Jensen VM9424

I bought this unit based on other reviews and the features of the unit. And it was better than expected! I was hesitant that it was a Jensen, but no longer.

Install - easier than expected

Sound - Very good, the unit has a lot of options in equalization. I wanted the 3 sets of outputs. I did find that the unit is not tolerant of high compression MP3s. Some of my oldest MP3 recording were at highest compression and low fidelity. (memory wasn't cheap 10 yrs ago) I re-ripped them and they sound great.

Controls/Screen, I searched out units with a rotary volume, but with large screen. This unit is great on both- an the screen only slightly washed out in full sunlight from sunroof.

Inputs- it taked USB, SD card, DVD or CD for music. All work fine. Nice to have those options, more expensive units don't always have those opttions.

DVD - plays movies better than expected, easy to jump forward, loads fast.

NAV- for the price you can't beat it. My Magellan is slighlty better or intuiative, but when you get use to this one, entry flows well. It does include 11 million POCs and was impressed. When you have Nav and stereo on, the music mutes down and the Nav voice comes on with nice fading. You can upgrade the NAV info in future years for $99, but the '09 data is fine.

Blue tooth/camera- haven't played with these yet.

I would highly recommend - friends that have seen and listened can't believe the price and brand. They love the screen. For 1/2 the price of Kenwood you get 90% of satisfaction/features.

My favorite feature is the ease I have scrolling the MP3 songs, very easy and the titles are easy to use with large font sizes.

Yea, I was skeptical about Jensen/Audiovox. But after being in the car dealership service business for the last 20 years, I know how one manufacturer likes to blanket the market with 6 different brand names. Gone are the days of "quality" brands. Yea you, high-end big-name brand. I've had my guys replace tooooo many of those fancy head units. So here is this lowly $400 Jensen with all these features--plus GPS!!!!! I have been truly amazed for about 5 months now. Its in my wife's Sequoia and she is ga-ga over this thing. I like to jam on the radio/cd while driving while the screen is on back-up camera! Too cool. Has a big Speedo Display using GPS, plays DVD's, lots of user options, too. Just works well. SOLID feeling volume knob with micro-clicks. Feels good, no slop. Excellent touch-screen. Large screen not blocked on each side with seldom used buttons. Plug in the iPhone and it picks up all the info. Playlists, artists, songs, etc. on it's own!! I havent even bought the $20 iPod cable yet. Probably won't. I also purchased the Rockford Fosgate 10" amplified sub.(ready to go unit). Sweet Jesus this thing shakes the hell out of everything! I can only imagine the 12" version! Blew me away. Forget what you thought you knew about subwoofers. Apparently, technology has improved greatly while I've been away raising kids. This thing pumps out chest-pounding bass like my two 12's back in 1991. TOTAL SATISFACTION

Hi all! My review is gonna be kinda long because I just wanna cover everything and point out some great features if possible.

I came across this unit when I was looking for a Two-way alarm system on Sonic. And when I saw the price of $379.99 on this Fully-loaded unit, there were 2 things in my mind. One, this gotta be a joke or someone in the sale department was really messed up tagging the price. And two and most likely true, this is a sh***y system and I never heard of Jensen before. So I went ahead and check it out to see if this a good unit.

I read through the Specs and Features of this unit pretty careful, twice. And this unit does it all. It has every options you can ask for a car head unit. NAV, BLUETOOTH, XM, IPOD HOOKUP, USB Port, SD Card Reader, 5.1 RCA Outputs, Rear View Camera Hookup, Rear Seats Video Outputs and much more...This is more than I could ask for as a head unit. That's why I really concerned about the quality and durability of this unit so I read more than 20 reviews. And suprisingly, 12 out of the first 20 had All 5-stars and the rest had like 4-stars and up.

