Kenwood KDC-4057U Single DIN FM/USB/iPod/CD Head Unit

Product Details
Manufacturer: Kenwood
Website: link
Typical Selling price: £89.95
In A Nutshell
An unassuming single-DIN CD deck with FM radio and a USB as well as a 3.5mm aux socket. It quietly comes complete with a collection of features and control options that would have been three figures more in cost just a few years ago. The sheer value for money in terms of facility, sound quality and potency of output is huge.
SCORES
Overall 8.8
Sound Quality 9
Appearance/Display 8
Ease Of Use/HMI 7
Features 10
Value For Money 10


What It Is
As more and more mechanism-free decks appear on the market, and with the likes of music vendors HMV going bust (I so hope that the one in Watford is amongst the ‘˜saved’) I was told recently by Mike Edwards of Kenwood Electronics, ‘Not many people use those any more’ when discussing CD capability. But in a world where my old accountant is still wanting to use Compact Cassettes of Ella Fitzgerald and has a CD changer in his car, many folks are simply unfamiliar with anything but downloads.
For this is a simple CD radio. Or at least it looks like it and at a mooted £89.99 (almost certainly less by the time it hits the streets) it is not a costly item. But what it has is massively impressive at the price and so cool that you really may not even use all the detailed DSP that this unassuming deck offers. There’s so much, it could even put off the technophobic! But be not afeared, it isn’t confusing really
The deck is just that, it has a sweet and rapid-spit-out-and-grab CD player mechanism and behind a really pretty little totally clear plastic window on the right, that snaps back, there are the front USB and Aux sockets. A knob with a few buttons around it and the classic six-buttons of presets for radio stations is all else you get. But that knob is a rotate AND press job, so it can scroll through stuff on screen and ‘˜go’ with a push. It has a proper three band parametric EQ as well as regular tone controls and even a multi preset-plus-user option of equalisation curves you can set up. The RCA output is set at a whopping 2.5 Volts. Lit in red, it looks pretty.

Editor Review : Kenwood KDC-4057U Single DIN FM/USB/iPod/CD Head Unit

My first draft of the introduction to this Kenwood KDC-7057U was politically incorrect and about stuff that would never have got past any sane editor. It was to do with the multiple places you could stick music into on this deck three and well, I called it a tart. But the simple fact is that with a CD slot as well as front USB socket and a 3.5mm micro jack auxiliary input, this is a deck that really can let you insert music into it in what ever technical way your desires take you. Be that USB beans or sticks, your iPod/iPhone, anything with an aux out and of course those things that are now tragically receding CDs.
Ands what you get on board this machine (how I love to still be able to call it such!) is so expansive as the chips where all this cleverness can be put are now so cheap versus the monsters that run iPhones and Galaxies, that like the doggy who licks his own privates simply ‘˜because he can’, the manufacturer has in this case loaded a pile of cool features onto what looks like a simple shoebox with a slot.
But it isn’t just a shoebox with a slot and as well as the clever smarty-pants stuff all listed extensively at the bottom the unit has a peppering of features which are purist audio god stuff. ONE RCA output pair but they rock at 2.5V instead of the old 500mV. And you can configure that output just for bass and even set a lowpass crossover! And Zero Bit Mute means that it is fit for use in a sound-off! (They wanna hear silence not hiss between tracks when being judged.. so this is BLOODY clever.)
Now read on.
How Well Does It Work?
First, I grabbed an old CD. Stanton Warriors some mad kicking dance music item that starts with the soundscape of a bloke getting into a car and starting up his radio. He whistles happily, you hear him get in, the car starts and after a brief iconic radio shizzle-noise, the DJ says, ‘you wanna turn this one up..’ and the sound crescendos 20dB to kicking tuff level with great clarity, in an instant. It had dynamics, snap and attack and through the old Genesis SM100 reference amplifier and into a set of B&W LM1 Monitor loudspeakers, it sounded bloody wonderful. I do so love CD
I gripped my Sandisk 8GB ‘˜bean’ USB. The one with a load of corrupted files and all locked-in as I removed it without powering-down the PC’s USB port that time. (Infuriating but unwittingly, a brilliant test as a result.) The CD interrupted immediately and a few seconds later I was looking at an error message for a file nothing will read any more except my PC and with a brief twist and shove, I was on a track it would play. This of course, was only as good as the music files I had on the bean and was belting out some Bob Marley. Not bad at all, I admitted
Then, I reached for a Sony digital MP3 player one of their Walkman family and plugged a 3.5mm wire into it’s butt and then into the Kenwood KDC-7057U deck’s orifice beneath the USB. You have to switch to ‘˜Aux’ input manually via the source button. I found the signal a bit weedy, even on full volume, as this device is intended to drive tiny earbuds. Then I tried my BlackBerry 9300’s headphone socket on the other end of the wire rather than the Walkman and cranked it. It rocked then, all right! I think I found the source of my headphone problems as well, as the BB has been a bit crap lately. On music into the test system, I could hear this crackle and waggled the plug in and out until I had worn away the dirt and cleaned the connection!
Finally, I socketed-up my iPod touch 4th Gen and whipped out the bean and placed the iPod wire into the USB. Once again, the deck took the USB as daddy, read my iPod in around 20 seconds (it is a 64GB) and played me some Thomas Dolby. A is for Aliens Ate My Buick
I was unimpressed with a perceived softness in the sound quality of the iPod at first and then flipped over to Kraftwerk’s AeroDynamique from the Tour De France album on the same device and that was suddenly revelatory. Gorgeous and rich, fat and crisp, the bloody iPod was sounding all but as good as CD and even I, when being my most snotty and pernickety could not fault it. The Garbage In, Garbage Out rule or GIGO law, holds firm!
Why Buy It?
It is a pretty deck and simple to show off and operate yet can do an awful lot of everything. It is not a Bluetooth machine but that would have made it a very much more expensive proposition. The price is going to be a tad less than the suggested, as ever and with the cloth-bagged removable face and that high power RCA output, this is a lovely deck to look after and easy to make sound immense with an amplifier or two. You’ll need an RCA ‘˜Y’ lead or two or an amp product with an output pass through, is all.
And now that Kenwood have got car amplifiers literally 35mm thick but with some real muscle on board, this deck represents a delicious upgrade path ‘˜opener’ with the Kenwood brand for those wanting some Japanese kicking quality in their rides.
Overall, I was terribly impressed and astonished by all the extras. F’rinstance, you can use big efficient speakers on the internal amplifier on all corners, just on head unit power and then use the RCA signal feed out to drive bass alone and fully fettle it at the headunit. No other fancy crossover needed. Thus, any cheap but clean stereo amp you can bridge could be used as a sub woofer amp on this deck But I’d check out their new skinny amps, myself!


