Blaupunkt Melbourne SD27

Great Idea Still a first to market

I purchased this after seeing other products with add on ports for MP3 players or USB drives. To me this configuration makes perfect sense. The SD format works very well and is integrated into the front console. Current version does not handle the SDHC cards so 2 GB is the largest card you can use. Still having 500 or 1000 songs in such a small package is very convenient.

The player works off of a subdirectory structure assuming only one layer of directories. In this case one album or artist per directory. You select the directory you want to play and it plays the songs. it appears to do this based upon the way they are stored in the FAT of the card. This is the order they were added to the card. This works okay but I would hope future versions would allow a tiered structure. Perhaps files could be stored by Artist then Album. This limitation on file structure makes it a little hard to get to a particular song you want, especially in consideration with the number of songs that can be stored.

On the controls There is also a noticeable lag time when selecting the next file or directory. A bit annoying, but tolerable. Set up options are pretty good. The volume that the player starts can be set at a fixed volume or the volume it was set at prior to turning it off. The feature I like and feared it would not have is the player resumes play where it left off. Seems like a given but you never know. One small bug is the clock. One mode you can set is to have time on the display, after a single pass of either the song title or artist. Even though set for 12 hour time those German engineers seem to think everyone really wants a 24 hour clock. The player comes with mix options for either by directory or the entire card. Although I can not prove it is not random, the mix algorithm appears to be repetative and not get all the songs in the "bucket" for mixing.

The volume and song select controls are essentially push button and I would prefer dial, but with the auto volume controls this is not much of an issue.

The sound quality was unexpectedly good. I am pleased and find no sound quality difference between this and my stock CD player that it replaced.

In general this is a good radio/player. It is much better in my mind than using a separate MP# player that has to be connected and moved in and out of vehicles all the time. Loading songs is very easy with the use of a SD/USB adapter for $5-10.

I would recommend this for anyone who like I wants to get the stack of CD's out of the vehicle. The format is convenient and flexible. I am sure second generation products will offer better user interfaces, but for the price this works good for me.

Note I have rated Durability below, but having owned the product for less than a month time will tell