Put a CD into your in-dash head unit and let it play 13 hours of your favorite songs straight. Imagine that, you can drive up the coast of, say, California and never change CDs. That's a reality now, thanks to the audio compression technology known as MP3 that has become wildly popular among Internet users. Kenwood, the first company to offer MP3 in a car deck, has incorporated a second-generation MP3 technology into the Kenwood Excelon series with the new Z828 unit.
This is a seriously sexy deck, dominated by a fine pitch 144 x 24 dot matrix display. The large matrix has two lines of scrolling text with selectable bold or regular characters. You have control over the display's complexity, with three levels from full-on video animations down to the plain text only style. Surrounding the display are the controls which are laid out in a pattern that makes it easy to find what you need. The only negative about the control surface are the labels for each button. They are white screen-printed labels on clear plastic, making them difficult to read.
At the push of a button, the faceplate drops down to reveal the CD slot. You can then remove the faceplate to keep it with you when you leave the vehicle. A convenient carrying case is provided for protection. As an additional security precaution, a 4-digit PIN code can be programmed to prevent unauthorized use.
The CD mechanism has a variable servo gain; it plays virtually any disc (CD, CD-R, CD-RW) and plays through scratches in the disc surface and bumps in the road without skipping. Of course the big news here is the ability to play your custom ripped MP3 discs. ID3 tags are supported, with scrolling labels for the embedded tags showing the name of the album, artist, and song (if the MP3 has the ID3 tag embedded during encoding). If you prefer, you can use the folder and file names instead of the ID3 tags. For full long filename support on the display, the disc must be burned with ISO 9660 Level 2 naming format, which most ripping software provides. Otherwise, the names will be truncated to 8 characters with the ~ character and a digit at the end. Kenwood recommends encoding MP3 files with a fixed bit rate of 128 kbps, but you can play files encoded up to 320 kbps and variable bit rate files too. Random play is available within each folder, but not across the entire disc. When you press the repeat button, it cycles between repeating the current file or repeating the entire folder. The files and folders are played in the order that they were written on the disc. Unlike some MP3 players, this unit remembers the file and time index it is playing when you switch to a different source or turn off the power. So when you return to MP3 play, it starts at the same point where it left off. You can "fast forward" or "rewind" within an MP3 file, although the time index does not display when doing this, making it tough to know how far you have gone until you let the playback start again. Navigation can be a bit of a challenge, since the files must be read each time you switch to a new file or folder. It takes about three to four seconds before the title of the file or folder is displayed, so you will want to keep your disc structure simple with few if any folders inside other folders. Files with extensions other than .MP3 and empty folders are ignored.
The Z828 has a stellar EQ section, with three bands of quasi-parametric equalization and a volume-dependent loudness control. Each band has cut and boost in eight steps, along with selectable center frequencies and Q settings (Q settings available on the lows and mids only). Q is the width of the filter, with a lower number being a wider filter that cuts/boosts more frequencies above and below the center frequency. You can set your own EQ for each source separately, or you can choose one of the factory presets labeled "Rock," "Top 40," "Pop," "Jazz," and "Easy."