Product Description
Pioneer Mvh-P8200Bt In-Dash Multimedia A/V Receiver With BluetoothAmazon.com Product Description
“Mech-free” receivers are all the rage lately, as more and more consumers migrate their music and media collections to hard drives rather than physical media. The MVH-P8200BT from Pioneer is one of the company’s first mech-free receivers, and has plenty to offer the digital-centric crowd. Make and take hands-free calls with built-in Bluetooth technology. Enjoy … More >>
#1 by Ron Malinowski, Jr. on July 2, 2010 - 7:28 pm
I received my MVH-P8200BT yesterday, and installed it. Installation was as normal as any other stereo, except the additional parking brake wire if you want to use the photo or video portion of this radio. Let me first start out by saying the AM & FM portion of the radio work pretty good, you can relatively easily seek to the next or previous station by pushing the knob left or right, or bring up your presets by pushing it up. The radio displays the RDS nicely as well. Changing sources (Radio, ipod/USB, or Aux input requires pressing the SRC button and rotating the tuning knob to the right or left to highlight the source and then pressing the tuning knob in. This in all is relatively easy to do in a timely manner.
Where the problem comes in, is using the ipod interface. it will start playing I believe the last song you had playing, but if you want to jump to another artist or lets say a podcast, be prepared to take your eyes off the road. You have to hit the Home button, and then rotate the knob one to the right and then press it in, and rotate the knob to highlight Songs or podcast or artist, and in my case lets do podcast, then the lost of podcast comes up and you have to rotate to the podcast and press the knob in, then it shows you the episodes, then you push it in. But on top of doing this, the tuning knob which is a 5 way control (left, right, up , down, and in) is very sensitive and plan on registering the wrong menu choice, and then having to hit the previous button on the display to pop out one menu and continue. You have to do this anything you want to change songs that are not the next immediate song that you can just press the right commander button to jump to next track.
So, I thought, well the nice remote has a left right up and down, and in feature as well. I will do this from the remote with a little more precision, well turns out 70% of the buttons on the remote don’t even do anything. any function that requires you to turn that knob on the radio, still has to be done that way. the up and down will not allow you to scroll through menu items. the only real think I was able to do with the remote was volume, next track and previous track, and radio tuning.
If you thought it would be nice to be able to play videos from your ipod or photos, it requires a $40 cable with a usb and aux cable now hanging out of the front of the radio per the manual. I did put some photos on the SD card, but you cannot play music from SD while you do your slid show, and again its a cumbersome use of the scroll wheel to jog between music and photos on the SD setup. You are able to play the slide show while listening to the radio.
Now for the real good, I think the best integration with this unit is the bluetooth with the iphone or probably many other phones, I was able to easily pull up contacts, and you can quickly choose a letter of the starting letter of the contact and click through to dial the appropriate name and if you want to call mobile or home. And the audio with the included mic is excellent. it will mute your music and continue it when your call is done.
The radio looks really good and thats what lead me immediately to this model, but I am ever so sorry I did not test it out before doing the install. I for sure thought the short comings would be overcome by using the remote, but you had no way to test it that well in the store. The remote is useless for iPod navigation or navigation or any SD media. I did get a chance to watch many tutorials online on the Alpine receiver 305 which was made for iPod and it has the navigation the way I would prefer it, thought it does lack characters and you have to scroll most titles, this pioneer was able to display a good character set. Oh and speaking of a feature that Alpine has, it has a nice readable clock. The clock on this is small, there is a feature you can turn on to show a nice clock, but you have to turn it on every time, it doesn’t stay on as an option. Even with the radio in off mode, it should show the nice larger clock IMHO, but it doesn’t you have to fight menus again to call this up.
To summarize, much fighting with a poor jog wheel to drill through menus to make common settings to what you want to listen to. They made it simple to change source and volume and next and previous track everything else gets deep in menus that will take usually 6 to 10 seconds to drill through menus to do, this is not safe in a car and the remote which could have assisted in this matter has much less ability. I think if you can do a double din the AVH-P3200 double din touch screen, is sooo much easier to navigate and for not more then $120 more in general, very upgradable and the addition items you get (CD/DVD slot and DVD playback, you wont be trying to convert stuff to Divx, and you can burn your stuff or bring along your DVD’s and you have a bigger screen.
