Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I wanted a bookshelf system for my kitchen with CD player, decent radio, and iPod and auxiliary inputs. The DM-38 delivers all this with a striking elegance of design that makes my engineer heart happy just to look at it. I like it so much that I'm ordering a second unit for my office.
There's no need to buy an iPod dock. I connect my iPod Touch 32G (third generation) to the USB port. I can operate the iPod in either of two modes. Normally I control it by tapping on its screen as usual, calling up apps and playing music. I can, for example, run the NPR News app, sending the audio over the USB cable. That's a win because the digital signal is converted to analog inside the DM-38, which does a much better job than the iPod.
Or I can press the "browser" button on the DM-38 remote. Now the iPod goes into "accessory connected" mode and I can control the music player with the remote -- start/stop/pause and forward/reverse work. The two-line display on the DM-38 shows the song info.
Here's why I didn't go all the way to five stars:
*) No HD radio. None of the competition has HD either, but still ... the British version of this product handles digital radio, why doesn't the American?
*) No support for RDS, the metadata in the radio signal. My car radio can tell me what station I'm listening to and the name of the current track, but the DM-38 cannot. There's a "DAB/RDS" button on the remote that does nothing.
*) When playing MP3 files from a USB storage device (like a flash drive), the DM-38 doesn't sort by the track number meta-information in the files. Instead, it uses the order in which the files appear in the directory. This means that the only way to get the correct playlist order is to format the USB device and then carefully copy in the files in track order. Portable MP3 players don't have this silly limitation.
*) No option to leave the USB port hot when the stereo is turned off. This means I have to unplug the iPod from the stereo and connect it to a separate charger to keep the battery full. And no, you can't put a self-powered USB hub in the circuit; the DM-38 doesn't work with hubs.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Denon DM38S Micro AM/FM, CD System Featuring USB Input and iPod/iPhone Connectivity
No comments:
Post a Comment