesn't have the incredible display that some of the more expensive units have - but so what? I took the money I saved and put in an LCD screen and DVD player :)

I really like this headunit, it has 200V's of power, maxing out almost any stock speaker system (this baby can be loud)! Its perfect to show off, or just for good sound. the MP3 capeability is what makes this unit stand out though. I bought mine for over 200 when they first came out just for it. it playes them quicker than any other unit I have had, and it playes them better. you can't tell the difference sometimes between a low quality and a high quality because they both sound so great. it also allows for multiple folders to be burned onto the data Mp3 disk. all in all, its a great unit, and with loud mode on, it works great with subs. just be careful though, because it is a 4 volt system, and many of the older sub woffer amps are 2 volt systems