Caliber RMD 579DAB-BT Head Unit

3rd June 2019 Adam Rayner

Product Details: Single DIN Motorised Mechless Touch Screen Headunit
Manufacturer: Caliber
Distributor: Celsus Ice
Websites: UK Distributor http://www.celsusice.co.uk/shopdisp_7929.php
Maker’s site: http://webshop.caliber.nl/products/view/details/rmd579dab-bt.html

Suggested Selling price: £319.99

In A Nutshell

An all singing, all dancing motorised touchscreen car radio with no CD mechanism. It has a USB socket on the front, a micro SD socket behind the removable small front panel and has a front 3.5mm aux in, as well as rear AV inputs. The RMD 579DAB-BT has four channel plus subwoofer RCA outputs to use with amplifiers instead of the built-in 4×75 watts if you want it louder. Plays pictures, music and video. Bluetooth and DAB+, complete with an active antenna and a big remote control, makes this crazy VFM.

SCORES
Sound Quality 8
Appearance/Display 9
Ease Of Use/HMI 9
Features 10
Value For Money 10
Overall 9.2

BEST BUY AND RECOMMENDED

What It Is

A single DIN car radio head unit with a USB port under a rubbery cover on the front. A seven inch touchscreen appears, when prompted, motorised from inside the unit. There is a 3.5mmm auxiliary audio input socket on the front beside the USB port and there are two sets of chassis mounted stereo RCA outputs to the rear, plus sub out, on a flying lead. Front panel has a multi-segment EFL information screen. A small portion of the panel is removable. A Micro SD card slot (reading up to 32GB!) is on the inner panel. Steering wheel control compatible – with an optional extra adapter being needed. The RMD 579DAB-BT comes with an active DAB+ antenna, a massive 28 button card remote control and a wired microphone with sun visor clamp as well as the unit’s fixings needed for inside your dash.

Editor Review : Caliber RMD 579DAB-BT Head Unit
Two milestones today. It being a Thursday, I figured that I would commence a ‘Throwback Thursday’ feature. It being the first, I started at the beginning, which was a group review of three single DIN motorised-screen head units. One each from Pioneer, Kenwood and Alpine. They were all hundreds and hundreds of pounds. All had disc mechanisms inside to play CD or DVD. Way back, I recall an SD slot that was rated to handle 4GB. The Caliber RMD 579DAB-BT unit has no disc mech but it does handle up to 32GB, from a bonkers wee MicroSD.

How Well Does It Work?
One thing you won’t see, along with CDs, here is any reference to the signal to noise ratio of the audio internals of products like this. Where that three way review above was concerned, the three manufacturers gunned it out over 96dB, 100dB and 105dB signal to noise, with Alpine taking the SQ high ground.

But you cannot sell SQ any more in the normal audio market. As since MP3, folks in general do not even care as much. No analogue record player noises was enough. And even those dodgy devices are back in retro vogue again, crackles and all. So to fret overmuch about sound purity is a daft thing these days. I just wanna plug it in and ROCK!

So, does this delicious slice of Nederlander tech make the music blossom like a tulip field? Or taste like five year old Gouda cheese? Let’s go plug it in.

First off, the humble pie, with no custard. The chip amp in this is as potent as Caliber could get. Un-amplified, it is just louder than most radios and the modern chip amps are embarrassingly good. Thus, the GIGO law is king. Garbage In, Garbage Out. I played Three Cane Whale on FLAC from the Bowers & Wilkins Society of Sound and it was astonishingly good. Some older MP3 tracks sounded ropy, because they were and the unit presented them perfectly. But put quality crisp music files into the storage medium and the RMD 579DAB-BT will play them a treat.

But to start at the beginning, the unit took some getting used to. You can see evidence of that in the video below..

The RMD 579DAB-BT is one hell of a thing but it is not a fire breathing high power desk computer. So just as it always was with digital file reading headunits, you must ensure that the storage devices you pug in are populated with files and flavours that it can read. I have a big old Verbatim brand USB ‘bean’ with a mass of files of different kinds on it. If I tried to fire the unit up with that USB connected, the RMD 579DAB-BT just went tharn and the controls wouldn’t respond.