Rating: 2 / 5
#2 by C. Quan on July 2, 2010 - 8:04 pm
Like the other reviewer, I was immediately attracted to this unit because it looks GREAT. If you start doing research and then actually see the packaging with all the features, you figure you HAVE to give it a try. I downloaded the manual from the Pioneer website, and it was a bit confusing. Probably the main thing for me, besides good sound, is the bluetooth. I drive about 70 miles every day, so handsfree phoning is essential.
PROS:
1. Again, the unit looks absolutely SWEET. The faceplate is clean and practically void of buttons except for SRC, HOME, and a return button, but unfortunately this is where some of the drawbacks are due to its outside simplicity. More on that in the CONS.
2. Very nice looking color display and well laid out. Very professional. Very well built, you can tell it’s solid and good quality material.
3. Neat detachable faceplate design. Only part of it comes off, which is actually very convenient, you can stick it in your pocket.
4. For those of you wanting bluetooth, this thing has Parrot bluetooth built in. Parrot is known for excellent bluetooth products. I have had Parrot before, so I can tell you it’s good stuff. I have an LG CF360 and the unit had no problem at all importing the phonebook.
5. It supposedly plays video, but you have to connect a wire to the parking brake to get this feature, for legal purposes, of course. I didn’t try it, but I trust it works well.
CONS:
1. There is definitely a learning curve, but that’s not a big deal.
2. There are no separate bass or treble settings, you have to use the EQ to try to get the sound to your liking. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get it right. The Dual unit I was trying to replace actually blows this Pioneer out of the water with its loudness setting. Then again, the Dual is 17W RMS as opposed to 14W RMS for the Pioneer. DON’T get fooled when you read 50W peak on the box. Please do some research on PEAK vs RMS wattage. You’ll be getting RMS 99.99999% of the time.
3. Due to lack of buttons on the faceplate, you have to go through the menus to get to the presets. Not that big a deal, but it is an inconvenience.
4. Bluetooth pairing was quick and trouble-free. Phonebook access is somewhat cumbersome, and it takes about eight steps just to dial from the phonebook. You can preset about six numbers for “speed dial”, although you still have to get to them through the menus. Note that you CANNOT ENTER ANY NUMBERS FROM THE UNIT if you want to dial manually. You HAVE to enter numbers from the phone. I found that very odd for a $350 unit. Call volume was just so-so.
I don’t use ipods or any device like that, so I can’t say anything about those features unfortunately. At any rate, the unit is going back. For the cons I listed, I figure I shouldn’t be spending the money.
Rating: 3 / 5
#3 by G. Fontaine on July 2, 2010 - 11:02 pm
I recently went fully digital with my home system and have wanted a solution for the car as well, so when I heard Pioneer was releasing their first “mech free” receiver that could accept a variety of digital sources it immediately caught my interest. I also wanted something that looks good and blends in with the car’s interior without screaming “aftermarket” the way some units do. This one seemed to fit the bill in that regard and does look good installed.
One of the first things I noticed experimenting with the different sources is that sound quality is much better using SD or USB drives than an Ipod. I assume this is due to the unit processing the digital data directly as opposed to consuming the analog signal produced by the Ipod’s low grade electronics. I like the fact that the SD slot is completely hidden from view behind the faceplate. For some reason Pioneer limited it to the 2GB size but that is still good for the equivalent of around 10-12 cd’s at a decent quality (I used AAC @ 320kbps). There is no stated size limit to the USB drive so I loaded a 16GB drive to the max to see if the Pioneer could handle it. It took a little over a minute to initialze but I had no trouble browsing or playing any of the content.
This unit also has quite decent tuning capabilities for this price point. I tried the auto-EQ function (microphone must be purchased separately) and got excellent results.
The bluetooth phone works as it should. Nothing special but nothing to complain about either.
