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One small step for Panasonic, a giant leap for car audio fanatics! The Panasonic MXE CQ-C9800U kicks in-dash receivers into the 21st century with its impressive Class-T™ power section.

Power wars
The latest and the greatest! The glorious nature of capitalism dictates that manufacturers of car audio/video equipment engage in an ever-escalating game of electronic one-upmanship. What a blessing for us consumers! If you have any doubt about that, just compare today's $200 in-dash CD receiver to a $200 model made just five years ago. You'll find that today's receiver delivers more power, includes more soundshaping features, boasts cooler cosmetics, and offers more options for system expansion than ever before.

For some time now, in-dash receivers have been powered by analog integrated circuit (IC) amplifiers, a Class AB design well-suited to the confined space behind a car dash, but limited by its nature to power output somewhere in the neighborhood of 18-20 watts RMS per channel. In 2004, Panasonic made a quantum leap with the introduction of the MXE Series CQ-C9800U, an in-dash CD receiver with a built-in "Performance Digital" amplifier that cranks out an unheard-of 60 watts RMS per channel. To put that in perspective, Alpine's impressive V-Drive, the former power champ, combined a MOSFET power chip with an outboard voltage booster to produce an honest 26 watts per channel.

How did Panasonic manage such a remarkable increase in power? Is it all smoke and mirrors, or does the Performance Digital amp really provide that much usable power? And, most important, does it actually sound good? My CrutchfieldAdvisor mission: to install the CQ-C9800U in my Cherokee, play with it for a week, and provide some answers to these questions.

Tripath develops a new amplifier design
The story begins with a small company called Tripath, founded in 1995 in Santa Clara, California, by Dr. Adya Tripathi. Tripath successfully developed a Class-T™ digital audio amplifier design that delivered the power of a traditional amp design, while using much less space and generating less heat — and at a significantly lower cost. The Tripath amp has already been used in a variety of home theater products and Blaupunkt incorporated it into its PA Series amplifiers (released in 2002), but Panasonic is the first to build an in-dash receiver around the Tripath design.

And so the experiment began — I removed the Pioneer DEH-3400 CD receiver from my dash and installed the Panasonic CQ-C9800U. I've lived with the Pioneer for 2 years now, and I love the unit for its simplicity, its excellent AM/FM tuner, and its impressive built-in power. My 10" subwoofer is powered by a 200-watt Rockford Fosgate amplifier, and the Pioneer is able to drive my Infinity Reference components (in front) and Kicker midrange speakers (in back) with enough authority to complement the low frequencies perfectly. Would the Panasonic be up to the sonic challenge?

Give me more power, Scotty!
First impression of the CQ-C9800U: Wow, what a cool-looking machine! The silver face, the large display, and the simple control panel all combine to say "I really don't need to impress you with a bunch of flash, because once you turn me on, you will be mine!" I pressed the CD button, and the face motored down to reveal the CD slot. I picked Toots and the Maytals' new disc True Love to audition the Panasonic. It's a great recording that challenges any system on two counts: 1) it contains extremely heavy bass content, and 2) Toots Hibbert's powerful voice will carve holes in your ear drums if it's not amplified cleanly. I set the EQ to the "Flat" setting, and brought up the Panasonic to a moderate volume level.

Big sound from a little chip — the Tripath Class-T™ amplifier takes up less space, delivers more power, and generates less heat than traditional amp designs.

Immediately, I noticed a difference in the sound of my system. Specifically, I heard more authority in the upper bass/lower midrange area and more overall brightness, even though the equalization was set flat (just as it usually is on my Pioneer).Interesting. In order to adjust the overall tone on the Panasonic, you have two choices: Dynamic Control (which emphasizes bass and/or treble without "compromising the sound in the midrange") or SQ9 (which combines a 9-band semi-parametric EQ with 6 adjustable preset curves). I accessed the SQ9 menu, and encountered the first stumbling block in my CQ-C9800U experience.

Setting up the receiver
I take pride in my ability to find my way around a receiver without having to crack open the manual, but not this time around. Panasonic assumes (and rightly so) that anyone spending this much money (Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price = $500) on a CD receiver won't mind doing a little research in order to operate the machine. The controls are not intuitively arranged by any stretch of the imagination, but once you grasp the system, it's fairly easy to make adjustments. Each EQ curve can be adjusted at 9 different frequency bands, and each individual band can be set to any one of twelve different center frequencies. The "Flat" EQ curve cannot be altered, but you can adjust the other five preset curves to fit your needs. I called up the "Rock" curve, adjusted it to my liking, and stored it away.

Now that the receiver sounded great through my system at a moderate level, I jacked it way up to see how the built-in amp would react. I kept turning it up......and turning it up.......and turning it up, waiting for the onset of distortion, until I finally cried "Uncle!" I couldn't make it break up, and that's a remarkable thing from an amplifier that's small enough to be housed in a receiver chassis. I have no testing equipment available, but I certainly can believe that the CQ-C9800U is putting out 60 watts RMS per channel as claimed. [Turns out that when the CEA-2006 power rating standard is applied to this unit, the actual RMS wattage is 31 watt RMS. -Editor] Now, the important question — how does it sound?

