We’ve come a long way since the era of cassette tape hiss. From optical media to digital downloads to streaming, the way we’ve listened to music has seriously changed over the past 40 years, and although the prospect of connecting your phone to your retro car is tempting, most modern head units just don’t look right in cars from the decade of new wave and hair metal. Here’s one that does. This is the Pioneer SXT-C10PS, and while it might look straight out of the late 1980s, it’s a fully modern single-DIN head unit with Bluetooth and a USB port.
Yep, behind what looks like the door to a cassette player sits both a 3.5 mm auxiliary input and a 1.5-amp USB 2.0 port. While USB-C would be nice given how pretty much every device now uses it, most of us have plenty of USB-A memory sticks laying around, so there’s something to be said about using existing storage for FLAC files.
Speaking of connections, the Pioneer SXT-C10PS comes with RCA pre-outs for front, rear and subwoofer channels, a decided advantage over the popular Continental TR4512UBA–OR. Should you not wish to run aftermarket amplification, the Pioneer head unit’s internal MOSFET amplifier has each channel is rated at 50 peak watts which should translate to a real 22 watts RMS. Fairly standard stuff.
In addition to a 13-band equalizer, time adjustment to dial in staging, and high-pass and low-pass filters, this radio also offers RGB illumination so you can match the glow of the head unit to your dashboard lighting. Combined with the retro styling, the result is a brand new aftermarket head unit that would look at home inside a Porsche 964, a fox body Mustang, or just about any other car from the mid-to-late 1980s, or even the early 1990s.
Firstly, the SXT-C10PS is aimed at the European market, meaning its actual radio functions work a bit differently to U.S. market radios. For one, you won’t find DAB stations in America, and while European FM stations operate within the same bandwidth as U.S. stations, tuning is often slightly different. While we’ll have to see whether this head unit skips odd frequencies when tuning, there’s a chance it might not be the best radio choice for well, listening to the radio in America. Secondly, there’s the price. I’m seeing these units listed for €399, or about $452 at current conversion rates. That’s about three times what a reasonably high-end modern-looking single-DIN head unit goes for, and that’s before you factor in shipping. On the plus side, since it’s not officially going on sale until October, that’s time to save up.
Finally, it’s not like the SXT-C10PS is without competition. For ’80s aficionados, the Blaupunkt Bremen SQR 46 DAB offers period-correct looks and the cred of a Blaupunkt, but the Pioneer does beat it on specs. This Blaupunkt only features a three-band equalizer, but it does feature an extra USB port. It’s also a little on the pricey end, as you’ll likely be paying more than $500 to get one in America.
If you’re looking for a more bubbly ’90s look, the Blaupunkt Frankfurt RCM 82 DAB is likely more your speed. Aping the design of the original Blaupunkt Frankfurt of 1992, this head unit would look perfect even in early-2000s cars. With a 14-band equalizer, plenty of RCA outputs, and steering wheel control compatibility, it goes blow-for-blow with the Pioneer on specs and falls in the same ballpark when it comes to pricing.
Still, if you can stomach paying more than $450 for a head unit, the Pioneer SXT-C10PS looks like a great option for a number of ’80s and early ’90s cars. Plus, with the car industry having moved to widespread built-in infotainment over the past few years, almost all aftermarket systems in newer cars use the factory head unit coupled with a combination amplifier and DSP, so the market for single-DIN head units is becoming a classic thing. Don’t be surprised if, over the next few years, we see more retro-style radios for sale.
Top graphic image: Pioneer
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I like this and have been thinking about getting a new head unit to replace the hideous-looking aftermarket one that came in my NA Miata. However, that price is pretty steep… as mentioned, ‘normal’ head units are like half that price or less.
Have an 86 VW Cabriolet, and have been looking at the Blaupunkt Bremen, but I think I will need to check out this Pioneer – depending of course upon price. I mean, that is the thing that has kept me from the Bremen – these things are expensive. The crappy 1996 Sony actual cassette single DIN in it still works…
I need one for my ’87 Nova. Which is, currently, running an Aiwa CD player circa ’96.
I had a Blaupunkt (I think Hamburg) in my ’84 Corolla. These HUs give me all the nostalgia feels.
I don’t understand the obsession with USB-C. I must have missed the boat. Every electronic device I’ve bought in the last ten years has come with a USB-A to USB-C cord save for my iPhone SE. I don’t own any wall adapters that natively offer USB-C. I literally had to go out of my way to buy some USB-C headed cords to use in rental cars because the 12V adapter I use in my 13 year old Volvo is USB-A. I get that USB-C charges faster and is invertible, but I don’t buy this notion that USB-A was suddenly deprecated overnight. I think everything should just offer both.