Now for my gripes.
As other reviewers have noted, many common tasks require way too many steps with the control wheel and buttons. This is a huge problem and possible safety hazard for a product designed for in-car use.
If Apple can put 160GB on an Ipod, why no onboard storage whatsoever on something like this? Imagine the killer product they could have if they matched the Ipod’s 160GB and provided an easy mechanism to sync with a music library on your computer or Ipod. As is though, this unit meets my immediate needs, but I will likely ditch it when something significantly better comes along.
Rating: 3 / 5
#4 by goaliefight on July 3, 2010 - 12:26 am
I’ve had a number of problems with this stereo. The first problem is the navigation wheel. It’s a neat concept, but it has some flaws. The main problem is that in order to select some items you must click the wheel in the dead center. This is incredibly difficult to do while driving. What happens most often is instead of hitting the button dead on, you end up pushing it in one of the various navigation directions. Depending on what function you are performing, this can be a very frustrating process.
I’ve also had a number of problems when using the SD slot. The unit is incredibly slow at reading the card. I read in the manual that if you have a large folder hierarchy it can lead to this problem. As a workaround, I collapsed the folder hierarchy on the card and placed all of my files in one directory. This allowed the card or read much faster – but I found another major problem: the unit can only read a maximum of 255 files in any folder. I contacted technical support about this problem. They informed me that this is normal operation of the unit. They also told me that the unit only supports a 2GB SD card maximum. 2GB?! This is a big letdown because I had high hopes placing my entire music collection onto one 8GB card. It may read some larger cards, but it is not supported and crashes the unit after a while. I kept getting “DB-ERROR2″ when trying to use cards larger than 2GB.
Other notes:
* The remote control is worthless
* Tuning FM radio stations is incredibly hard using the navigation wheel
* The sound quality when using an iPod via USB is flat
* The user interface is pretty cool
* The Bluetooth function works very well
* Does not allow iPod 2 way control
* The sound quality and power is nice (except when using an iPod as the source via USB)
Final verdict: Do not buy if you are looking for a stereo with support for large SD cards.
Rating: 1 / 5
#5 by Ross Isbrandt on July 3, 2010 - 2:18 am
I purchased the PB200BT and had it installed a week ago.
My first impression was that the 3″ screen was a bonus as you can see all the song information when played off of an MP3 player such as an iPod or all of the tag information off of FM radio that support tagging (Artist, Song Title, Radio Station call letters and frequency). Also it’s convenient to have both the USB and AUX ports on the faceplate (some people would not like clutter on the front but I prefer it for the ability to easily switch devices on the go).
NOTE: The extra iPod sync cable you require if you have an iPod is available many places online for as little as $1-$2.
URL for official cable from Apple:
[...]
Second I liked the fact that if you wish to secure the radio you only need to remove the left third of the faceplate (portion with the wheel and three buttons).
Pros:
-Can watch most videos off of the iPod on the 3″ display (be sure your installer has this feature set up properly before they are done installing!)
-Can read tag information from FM stations which support the feature (if you have an iPod it remembers what songs you like for later iTunes purchase)
-Thanks to Parrot Bluetooth, during incoming calls MP3s & video are paused and radio is muted and resumed / un-mutes when off the call.
-Loudness and equalizer presets present a wide array of sound quality that do not require much tweaking to get that sound you’re looking for.
-SD card bay behind ejectable faceplate area for more MP3 storage or picture viewing
Cons:
-As mentioned, the time is quite difficult to read off the unit as it is in very small letters in the upper right hand corner of the display
-Also as mentioned, if you want to find that exact song you want to play off an iPod you must go to ‘Home’, ‘Source’ ‘List’ ‘Songs’ and scroll with the wheel which can take your attention off the road for a dangerous amount of time. Playlists or all songs on shuffle are the reccomended way to go.
-Remote is next to useless
So unless you are a driver who always needs to find that one song on the fly that you feel like listening to on your iPod, the Parrot bluetooth, 3″ display capable of displaying video and slideshows and detailed music info make this well worth the purchase.
Rating: 4 / 5