Review on JVC KD-BT1 Stereo by Dante Black

I have been using this radio for about 9 months. I bought it for around $250 and it's hard to get full Bluetooth and USB support at that price. However, there are a few things that people should consider before making a purchase. If I had to do it again, I'm not sure I would make the same choice; I would highly recommend you spend a little more money and buy something better. Here's what I don't like about this radio: 1) My #1 complaint: Poor USB support. Instead of serving the music in a directory tree structure (dir), it just takes all the subdirectories and puts them in the root directory. I have a 60GB drive that I can use with it, but anything over a few gigabytes (if that's the case) gets too heavy to sift through and find what you're looking for. JVC claims there are no issues and shows no intention of improving the design and possibly issuing a firmware update, indicating a lack of support. 2) People on the other end get annoyed with the echo that seems to come and go and sometimes it's hard for them to hear me. The microphone is on my dashboard right in front of me. 3) If you use Bluetooth to make a call, the call will not be transferred to the phone when you turn off the car. When you get to your destination, you either have to leave your car running and waste gas to end the call, or you have to hang up and call the person back. However, this may be common to all Bluetooth radios. 4) No break. I find this annoying and cheap, and it's common on many JVC radios. 5) Non-intuitive menu, especially when setting custom equalizers. For example, even if you select user 2, after making changes to it, you must tell him to save it as user 2, otherwise user 1 will be overwritten. I did this many times before figuring out what it did and still did it a few times after that by accident. If you select User 2, any changes you make to User 2 should be saved. This is just common sense. 6) These are not complaints but suggestions from JVC (or any other company) in the hope that these reviews will be followed up. Firstly, instead of a simple dimmer function to set the time, why not build a calendar into the radio and use it to coordinate the automatic dimmer time adjustments over the months to accommodate changing sunrise/sunset times throughout the month. Year. Even if it were adjusted once a month, it would be a significant improvement. As USB sticks can be used with the radio you should also provide a facility to save all settings and custom EQs to a hard drive so that in the event of a power failure the radio can be easily restored to match the user's settings. All in all it's a good radio and if you're on a budget it's a good choice as it offers many features normally only found in more expensive units. I don't want people to think this is a terrible product based on my review because it isn't. I just want people to be fully aware of what I think are the biggest flaws so they can make a more informed decision.