Full Features & Specifications
CD/MP3 Player With USB Input For iPod/iPhone Or Portable MP3 Device, USB Memory Stick etc
– MP3, MWA & AAC playback
– Front AUX and USB terminal
– iPod, iPhone USB direct control (with optional KCA-iP102 lead) NB this is simply a regular USB-standard iPod connector, like you get with every iPod.
– Low Pass Filter built-in
– System Q preset EQ
– OEM wired remote terminal (requires additional cables)
– 1 RCA preout
– Detachable Faceplate
– Soft Protection Case For Faceplate
– Rotary Encoder & Control Knob
– Multi control wheel
– Music Search function
– Attenuator with Smooth Volume Return
– Digital Clock (24H)
– Firmware upgradeable
– Built-in Connector: Molex 16 pin, (goes to) ISO connector
– Display Type: Fluorescent (FL) Tube Display
– Display Layout: 13 segments x 11 Characters
– Display Illumination by light-emitting diode (LED)
– Dimmer Control: two steps, Manual
– Fluorescent Display
– Demo Mode
– Special Character Display: Russian Characters
Cosmetics
– Front/edge: Black Injection moulding
– Dress plate: Piano Black
– Volume & operation knob or wheel: Chrome Plated
– Preset key finish: Piano Black
– Escutcheon finish: Black Injection
– Triangle, Front terminals , Volume & operation Key and also knob illumination: Red
Radio
– RDS (PI, PS, AF, TI, Clock)
– Radio Text (RDS)
– Program Type Function (PTY)
– FM, AM (MW/LW) Reception
– Enhanced Other Networks Function (EON)
– PACS – clean reception tuner
– Presets: 24 Presets (18FM / 3LW / 3MW)
– Mixed preset memory (FM & AM): 6 presets
– Automatic Memory Entry (AME)
– Up/Down Seek Tuning
– Tuning mode (Auto1 / Auto2 / Manual)s
– FM Stereo / Mono Selector
CD Features
– CD-R/RW Compatible
– MP3 Playback with ID3 Tag Display
– Compatible with Kenwood Music Editor Lite
– WMA (Windows Media Audio) Playback
– AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) Playback
– CD Text Support
– Supreme D.A.C. processing: 24 bit
– Zero bit Mute
Digital
– USB Type: 2.0 Full speed
– Kenwood Music Editor Lite
– Kenwood music control App for Android
– Made for iPod & iPhone *
– USB Digital connection (1 wire) with optional cable KCA-iP102
– Music playback
– Alphabet search
– Skip search
– App & iPod control mode
– Reverse browsing
Audio
– Maximum Output Power: 50W x 4
– MOSFET Power IC
– Auxiliary input: Front panel, Mini-jack
– Pre-out: 1 RCA
– Pre-out Output Level: 2.5V
– Preout Rear/Subwoofer Switchable
– Subwoofer Reference Level Adj.
– Source Tone Control & Memory: Bass/Mid/Treble
– Balance/Fader Control
– System Q: Preset EQ
– Bass Boost Circuit
– Low-pass Filter
– Steering wheel control (with optional adaptors)
Kenwood’s website is here: link