Kenwood KIV-701 iPod/iPhone Digital Media Receiver

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Price: $205.00    

Product Feature

• 3" widescreen full color TFT display AM/FM/USB receiver
• iPod 1-amp charging support
• Sound excellence DSP

Product Description

Kenwood's KIV-701 digital media receiver offers the functionality and fun of a video receiver, but in a slim size that'll fit in most dashboards. Gone is the CD slot, replaced by a 3" color screen and a user-friendly click-wheel interface. But you'll have plenty of music to play - with an iPod ready USB input, A/V input, and a built-in flash drive, you'll stay entertained no matter how long the drive.

Kenwood KIV-701 iPod/iPhone Digital Media Receiver Review

I purchased the Kenwood KIV-701 to replace an older Kenwood deck that also supported USB devices. The things that attracted me to the KIV-701 / KIV-BT901 were the display (she is a beauty), the ability to show album art on the display, the better USB song navigation (compared to my old Kenwood), and the backup camera option. Why the KIV-701 over the KIV-BT901? The 901 has bluetooth built in for hands free calling, but it doesn't support the A2DP BT profile (streaming audio profile). That means you can't stream music to the 901. I thought that must be a mistake, but searched around on the web to confirm. Apparently the original 901 supported A2DP, but that feature was removed in 2011. A2DP was important to me . The optional BT unit from Kenwood (KCA-BT300) does support A2DP so that is why I went with the KIV-701 and the KCA-BT300 BT adapter.

I like the idea of using a USB flash drive with a car radio...... no moving parts, is cheap, and can leave connected. You could dedicate an iPod to the radio, but unless you have a spare one lying around that seems like a waste of a somewhat pricey device. You do gain a little more search functions if you use an iDevice with the 701 (I tried it with an iPhone4), but the USB function does work quite well as long as you play by the rules and there are a lot of rules. If you are going to connect an iDevice to this radio, it is much more of a no brainer (just need an optional cable). If you are going to use a USB drive, you have more hoops to jump through (discussed below).

Tuner:
No tuner presets, but just hit the right arrow or left arrow buttons to skip to your next preset station (as long as your seek mode is set to "auto2"). I think a lot of people miss that function since I see some reviews saying you need to go into the menu to switch between station presets. There is no need to go into a menu to go between tuner presets if you set it up right (auto2).

Audio:
It sounds good to me. I don't use the internal amplifiers (I use the preamp outs to external amplifiers). Because of that, I set the "Built in AMP" setting to off which the manual says improves the sound quality of the preamp outs.

Album art:
You have a nice display so you might as well display your album art there. Using an iDevice, album art just works since the heavy lifting is done by the iDevice. If you use an USB drive here are a few things to note.

USB album art related only:
Originally a lot of my album art wouldn't show up. I found out a few things to watch for.
1. The embedded album art has to be a JPEG. Under "acceptable album art", the manual lists "JPEG (Max. 500KB)" Some of my album art was embedded as a PNG image (out of iTunes). This will not work. You can use MP3Tag or similar to pull the album art out, then an image program to convert to JPG and then MP3Tag to re-embed the image. There is a batch mode in MP3Tag you can use to make this happen easily with a large amount of files.
2. MP3 only. After I fixed my songs that had PNG album art, I noticed I still had a quite a few songs that wouldn't display album art. Then I noticed the songs that wouldn't show the art were all AAC encoded files. In that same acceptable album art section of the manual, MP3 ID3 V2.3 is listed. There is nothing about album art and AAC. It looks like you can only display album art off USB from a MP3 file. I have two copies of my music (low bit rate and high bit rate) so I took the highest bit rate copy and converted them all to MP3 (I used 192kbps, but the radio supports up to 320kbps).
Jumping through those hoops has almost all of my cover art displaying nicely on the radio. It was a lot of work, but worth it.

USB searching:
Don't even think about just loading up your thumb drive and plugging it in unless you have very little music. Use the Kenwood Music Editor Light (KMEL) (free download from Kenwood). The entire process takes less than a minute. Attach your thumbdrive to a computer. Run KMEL, select your thumbdrive in KMEL, and have KMEL create a data base. The database it makes will let you search by artist, song, genre...... when the thumbdrive is connected to your radio. It uses the tag information. If you don't use KMEL, you don't have as many search options and you will be looking at the files names of the songs instead of the tag data.