So without any doubt, I bought 2 of these, one for my car and the other for my girlfriend's. Got these 3 days late...I have to say that Sonic did a super job on packing. The unit came sealed and not even a little dirt on the unit box. I opened the unit's box and started checking on the unit itself and all the included accessories. Not thing missing on both unit, that's a start. All accessories were sealed with tape and fresh. The first thing I always do with these electronics is read the Manual or Installation Guide. This unit came with both, so I saved some time by going through the Installation Guide only. If I get into any trouble I will then search it in the Manual. The guide was pretty straight forward. After spending some time reading the guide, I felt very confident installing it myself because Best Buy Geek Squad will damage it or my car anyways. So why not install it myself, I can save some money and learn a lot of things messing up my own car, LOL. So I connected the head unit harness with the harness designed to plug and play on my car audio system. Sonic included the specific harness and dash kit for your car for FREE, that's a breeze. After connecting all the required wires together, I was pretty much ready to install this unit. Popped the hood, disconnected the Positive Terminal....and Negative Terminal to make sure that there's absolutely no short circuit. I went ahead and remove my car dash and factory head unit. Unfortunately, the free dash kit that Sonic included for my car was not used because I want the head unit door in my car able to close. I drive 2005 Scion tC by the way. So I modified the factory mounting kit to make the dash door be able to close completely with this new unit. All the instructions on how to connect wires and install mounting kit are included with the free dash kit and harness.

After an hour, everything was in places and ready to run the first try. FAIL. The unit powered on but only showed a white screen. 2nd try, same thing. 3rd try, nothing different. So I called Sonic Tech Support, where the Tech guy was very patient with me, and that's why I love shopping at Sonic. He spent like almost half an hour to help me fixing some bad wiring. I tell you what, that was the longest time a business representative been on the phone with me. Very impressive. So he figured out that i got some bad Ground wiring and told me to ground it some where else on the chasis and I did. Turned car key to ACC, and BAM!!!, unit powered on completely, "Jensen" loading screen for about 10 secs, and everything on the screen like it's supposed to. Said thanks to the Tech guy but forgot to ask for his name. Inserted my pre-loaded SD card with 213 songs in the SD slot, the unit automatically loaded the SD card and VOILA!!! 213 songs with titles and artists. It took approximately 8 secs to load all 213 songs on the playlist. Navigated one of my favorite song "Swing Ya Rag" by T.I and BA BAM!!! The system hit extremely HARD. I have Alpine SPR-50C component speakers in front and Alpine SPS-610 speakers in rear seats all powered by Alpine MRP-F300 along with 2-12" Alpine type R ported box with Jl JX1000/1D.

While the unit is ON. With just one button I can get to the Navigation feature. Maps load kinda fast, about 4 secs. It is kind of hard to use the Navigation at first, but if you spend a good amount of time driving around with it, you will get used to it real quick.

About the Bluetooth, I used the Jensen BTM15 and everything is fantastic. I mounted the Bluetooth device on top of the rear view mirror for easy access every time someone calling. The sound is pretty clear, no signal dropping, and it filters out unwanted noise pretty much. I was talking through the Bluetooth the other day with my friend while driving at 60-65 MPH with windows rolled down, my friend barely heard the noise of the wind and other vehicles sounds, but heard me pretty clear. This feature is very cool.

Next is Ipod Hook up feature. You can hook up pretty much all the new models of ipod Touch and Iphone. Please check the compatibility before purchase the Jensen Jlink USB, which is used to play your ipod/iphone musics and videos. If you only play musics from your ipod/iphone, you can directly plug it the USB port behind the unit. But you will need Jensen Jlink USB to play musics and videos. You can also control your ipod/iphone right on the screen. This feature is a must have for those who has ipod or iphone, but please check the compatibility first.

Everything else is just PERFECT. I owned a couple of Kenwood, Pioneer and Alpine head units before, but this Jensen unit is really something. In my opinion, this unit can be compared with some fully-loaded Kenwood units and even with Pioneer with same options.

Im really glad that I bought this unit. It's given me a lot of fun and joys.

Highly recommend for anyone who looking for a fully-loaded head unit with limited budget.

Everything about this radio was worth it. The only thing I'm having trouble with is getting my iPhone to play vedio on the radio.

Installed easily and most of the features work well. Sound is good.. Nav is good, but night screen does not work right; you can dim the screen manually but the auto dim is intermittent. Jensen has a gain control in the setup menu whereas you can preset the preamp output for different music and/or sound sources. Good feature but the unit will not always remember all the settings once you turnoff the unit. or change sources. It defaults back to the factory settings some of the time. The DVD plays well but 5.1 surround does not play as there is no center channel output. Therefore voices cannot be heard. There is no adjustment to down grade 5.1 to stereo so I guess the DVD movie thing is a waste. This is a nice unit loaded with features but the software is still buggy and needs to be updated. If Jensen does an update and fixes a few of the soft problems this unit is a keeper for the money. It is well thought out and has a lot of great features.. too bad they don't always work.