It’s a pretty great standard for the most part. Apart from being reversible, in the right specifications it can deliver vastly more power, data, or both, vs USB-A. My laptop, phone, daughter’s phone, Switch, Xbox controllers, can all use the same compact form-factor cable. You don’t have to have a special cable for one end vs the other – there’s no such thing as a Phone USB-C and a Printer USB-C like there more or less was with USB A & B.
Now, I will definitely accept the argument that A had a lot of shortsighted shortcomings and that B never should have existed, but C is the rectification of that.
It is because you probably have newer things. If you don’t replace your stuff frequently, you become tied to legacy systems/conectors/etc.
USB C is great, delivers lots of power, can deliver video, daisy-chain and so on, but will never replace the joy of plugging a DB25 parallel port conector on the first try in the back of the computer without looking at it..
Don’t have to tell me, I’ve *made* those connectors. Melting solder in the little cups and landing the wires is soooo satisfying, as is a first-try serial plug, of course
DB-25s. Wow. That takes me back. I never had to solder them. I just had to find the correct pin-out for the ethernet to DB-25 connectors I had to make for our particular serial applications. (DB-9s, too) I used to be able to do that in virtual darkness behind a server rack until I turned 45 and then suddenly, I needed light and reading glasses. And then, everything changed again, and serial was no longer a thing, and I had to learn networking. And then, I retired. And none of that matters to me anymore.
And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to take two tries at getting a USB-A connector or thumb drive in on PCs with sideways ones. Does it go this way or the other way. If memory serves, Dell was not always consistent about they oriented them.
But, again, it doesn’t matter to me anymore.
Yes, I understand that it’s better; that bit is obvious. I just don’t understand why the transition was fumbled so badly. I’ve had to go out of my way to purchase USB-C headed cords because nothing I’ve bought has come with such a cord, yet every modern charging interface assumes you already have one. I don’t own a single USB-C charging adapter at home, but get in a rental car or airplane and suddenly it’s USB-C only.
There is also the problem of cords still having different specs where some can handle high speed data transfer and others can barely throughput anything at all. I plugged in my external DAC with a crappy little USB-A to C that I got with some cheap headphones and my PC didn’t even detect it. Luckily IKEA’s USB-A to C is built to a higher standard. And before you ask, my motherboard from 2019 doesn’t have any USB-C ports. Because why would it?
USB-C is nice because it plugs in the right way the first time, you don’t have to try 3 times to get it in. But the connectors seem more fragile if you’re plugging in & out a lot (e.g. to charge). The higher data rate is nice for bulk data (thumb & hard drives), but cheap cables are often crap. The things USB-A was designed for (mice & keyboards) it works just fine. B had faster data than A.
I guess it depends on the make, but I’ve put Blaupunkt’s retro offerings in several of my classic Porsches and Saab’s and think they look much better than this Sony. I just wish they offered them with a CD player. They’re also about $500. This looks like the average 80s aftermarket crap I’m removing when I upgrade the stereo on a vintage car.
I agree on the option for CD or tape. I purchased a JVC head unit from Best Buy wondering why it was $15 less than I had seen online. When I looked carefully over the box I realized it didn’t have a CD player, it hadn’t occurred to me that someone would make a single din head unit without a CD player. I immediately returned it and ordered the correct version online as apparently Best Buy didn’t have the CD version in store.
I have a big enough collection of tapes that I’d be happy to have a modern tape head unit that doesn’t have worn out belts and threatens to heat the tape like the 70s vintage Pioneer deck I have in the Austin Healey.
Tapes & CDs are sooo 2000 :->
Still retro though not as much, but with a cd player:
https://a.co/d/frjRXPK
I like this but not at this price.
But what I would really want is a unit using cassette-shaped USB drives. I miss foraging in the glovebox for a cassette and putting it blindly in the unit.
One thing I wish they had was a way to actually hide the USB flash drive. You can hide the SD cards, but the USB flash drives still stick out. And this is important to me because your car will clear the cache every once in a while for various reasons, and then it has to index everything again. Without the index it won’t do random play from folder. If you’re insane like me and have something close to twelve thousand songs, that can take hours with the read speed of SDHC UHS-I or SDXC if they’re UHS-II, and almost nobody supports SDXC EX which is Express because the licensing costs aren’t worth it, and any SDXC EX card can be run in backwards compatibility mode as just an SDXC UHS-II card anyways. So you’re stuck with an 150MB/s read speed. I’m not even including SDXC UHS-III because the only place you find that is high end camera equipment where the SD cards are like $75 each and have ridiculous sizes like 2TB.
Meanwhile USB 3.0 is cheap at this point to include, and you get 625MB/s at maximum, with USB 3.1 and beyond pushing that up to 1GB/s. Really fast.
I don’t want to babysit my car for two hours waiting for it to load all of my music.
