Home > Consumer Reviews > Pioneer DEH-P4100SD CD/MP3/SD/USB/iPod Ready

I bought this radio to plus in an SD card with all my MP3s, so I wouldn't need to take CDs to my car anymore.
Even my 32 GB SDHC card was recognized. You can easily navigate through folders and subfolders (and sub-subfolders and so on), just like you would do in Windows exploring. Browsing by ID3-Tags is not supported, but I prefer folder-navigation anyway.
The only disadvantage is that you are limited to 500 folders per device (SD card or USB). This translates into somewhere between 16 und 25 GB of MP3s, depending on the bitrate, assuming that you have one folder per album as well as folders for genre and artist.
The only annoyance I found so far is that there is a clicking sound whenever you choose an option or change a folder or browse through MP3s. This sound becomes very annoying when scrolling through a list of 200 MP3s, because it appears that it can't be disabled.
Other than that: This seems to be the only radio for less than 250 that lets you browse in a folder-oriented way through large MP3 collections.

The CD tuner has a good sound quality and reception.
Also, it is probably one of the most versatile product currently on the market: beside CD (of course!), it offers USB and AUX connections, as well as a SD slot (the main reason for me to buy it).
Compressed audio compatibility is nothing special: the standard MP3/WAV/WMA/AAC combination is what the CD tuner firmware offers.

It could have been a 5 stars product, if not for the following...
- As incredible as it can sound, it is impossible to turn off the beeping associated with operating the controls. Therefore, every time you press a button or perform an operation (such to skip a track, change radio station or scroll through the list of MP3 files), a very well audible beep will be played. I must say that the frequencies for the beeps (yes, there is more than one, depending on the operation you do/button you press) are carefully chosen to be not so disturbing, but still it's quite incredible that you can't turn it off!
- The CD tuner software doesn't know how to handle MP3 playlists (M3U files). This means that if you want to listen to some specific songs in a specific order, you would have to create a folder for that purpose and copy the files in it in the order you wish they will be played back. Not very convenient!
- There are no buttons to access the radio presets; instead there is a LIST button giving access to radio stations in memory, to be scrolled/selected via the rotary control. Per se I like this method for selecting rasio stations, but I fail to see the point of having three bands for FM: I'd rather have all the preset stations in one band, so I can go through all of them without having to press the BAND button.
- I would have liked a dot matrix display. I have many not English songs. Their titles (in Portuguese, Italian, French, etc) get messed up on the display, since it can't represent accented letters or cedilla/tilde...

As a final remark, it may be worth saying that I didn't find the rotary control cumbersome as other reviewers on other websites.

All in all, I'm happy of my purchase, but I don't consider this as the *definitive* CD tuner in this price range.

Ordered this headunit due to wanting to upgrade the standard tape deck in a Ford Ka, this headunit meets and exceeds my expectations, easy to use, great compatibility, have tried it with radio, cd, sd cards and all works well, user manual is easy to read, the use of the 'multi-control' is also a nifty addition to this product and you can easily navigate through the unit, very sleek design, great illumination at night, many viewing options such as disk title, track title , track artist, etc, overall a great product and with the addition of the SD / SDHC card compatibility you can keep hundreds of tracks securely in the headunit by removing the face plate, have tried it with a 16GB SDHC card and works brilliantly, no other headunit could beat this one within the price range .