Car Audio Centre News

Panasonic greatness the all new CQ-VD5005

Panasonic’s Value for Money ethos is amazing. You can see it operating up close when you check out what a £100 higher price tag gets you for their posher 7005 deck. It looks very similar in that it too is a single-DIN DVD deck with a sexy 7 inch touch screen. This 5005 is a one-er cheaper but you lose 5dB of dynamic range and signal to noise ratio on CD playback, although you really would be hard put to hear that with any background sound at all. You lose all those surround sound things like extra centre channel outputs and dts and SRS stuff although it’ll read Dolby Digital and down mix it to stereo. There is no digital output for feeding to a decoder. You don’t get the time alignment or the seven band EQ but you do get the three band version of their SQ system and DivX certification means that the web’s favourite movie format is readable on your deck. This is a cherry back to you as the more expensive machine does not have this. The LCD TV screen panel is the same with the same pixel count, so the resolution and picture will be the same. As car screens seem to have a rule to show adult entertainment, this is perfectly on-genre.

The looks are very smart but instead of Piano Black it is matt black. (Did you know that the 7005 is the only headunit I have ever seen that comes with a tiny wee polishing cloth to keep the shiny front nice and well, shiny?) It has an extra cool feature over the posher deck, too which is that front plughole. This is not just for audio but also can carry composite video and even comes with a microjack tip/ring/ring/sleeve plug that ends in the red/white/yellow female RCAs of an A/V input. Thus, it has the two AV inputs, including the one around the back.

Whereas the posher deck is clearly aimed at the cinephile who wants surround sound and maybe needs the two-zone thing for their family, (and has somewhere safe to park it) this deck is more about the younger user, I reckon. More likely to want to fling MP3 about but not bothered about WMA. Keen on flicks but wants to be able to play discs of downloaded stuff from the web. Absolutely has to have a removable bit as ‘Code’ just won’t do for them. This answers all those needs and doesn’t answer a bunch of questions that it has to be said, for all my own personal love of surround sound (I have a load of music-only dts CDs by Sting and others) just are not asked by many if not most would-be in car DVD owners.

As to performance, I played the onboard amplifier output via the fabulously costly and lovely Morel Supremo speakers and found the sound to be clean and detailed with a crisp top end that the superfast HF drivers love. The best track was the Pink Panther take off on Boom Tube a bass CD with TV and movie themes remade with heavy bass. It is well produced and also has small tingly triangles all over the start, that are a real revealer of high frequency performance. I also played that odd wobbly Gumball DVD given away with Fast Car just recently and found that too, crisp and well defined with no hint of ‘cheapie vision’ that you get on some lesser priced DVD screen playing decks. The GUI (graphic user interface) is not too flash which makes it simple to use. It is a worthy item of real top Japanese quality and if you don’t want to pay for all the extra whistles of the top 7005 unit and you just love that DivX format but know you want a Top Brand, this is the machine you wan