Then, I was tapping the screen too fast and expecting the touchscreen to work with as much alacrity as the one on my tenth generation cost-no-limit-for-R&D Samsung S10 phone, with the state of the art mobile processor chip in that makes phones cost so much. Wrong.

But once I had gotten a grip and started acting more deliberately and changed the USB stick of stuff to one with less silly contents, I had no problems and really enjoyed it. I played music from the SD, checked out the album pictures I didn’t even realise were in with the music as metadata, and played videos. I streamed music frommy phone with high quality streaming via Bluetooth. (Choose the model number message to pair to in the Bluetooth connection menus of your phone, as the OEM ‘device’ Bluetooth chip within the 579 will also broadcast it’s own address. A quirk of the Bluetooth architecture of Caliber stuff.)

The screen quality is astonishing for the money and speaks of the TV industry making these better all the time. It is just so bright and clear and easy to see, even under the daylight lamp I put on in my office to help test these units’ screens. Not quite like Alpine in Iwaki City with their Sunlight Abuse rig room, but still worthy.

I would use the MicroSD as a de-facto 32GB ‘YouPod’ for tunes and video plugged into the main unit behind the panel and keep the USB socket for the ‘must-listen-now’ music you get hold of and want to drive to immediately. The front Aux plughole input works and is parallel to the ones on RCA wires to the rear. That’s where I plugged the Sony MP3 Walkman in. So this is just two routes, rather than lots of units being connectable at once. But I reckon you could hook two things up and use just one by powering up only the active one. Like a games console plugged in the rear and a video camera’s audio output to watch your stuff back with after a day out.

The sound was impressive from BT, SD and USB , with even the cute three band bass/mid/highs ‘eq’ working a treat. I chose to leave the loudness on and the ‘beep’ active. My office-window mount DAB antenna’s cable was terminated in a female socket, er as was the Caliber RMD 579DAB-BT’s chassis. So I could not connect my one in. It comes with an active DAB+ aerial, complete with a 12V wire labelled from the unit to power it up. This antenna, with metal ground plane lobe to be on the body work, as well as the active 12V feed, would cost £30 retail alone.

You can hear can audio ‘bipping’ as I operate controls (like volume adjust) on the unit while it is playing back video, as this may be stretching the processor’s ability. But simply playing, the thing does a brilliant job with smooth video and clear sound. And that 4x75W is about 4x25W RMS and is damn loud!

You could so easily upgrade and add a four channel amplifier, then a sub bass unit, with its own feed. Rear seat screens and a reversing camera out back and you have got the sort of equipment that would have been absurdly more expensive a year or two back.

The front layout is smart and crisp but can be a bit mystifying to work out as the button count is kept low. That said, I loved this thing. The screen whirring out of the unit stirred memories of the Naughties and a golden age of the aftermarket in the UK.

Thing is, for owners of cars that don’t have digitally strangulated conjoined twin sound systems, that can use a proper ‘head unit’, this era isn’t over and the Caliber RMD 579DAB-BT is a gift of tech enjoyment, just like the distributors promise to deliver.

And Caliber are champions of top end value for money with absurdly high feature counts. This is a unit full of win.

Why Buy It?
There is no denying how damn cool the motorised screen thing is and was. So much so, that this very unit can be found found on EBAY, priced at £399! They must be selling them, too. But I reckon £300 is likely a findable price. Great fun, good looking, sounds great and the video quality is as good as any Japanese deck I ever saw. This used not to be the case as the TFT stuff was always expensive. Cheap screens always looked it. But screen tech has been driven by Television lately and oh BOY has it evolved in recent years.

A totally awesome bargain of deep fun factor.

Full Features & Specifications

Max Power 4x 75W
RMS Power 4x 25W
Motorised slide in/out 7in TFT touch screen
Front USB Port
Micro SD Card Reader up to 32GB
Front 3.5mm Jack Aux in
MPEG4/MP3/DivX/WMA/JPEG Playback with ID-3 Tag
Bluetooth A2DP & AVRCP streaming
Multi tuner with 18 FM/12 AM/10DAB Presets
RDS EON
Three band EQ
Removable Panel with display
Card type remote control
4ch RCA preout
Subwoofer output
Video output
Reverse cam input
ISO connectors built in