Pioneer Premier DEHP510UB iPod AM/FM/MP3/WMA/AAC Receiver

great music quality but crummy user interface
Rating:3 out of 5 stars
I bought a Pioneer DEH-P510UB along with the Pioneer HD tuner in early 2009 when they came out. I was eagerly awaiting a quality deck with good radio and also AUX-IN and USB right on the faceplate of the deck. The unit sounds fabulous, even through my car’s original (premium, 7 speaker) sound system with no additional amp. The radio works wonderfully, gets stations that our home tuners don’t, and you can store HD subchannels as presets. I put a whole bunch of MP3-encoded songs on a 16 GB USB thumb drive and this is my primary mode of use. It’s very easy, plug in the thumb drive and within seconds it’s playing your music. The key to playing 1000 songs on one digital medium like a USB drive is the user interface, of course. Sadly, this is where Pioneer cut corners. There’s no way to skip ahead say 50 or 100 songs, and if you want to go back to the song that played before the current one it’s incredibly bad, barely works. You can put the unit into random mode, which will skip around through your music. Unlike many consumer audio players, the random algorithm seems to work well. However, this is the very worst part. If I’m in random mode and I push the button to skip to the next song, it should go to the next song randomly, NOT the next song in alphabetical order. This is a very basic and stupid mistake in the UI design and it is excruciating for the user. Stuck in the middle of one of your daughter’s Spice Girls songs and don’t want to listen to it? You’d think you could push “next song” and it would jump to the next song in random order. Does it? No. It goes to the next Spice Girls song, then the next .. yow.

It’s a good thing the remote works as well as it does, because that one-button-does-all thing doesn’t work very precisely if you’re driving. To make a radio station a preset, for example, requires that you hold that button exactly in its center for several seconds until the deck realizes what you’re trying to do. I have yet to accomplish this while I’m driving – some tiny swerve will make my fingertip move just barely but enough to make the thing skip to the next radio station instead of adding the current one as a preset. Sigh. The remote works much better.

It’s a shame, really. This could be a really killer product and it wouldn’t have cost Pioneer any money in hardware, just needed to put someone on the UI design who knows something. The manual seems large at first glance until you realize it’s one of those awful written-in-every-language manuals. The English section is skimpy, the index is uselessly terse, and whatever you’re looking up is certain to refer to another section which itself may refer to another section .. just plain lazy tech writing. And the font is way way tiny. I have to take off my driving glasses and put on reading glasses to read it. Needless to say I have to pull over to do this. There is supposed to be a way to enter custom EQ data using a six-band equalizer, but the crummy manual has defeated me entirely.

So it’s a great product with great limitations. I’m going to keep mine, hoping Pioneer comes out with a flashable upgrade to the UI. After all, I can still have my whole damn collection on one USB drive and the unit plays them and sounds great. That’s cool.