PIONEER AVIC-Z1: RAISING THE BAR ON THE ALL-IN-ONE DOUBLE-DIN

摘要

When we heard about Pioneer's AVIC-Z1 we thought it might be too good to be true. The Z1 seemed to do everything except read your mind, It's not that far off though: Just tell it what you want to do and the unit, a little like HAL from Space Odyssey: 2001, asks for information and then fulfills your request. Before we get into any details about the voice recognition feature of the Z1 we'll first cover the different functions of this double-DIN unit. Comparisons to Eclipse's AVN products is unavoidable here. Like its competitor, the Z1 has a music library which allows you to record songs from a CD into the hard drive, about 200 CDs worth of material. You can set it up for auto recording to the entire disc or record manually when you hear a song on a disc that you would like to add individually to the library. This is a terrific feature to have. Once songs are placed in the library they are organized automatically, thanks to Gracenote software that recognizes and labels practically any saleable CD you own. The caveat here is Pioneer's compression method can cause some loss of audio quality, so we don't recommend this feature for songs you like to use for auditioning new high-end speakers you may want to buy to complement the Z1.