The Continental VDO radio is like $130.
Right? Where is that? The author should add that radio to the article. I just put one in my Range Rover. Looks the business. Range Rover amp is dead tho. Just make sure you have a line level signal or a work around. I’ll get the Blaupunkt for my e24 Alpina for the looks. The VDO Continental is cheap. Looks OEM because it is.
Tuner specs will help make the choice.
Pioneer had its Supertuner back in the day that was pretty good. Of course, too much tuner sensitivity works against you, as well – it’ll keep trying to lock onto something distant when you want to hear the local station. (The LO/DX button helps).
Anyway – this is my favorite form factor, because who needs more? (And I had a Blaupunkt Aspen for years across several Volvos)
You missed Retrosound’s offerings completely. Their Grand Prix model is a near-twin to the 80s/90s Becker units that Mercedes Benz cars rocked, except with all the modern tech. I installed one in my Benz, great sound and a lower price point than this new Pioneer.
Waiting for Alpine to jump on the bandwagon. Those were the head units to have in the 80’s. That green glow from an Alpine would be peak 80s.
I kept mine. 🙂 Amps too.
Great.
Just need to have them actually play CDS as well, and they’re perfect.
Dig it, especially with the bluetooth. Love using the cassette door to hide the aux inputs, though it would be way better if you could jam a whole memory stick in there and close the door.
Yeah, those ultra small thumb drives stick out less than 1/4 inch. Wouldn’t take much engineering to recess the ports that much behind the door.
Eh, no dolphin animation, pass.
That was more 90s ->00. Give them a few more years and the dolphins will be back I’m sure.
That’d be easily an extra $200 though.
Brings me back to the 90s. Parking my car and walking to my locker with my Kenwood cassette pull-out head unit straight 1995 baller status.
IIRC by ’95 (my senior year of HS), detachable faceplates had come around as well. Walking into class and setting your JVC faceplate case and your pager on the desk…king of the world, I tell you.
It is very pretty, but not 4X as pretty as the Continental single DIN.
I need one of these for my CRX
Upon reflection if this can be designed to work with wireless speakers that can be used to replace old speakers and not have to pay someone to rewire the system and replace the speakers it is cheaper. I was quoted over $500 to replace speakers and run new wires, imagine blu tooth
You really don’t want Bluetooth for something like this. Even headphones can’t keep a connection over Bluetooth to a phone two feet away in an open field, let alone five separate speakers running to a bodged together transceiver trapped inside a giant Faraday cage.
My headset will stay connected to my phone in the cab of my semi, even when I am at the back of my 53 ft trl
You’ve had better experiences than me. Every time I’ve used Bluetooth after like, 2004 it’s either refused to pair, paired and then blocked the connection so the receiving device can’t work, has refused to be unpaired after the previous thing happened because the connection’s still blocked, paired only partially (this is a problem with wireless headphones where each driver is counted as a separate device, especially earbuds), gone into an authentication loop that froze the parent device, paired to something completely fucking random (I was speaking through somebody else’s car instead of my own headset one time [albeit this was like fifteen years ago]), or the connection keeps dropping so that the parent and child device keep pairing over and over again, interrupting whatever it is I was doing.
I had better experiences with infrared of all things. INFRARED!
I am no idiot when it comes to electronics. I’ve repaired everything from toasters to routers, including microsoldering components to the board. I dig in at the hardware driver level sometimes to fix weird edge cases in software I use. But Bluetooth’s just such an opaque and hands-off thing that even though I know what’s wrong I can’t get inside to fix it.
Something about you Bluetooth doesn’t like and refuses to work for you. I can understand. I have the same problem with Apple computers.
Audiovox and Kraco will need to step up their respective games.
Sparkomatic, too
Frankly the display does not look period correct. They have the original layout use it as a faceplate otherwise looks like cheap Chinese junk
I don’t understand how they can justify the price. That continental unit all the 80s and 90s bmw and Mercedes guys use is like $100 to $150 depending on who has it. You can get a retro sounds unit for $250 direct and often cheaper though retailers. DAB chip can’t be that much they are used more then the hd radio chips and are generally found in in cheaper devices in Europe too. Plus all the Chinese stuff and SDR have dab.
Pioneer should’ve kept that logo. They made a mistake by changing it.
Also, all OEM radios should be single or double DIN
Agreed, knock it off with that 1.5 DIN bullshit
That last Pioneer shot, with green-lit buttons, looks a lot like the one I had installed in my 1989 Plymouth Horizon.
Heh, single DIN. So you can put your 80s-aesthetic HU in your actual 90s car 🙂
(for the record, I’m an advocate for something like a federally mandated Double DIN in the spirit of antitrust)
This x1000
Hey, just remind Orange Julius that Double DIN starts with “double D” and he’ll mandate it.