Home > Consumer Reviews > Panasonic CQ RDP 472 MP3 Player

Unfortunately this head unit suffers from two particularly annoying problems:
1) Any mp3 encoded with lame mp3 encoder suffers glitches on playback. Sounds so bad you cannot listen to the track.
2) If you want ID3 tags or filenames to display fully you have to write discs as ISO9660 level 2 with no Joliet extension. It doesn't like ID3 version 2 tags either, but then not many other head units do.
Other than that, sound quality is fine, tuner is very good, and it looks pretty good too.

Good sound, easy to install (although you might have to invest in a multi-plug depending on your car's wiring / connectors) , removable faceplate, a dinky remote, good tuner with nice bells'n'whistles like traffic announce, RDS, EON etc.

If you have MP3s encoded at a low enough bit-rate (e.g. 96kbps) you can squeeze over 7 and a half hours of music on a single CD!! And the player will show the tag details embedded in the MP3 on a scrolling display. If that isn't enough the player can drive a changer - audio overload....

The player is definitely worth having even if there are a couple of small niggles. The player doesn't scroll the entire MP3 tag - it gets truncated. The other niggle is that if you play MP3s that have been encoded using a non-standard codec (e.g. other than the Fraunhofer codec) you can get some terrifying (and loud) glitches in the sound when the player attempts to decode it. The first time you hear it, you'd be forgiven if you thought that the player was broken. Maybe my player doesn't have an up to date version of firmware but I couldn't see any options to download / apply updated firmware on the panasonic websites. The only solution is the tough one - re-encode the MP3s using the standard codec.

Niggles aside, I'm very pleased with the player- for the price, its a good quality piece of kit. Well worth buying.

This is a high quality product. I have a Honda. It was a best choice for my car!