Not your father's CD receiver! The CQ-C9800U combines a futuristic (yet simple) look with cutting-edge graphics.

The frosting on the cake
I picked five CDs that sound particularly good on my Pioneer — Rage Against The Machine's Live at the Grand Olympic Auditorium, Toots and the Maytals' True Love, Aimee Mann's Lost In Space, The Zombies' Odyssey and Oracle, and Buddy Guy's Heavy Love — for testing out the Panasonic. After a couple of hours of listening, I became a Performance Digital believer. The stereo spread was noticeably more pronounced, and I kept hearing little details popping out (reverb on a snare drum, vocalist's lips smacking, amplifier buzz) that I wasn't accustomed to hearing, making the recordings seem more lifelike. And it wasn't that the mix was being reproduced inaccurately by the Tripath amplifier. On the contrary, I was hearing all the information on the CD reproduced pretty damn close to perfection, just like you'd hear on a high-dollar home stereo system.

At this point, I'm thinking that the CQ-C9800U is the best-sounding in-dash receiver I've ever heard, but sometimes I get a little too excited about new technologies. A second opinion is always a good thing, so I asked a friend (who's a classical music fanatic and owner of an extremely discriminating set of ears) to check out the receiver. He spent a half hour playing his favorite test discs, then confirmed my suspicions. He found the internal amplifier in the CQ-C9800 to be amazingly clean, exceptionally accurate, and sonically superior.

So, you've spent in the neighborhood of $500 and you've got an excellent, built-in 4-channel amplifier. What else does this receiver offer?

Exceptional soundshaping ability: As you wander through the menu, you'll find subwoofer level control, low-pass and high-pass filters, and position settings (time alignment to optimize the stereo image for different seats in the vehicle). On most other receivers, I tend to revert to "Flat" after experimenting with the EQ because other settings just sound unnatural to me. But I found that SQ9 offers truly usable, very natural-sounding equalization adjustment. If you prefer the "Flat" setting, Dynamic Control allows you to spice up (but not attenuate) the lows and the highs to taste. I consider the bass/treble boost found in many receivers to be unusable, but the Dynamic Control feature used in moderation sounded really good, even at higher levels. Another excellent feature — you can shut off all mids and highs from the rear speaker outputs, and use those two channels of the internal amp to drive a pair of small subs.

This simple little remote helps you navigate quickly through your music folders and files.

Totally rockin' display: You can choose between still images and moving graphics for the screensaver on the display. You can also access images from a Panasonic site or download your own images as screensavers on the display. And you'll be knocked out the first time you drive at night when the display lights up and the blue glow frames the receiver.

MP3/WMA playback: The receiver will play CD-Rs and CD-RWs loaded with MP3 and WMA music files — a nice feature if you're a long distance driver or prefer not to haul your CDs around town on the floor of your vehicle. You need to use the included remote for direct folder or file access.

Excellent AM/FM reception: The CQ-C9800U converts incoming AM and FM signals to the digital domain for processing — a continuation of the Performance Digital design. My Pioneer has a fantastic tuner, so I was interested to see how the Panasonic's reception would stack up. Here's what I found: the Panasonic does not pick up distant stations as well as the Pioneer, but local stations sounded slightly better to me on the CQ-C9800U. Even though the FM frequency response specs are identical for both units, I heard more stereo separation and slightly extended frequency response on the Panasonic — possibly a result of the amplifier, but still noticeable to my ears.

As the face motors out, the CD slot is revealed in the eerie blue glow!

Flaws in fine leather
The CQ-C9800U is not perfect — after driving around for a few days with this receiver, I noticed a few flaws. As cool as the display looks at night, it can be very difficult to read system info in bright sunlight as the light reflects off the face. So, if you have to make an adjustment to the sound, you may have to pull off the road at times to see exactly where you are in the menu. Believe it or not, I missed my bass and treble controls — there's no way (that I could find, anyway) to make a quick adjustment for an overly bright or thin-sounding CD.

Also, the lag time for making adjustments is way too short. For instance, you might punch through the menu to make an adjustment to "Subwoofer Level." But, by the time you've determined that you need to turn the sub up, the display has gone back to the screensaver and you have to go all the way through the menu again. Irritating. Bottom line — the CQ-C9800U isn't particularly user-friendly. It offers an awesome array of tools to make your listening experience as close to perfect as possible, but I found myself constantly resorting to the manual to remember how to make adjustments.

These are the kind of flaws that I'd be happy to live with, though. Look at it this way — to get the kind of power we're talking about here, you'd have to spend a couple of hundred bucks on an external 4-channel amp (plus installation costs). That makes this receiver's relatively high price tag suddenly seem like a very good deal. Panasonic's CQ-C9800U is an extremely sophisticated CD receiver with the power and sonic control to make your music breathe fire. I enjoyed every minute of my week with this machine. And guess what — I'm never giving it back!


Charlie Pastorfield writes about car A/V gear for Crutchfield and prays every day for the Boston Red Sox.