Caliber RCD 267 CD/USB/SD Head Unit

Product Details
Manufacturer:  Caliber
Distributor: Celsus Ice
Website: link
Typical Selling price: £109.99
In A Nutshell
Rugged, simple-looking yet fully digitally up to speed CD deck with whistles and bells. A great fun toy for sharing stuff from mates’ music sources. All you really need is one of those wires with the 3.5mm aux plugs on.
SCORES
Sound Quality    7
Appearance/Display    7
Ease Of Use/HMI    10
Features    9
Value For Money    10
Overall     8.6

What It Is
A single DIN car radio head unit with a CD slot and a USB port under a cover on the front. There is a 3.5mmm auxiliary audio input socket on the front beneath this and there are two sets of stereo RCA outputs to the rear. The whole front panel is removable and a red warning LED flashes when it is removed. The SD card slot (regular SD up to 4GB) is on the inner panel. Multi-segment EFL lighting
Editor Review : Caliber RCD 267 CD/USB/SD Head Unit
Just because you don’t have much cash does NOT mean that you don’t matter to the car audio makers. On the utter contrary, the entry level buyer is crucial to the whole trade. As once tasted, the lovely flavour of better sounds evolves as we do. Getting more sophisticated or hungrier tastes for either purity and beauty in your music or just plain muscle, or worst of all, both!
I recall all too clearly being that short-on-cash buyer and the choice actually matters more at the cheaper end as the wealthy can at least sell on, say a Pioneer ODR head unit but these will not hold much value in a coupla years’ time, so it has to be worth it for what it does. It has to be that notch better for the money.
So, seeing as this unit is bound for installation in a teeny weeny Ford StreetKa belonging to a chum tomorrow, let’s see if it is any good&;
How Well Does It Work?
I have been having issues lately with the demonstrating of SD card and USB devices’ reading live on video lately. For a PC is far more powerful than the gubbins inside a car radio, and while a unit may happily state on the box that it will read WMA files and others, the unit may have issues with reading certain file types from certain sources and you will literally have to suck it and see. I was getting ticked off at my failure to get a note out of the SD card. So I popped it out, reformatted it, reinserted some WMA files and some mp3 as well. And yes, it had a ‘fmarrrble’ moment, then read into the listings on the SD card, found the MP3s and off it went.
So, I decide to do a live-unedited ‘netty clip on the thing and am a tad nervous about fitting the very solidly-fixing front panel on live, as I have no dashboard installation to lever against. Anyway, we start with the lamp I call the ‘Eff Off’ LED. It just says, ‘I have no pants on and you, On Looking Tealeaf, can just go sniff yourself&;!’ or something.. Anyway, as I sound astonished in the clip, the Caliber RCD 267 has a little recognition memory space in there and realising it was the same SD as last time, it just starts up where it knew it was last. Bloody impressive. Also, it read and played some stuff from a USB bean from Sandisk that I know for a fact has suffered due to my crassly stupid yanking in and out of ports without any ‘safely remove’ piffle going on. But the Caliber RCD 267 didn’t care and played me the music.
Then, I plugged in the Sony MP3 Walkman which outputs in analogue audio only to headphones or what ever you connect. This revealed the op amp inside to be not spectacular but clean and sweet and with the right amplification it can rock, too.
Of course, the odd Stanton Warriors CD had to be slapped in the disc mechanism for the video and the Sony camcorder does an incredible, seamless and bloody annoying job of utterly ‘coping’ with the near-20dB increase in dynamic levels as the choon starts properly. But it all works and as I say in the video below, it offers THREE digital sources, plus one analogue and is a real good all round digital beastie. The only thing better would be to have the model whose part number finishes ‘BT’ for Bluetooth&;
http://youtu.be/T9u0Hg8qaFU
Why Buy It?
For the one hundred and ten pounds asked, despite what I blither about in the video about ‘under a one-er’ this is still a ten out of ten for sheer mad value for money. It may not have the dynamic range of a deck from one of the bigger Japanese manufacturers, let alone be able to chase the heels of the posh, audiophile products from the likes of Alpine, Clarion, Kenwood and Pioneer for audiophillic speed, detail and prettiness, but the access is awesome. Furthermore, like a bloody tractor, it can cope with some bumps in the field and in fact was one of the best ever at just getting the hell on with reading and playing files that both Parrot and Clarion machines have had no truck with playing whatsoever in the past!
Full Features & Specifications
– Max Power 4x 75W
– CD/CD-R/CD-RW/MP3/WMA Playback
– SD Car Reader up to 4GB
– Front 3.5mm Jack Aux in
– Front USB Port
– 18 FM Pre -sets
– Removable Panel, with supplied branded hard case
– Red Warning LED shows when panel removed
– 4ch RCA preout
– ISO connector
– MP3 ID-Tag