What do you get when you design products and listen to customer feedback for many years? You get the experience and knowledge that allow you to create new products that stand out from the crowd because of their elegance, excellence, and ergonomics. The new DXZ945MP deck from Clarion is just such a product.
The first thing you notice about this deck is that there are very few buttons and knobs (one knob and five buttons to be exact). This is made possible by the use of touchscreen technology for navigation and selections. The display is deeply recessed with a rounded silver trim ring that doubles as a guide for your fingers when using the touchscreen. Each of the five touch zones is surrounded by a semi-circle in the trim ring, making them easy to find without looking. The faceplate is motorized and removable, and the CD slot lives behind it. Also behind the faceplate is a blinking LED (you can turn it off if you want). Another security feature called CODEMATIC can be enabled, requiring that you press the touch zones in a user-defined sequence before the deck will operate.
The LCD display itself (dubbed Optimedia by Clarion) consists of a sixteen layer matrix of 320 x 64 pixels. The layers provide sixteen levels of brightness for each pixel, giving the images a unique quality not normally seen in LCD displays. Adjustments for contrast and brightness along with a dimming feature that kicks in when it's dark (or when you turn on the headlights, your choice) give you a highly visible display in all lighting conditions. The multiple layers also make it possible to detect a finger sliding to the left or to the right across the display with great accuracy, and the unit makes heavy use of this for scrolling through menus and selections. It turns out to be extremely intuitive and easy to use, after the initial few seconds of getting used to it. And if you don't find it as easy to use as I did, you can switch to a "simple mode" that is more like the traditional touchscreen that responds like a pair of up/down buttons. This concept of simple vs. "pro" operation appears in several functions of the deck, and is a welcome idea that allows you to decide how complex and detailed the operation will be.
Clarion's AC-Processor III is an impressive set of functions for control of the audio after it leaves its source and before it reaches your speakers. There is a Dolby Pro Logic II decoder that retrieves 5.1 surround sound from encoded stereo recordings, and creates 5.1 surround from normal stereo sources. The Position menu gives you various delay settings to provide the best sound at each listening position in the vehicle. You can use the basic presets, or switch over to the mode that allows you to enter the delay for each speaker yourself and save up to five custom alignments. A function called VSE (Virtual Space Enhancer) compensates for the small size and parallel surfaces inside the vehicle; this feature also has basic presets and custom user presets you can set yourself. Finally, an internal three-band parametric equalizer gives you fine control of the frequency response. Once again there are factory presets and user-customizable memories for the equalizer, or you can even disable it by switching to a simple set of Bass and Treble controls. Each of the bands can be set to any of the ISO 1/3 octave center frequencies (the same center frequencies that you see on real time analyzers), with 12dB of gain in 1dB increments, and five different "Q" settings (width of the filter). All of these audio adjustments are saved separately for each source.