Home > Consumer Reviews > Blaupunkt Brisbane SD48 AM/FM SD/MMC/MP3 Receiver with CD Changer Controls
Blaupunkt Brisbane SD48 AM/FM SD/MMC/MP3 Receiver with CD Changer Controls
See it at Amazon.com for $109.95Average Customer Rating
(3.0 out of 5)
Amazon Customer Reviews
Most Helpful First | Newest First | + Share6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Almost Great
(3 out of 5) by Randy Remote on Jul 28, 2008 (Laytonville, CA)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.
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.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Works but major usability flaws
(3 out of 5) by Papoulka on Oct 20, 2009#) 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.
#) 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:
Good product, could be better
(4 out of 5) by Lance Robinson on Feb 16, 2009I 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.
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.
Good Product, Bad Marketing and Support
(1 out of 5) by C. E. Medina on Feb 10, 2010 (New York City)This is a well designed product so long as you read the manual and you are good at DIY. What can be improved are the attachment of the wires of the wiring harness to a Ford harness and the fascia has the a certain Mickey Mouse quality (very bad) which is unexpected from Blaupunkt.
Midwest Electronics the seller and Blaupunkt US online dealer should be put out of business and replaced by Crutchfield for the following reasons.
1. Contrary to what Midwest Electronics said, this really works seamlessly with Blaupunkt Lucca MP3 which I also bought from Midwest Electronics as well. Midwest you really should know your own product. This is basic Marketing 101.
2. The Ford wiring harness which I mentioned was obtained from Crutchfield with far more detailed and clearer instructions than the manual supplied with the Brisbane. Midwest Electronics does not have the wiring harness let alone offered any help or advice on the wiring if you're into DIY. Again you guys should really know your product.
3. The RC-09 Thumb remote which I already use with my Blaupunkt Lucca MP3 GPS works well with this unit with the IR eye installed. The manual only mentions using the RC-10 Thumb remote. Do you see a theme here, you really should know your product.
In short WAKE UP Blaupunkt, just because your product is German designed (yes no more Made In Germany folks, this amateurish product is made in China) does not mean that that is end of your marketing efforts. You guys don't even advertise anymore let alone update your website up until recently when Bosch sold you guys to Aurelius. I wonder how long you guys are going to remain in business. GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER!! For the lack of support or more like intelligence I give you guys 1 star or an F. Do us all a favor and make your entire sales, sales support and most of all your management personnel take a course in Marketing 101.
Midwest Electronics the seller and Blaupunkt US online dealer should be put out of business and replaced by Crutchfield for the following reasons.
1. Contrary to what Midwest Electronics said, this really works seamlessly with Blaupunkt Lucca MP3 which I also bought from Midwest Electronics as well. Midwest you really should know your own product. This is basic Marketing 101.
2. The Ford wiring harness which I mentioned was obtained from Crutchfield with far more detailed and clearer instructions than the manual supplied with the Brisbane. Midwest Electronics does not have the wiring harness let alone offered any help or advice on the wiring if you're into DIY. Again you guys should really know your product.
3. The RC-09 Thumb remote which I already use with my Blaupunkt Lucca MP3 GPS works well with this unit with the IR eye installed. The manual only mentions using the RC-10 Thumb remote. Do you see a theme here, you really should know your product.
In short WAKE UP Blaupunkt, just because your product is German designed (yes no more Made In Germany folks, this amateurish product is made in China) does not mean that that is end of your marketing efforts. You guys don't even advertise anymore let alone update your website up until recently when Bosch sold you guys to Aurelius. I wonder how long you guys are going to remain in business. GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER!! For the lack of support or more like intelligence I give you guys 1 star or an F. Do us all a favor and make your entire sales, sales support and most of all your management personnel take a course in Marketing 101.
Good with some tips
(3 out of 5) by John Rose on Nov 29, 2009 (Netherlands)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.
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.