Made Entertaiment on Your Car

Impressed by the number of features in the VR500CS-BT for the price and I previous owned an older Virtual Reality Sound Labs headunit, I decided to to buy the VR500CS-BT.

I returned it about 2 weeks later.

The biggest problem and the main reason for the return is that the unit would sometimes play only the first half of a song and then just jump to the next song. This occurred with music on an _SD_ card. It did this randomly once every 10-15 songs. This was truly random in that going back to the cut short song would play just fine the 2nd time through. Extremely annoying when your favorite song on the album gets cut short.

The inability to play complete songs on SD cards is simply unacceptable and is the main reason for the 1 star rating.

Pros:

-Supports SD (few big brand car stereos do this in the low-mid price range).

-Has numeric keypad for dialing (no annoying “turn the knob” to select EACH digit of the phone number)

-Bluetooth phone calls worked great

-Integrated microphone (no snaking mic wires through the dash)

-Supports RDS info from radio stations

Meh:

-Overall the sound is fine but not great. You get the sound quality you paid for.

-Supports streaming music over Bluetooth via AVRCP (good) but sometimes the audio sounds flat or over-compressed (bleh). Not positive of the root cause, but I’m more inclined to blame the wireless-ness of the connection rather the unit itself.

-The screen is not very well polished (as also noted on other review sites). In bright light, a lot of fine horizontal etched in the surface are visible. However, these are not noticable at night or when shaded.

Cons:

-Randomly cuts a song short about every 10-15 songs.

-Unresponsive technical support; never got a reply through email.

-When starting the car, sometimes playback starts back at the first song in the collection (instead of where it left off). This is a royal pain when you have 2GBs of songs to jump through.

-Only displays filenames for WMA music files (no artist, no title, no album info displayed though these do work for MP3s).

-Would benefit from a rotary knob

Most of my testing was with WMA files on an 2GB SD card. This is the same SD card and song files successfully used in an older VR3 car stereo (VRCD500-SDU). Also, other rating sites had questions of whether reviewers were properly attaching the 12V “memory” yellow wire. I triple checked to be absolutely sure it was wired correctly (and the previous radio had no such issues).
Rating: 1 / 5

I bought this stereo for my daughter’s car. I installed it as a novice stereo installer (if you are the least bit technical you can install it yourself). It comes with the wiring kit.

She has been using it for about 2 months now and she loves it. So much in fact, that I had to go buy one as well.

Here is the run down:

The SD card slot is located behind the radio face, which is great cause you can pop it in, put the face on it and forget about it. The CD slot is behind as well. The USB recognition is great. You can have whatever files you want on your USB device and it will sort and pull only sound files. It also keeps memory of where you left off, so you don’t have to search your song again when you turn your car on and off (the USB or SD must remain in the slot otherwise it will reset). Auxilary is always nice, nothing new there. The Bluetooth works flawlessly. You leave it disconnects you come within range it connects. I love the dialing pad on the stereo and remote. I didn’t think I would use it as much as I do, but the convinience of never having to touch your phone is fantastic. The built-in microphone on the stereo picks up your voice great. The music from the bluetooth on your phone is great. Fully manageable from the stereo and remote. One minor flaw that I found is that when you turn your car off and then return it resets the volume to a low level. I’ll have to check to see if there is a setting in there you can change, I’m still learning all the functions. The display is nice and big so you can see what’s playing. The radio picks up great and the response time on the data received from the radio station (i.e. song name, band) is very fast. This just stood out to me because on my old radio it would take forever. I like this feature cause that is how I know the song names if I like them. Then I just go shop ‘em. Anyway that about covers it.
Rating: 5 / 5

I would call this unit the trailer house of car stereos, It’s inexpensive, but there is very little quality. It works great as an amplifier for the radio reciever in my MP3 player, but it’s reciever can’t pick up the same power signal that a tiny digital reciever without an external antenna does. It’s USB power buss can’t handle anything larger than the smallest Flash drive, and the bluetooth sound quality is so poor that it’s functionally useless (granted it’s in an old honda civic with horrible acoustics, but my last bluetooth device worked just fine. In summary, if your after an amplifier for an auxillary input, it works great. If your looking for a radio reciever or bluetooth device, your getting what you pay for. I’m not sending it back, but I certianly wouldn’t buy it again.
Rating: 2 / 5