USB load times:
Once I got all my album art taken care of, I attached my 32GB thumb drive for my 4000+ song collection (192kbps, MP3, about 22GB) and waited..... and waited. On average it took two minutes and twenty seconds to play. That wasn't just the first time. Every time I turned on the radio it took that long. When I first got the 701, I tried the thumb drive out of my old radio (I had used the non-light version of Kenwood Music Editor that had come with that radio) and I remembered it loading very quickly. My thumbdrive had the same amount of music on it now so why did it take so long to load with the KMEL software doing the database generation?

Back to the manual. The appendix in the manual has a link where you can look at the audio file/structure specifics. [...] for the 701. I was breaking rules. The maximum number of folders was 500. I had 700 just for artist and then many more for the album folders. The non-light version of KME was more of an iTunes program (it didn't just make a data base, but also managed and synced the music over to your thumbdrive). When it synced, it made a folder structure for you and obeyed the rules for that older radio (for that radio it was only 255 songs per folder, but the 701 info is 4096 files per folder). That non-lite KME would make folder 01, 02, 03.... and put 255 files in each folder. So for my 4000+ song collection and the 255 song/folder limitation of that radio, I only had 17 folders. Could my excessive folders be the problem? Yes! Even though the folders support 4096 songs, I put 1000 songs in each folder, erased the previous KMEL files off the thumb drive and had KMEL make the data base again. The 4000+ songs that took 2+ minutes to load before now only took under 10 seconds. Faster would be better, but 10 seconds is reasonable. Ditch your album folders and just put the MP3s into a few folders for fast-ish loading.

Backup camera feature:
I bought a backup camera (not the Kenwood one.... too expensive) that is integrated into a license plate frame. Running the video cable up front as well as the trigger wire (that is connected to the + of your left or right backup light) took a bit of time to do right, but it works great. Whenever you shift into reverse, the radio display switches to the camera view (full screen). I also put a push button near the driver's seat that will let me switch to camera view whenever I like. It is nice seeing right behind you when backing up.

Bluetooth interface:
Since the KCA-BT300 add-on bluetooth module handles the BT feature, this section is more about cooperation between the 701 and KCA-BT300. One cable connects the 701 to the KCA-BT300 then just plug the microphone that came with the 701 into the KCA-BT300. You can select the BT feature several ways. The interface is very seamless (it doesn't feel like you are using an add-on). Both hands free talking and A2DP streaming music work great (no drop outs in A2DP like my old Kenwood radio).

Video:
Playing videos on the 701 wasn't a high priority for me, but since it has that feature I thought I would give it a try. The 701 is even more picky about video from a USB drive than it is about music from a USB drive. It also seemed picky about video from an iDevice. The same web page that lists the music folder and album art requirements has a lot of info about video.
The 701 only supports 10fps for H.264 so that kept me away from H.264. MPEG4 (non H.264) supports up to 30fps and an upper limit of 320x240 resolution. Video bit rate is listed as 640kbps max. It took a few tries with Handbrake (a free very popular video encoder), but I eventually got the video playback working from USB. Most of the Handbrake profiles are for H.264, but you can do standard MPEG4. For the video CODEC (under the video tab), I chose "MPEG-4 (FFmpeg)" and set the bit rate low. Only MP3 audio is listed on the Kenwood media page for audio in the MPEG4 format, but AAC for audio in the video did work (I chose a bit rate of 128kbps). I need to play with the Handbrake settings more, but I can confirm that video encoded with Handbrake can be made to work with the 701.

Youtube user "gerrr" has a video called "How to add videos to Kenwood KIV-BT900 with USB flash drive" that works for the 701. He uses xillisoft video converter and his video is a tutorial. Xillisoft video converter is not free, but the trial version is good for videos up to a few minutes long. The video was easy to follow and the video I encoded with Xillisoft video converter worked fine.

Summary:
The 701 is a great radio. It would be nice if you didn't have to jump through as many hoops to get the media working off USB. I think Kenwood expects most people to just plug an iDevice into it. It was the hoop jumping that kept me from giving it five stars. Kenwood should provide a program that would format all your media to play well with the 701 / 901 (do all the stuff I had to do manually to get it to work off USB well).
I can see why some people that used USB gave it bad reviews, but if you follow the info in the manual you can get everything to work and load fast. This is a great radio that has a lot of audio and display options.

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