JVC’s Mobile Theater

Home Theater isn’t just for the home anymore, car stereo manufacturer’s are adding more and more Home-Theater-like options for your car.  Hopefully these are being used just to entertain passengers on long trips.  Mobile theater and entertainment is perfect for little kids in the back seats and maybe for taking in a movie on a car camping trip to one of those parking lot camp sites.

After really examining the car stereo market lately and looking into who exactly does what in the area of mobile theater I am particularly impressed with many of JVC’s unique offerings.  Expect the imitators to start pouring in soon.

First up are the LCD transflective monitors.  I have only heard of them being up to 7” in size but JVC now has a some that expand to 9” in 16:9 aspect ratio.  This I a giant of an overhead (or headrest) LCD monitor.  The KV-MRD900 is also a fully functional DVD player that mounts into the ceiling of your car to entertain the kids in the back seat.  The KD-AV7010 is an in-dash head unit that provides you with a detachable 7” monitor.  This head unit is a DVD player that can do Dolby Digital and DTS decoding, can read MP3’s from DVDs also which is actually rare in DVD player car stereo head units these days (just because it's a DVD player doesn't mean it can read MP3 from DVD).  Includes a 5 band eq, 96Khz/24-bit audio DAC, 10bit/27Mhz video DAC for sound and vision that rivals anything you can use at home. 

The one I like is the 1DIN model with a tiny 3” LCD TFT monitor built in.  This is another DVD player HU that does Dolby Digital/DTS 5.1, plays MP3s from CD or DVD, also plays VCD from CD.  This little number is also Sirius radio compatible.  The high performance audio dacs are the same in this unit as the one’s from the MRD900, but this is also a head unit with 20Wx4 channels of continuous power and also includes a 7 band eq.

Now, why does anybody need video in their car?  I really don’t know, I can’t imagine watching Lord Of The Rings on a 3” monitor in the seat of an SUV but the ability to route the video to one of those 9” overheads sure has potential for a long trip.  The sound quality of car audio with a center speaker added into the dash is really second to none and can rival anything in the home market these days.  A concert DVD like Iron Maiden’s Rockin in Rio would be cool on a long trip, since it’s music the driver could also get something out of it.  But I doubt my wife, who would share driving duties on long trips, would share my enthusiasm for a Maiden concert.  More likely I’d have to listen to that damned Dora the Explorer theme music to entertain my 2 year old kid.