Hi folks ...

I am currently building a new sound system into my car and, as the topic title indicates, I am now a proud owner of a Kenwood KDC-W8534 headunit that supports MP3, AAC and WMA playback.

As for AAC, only LC up to 192 kbps is supported ... the same counts for WMA (I don't use these codecs anyway).

My question is: can anyone here who has any personal experience with newer Kenwood CD/MP3 car headunits tell me about VBR compatibility?

I'm not sure if you can call it a "newer" head unit since it's now many years old, but I have the Kenwood KDC-MPV619 unit which supports mp3 playback. All of my mp3s were encoded with Lame 3.90.3 using --alt-preset standard and they play perfectly on this head unit. Playback is not gapless, which isn't surprising, but even the gap between songs seems very short to me. Short enough that even songs that are supposed to blend together still maintain a fairly smooth transition, in my opinion. I've been very happy with this head unit over the many years I've owned it.

Assuming the mp3 decoding capabilities haven't gone backwards in the newer models, the W8534 should be great for you.

Edit: I forgot one thing. It's not really significant, but I'll add it for the sake of completeness. After seeking within a track, the track time becomes incorrect. The most obvious and extreme example I've seen is with a track that contains about 5 minutes of music, 3 minutes of silence, and then 2 minutes of a "hidden" track. If I seek forward to skip some of the silence, the track time displayed goes up to something on the order of 35 minutes. It seems as though, after seeking, the unit assumes that the size of the first frame it encounters is the size of all the frames in the file, and that throws off the time calculation. I hardly ever seek within a track to begin with, but even when I have, the seeking and subsequent playback worked perfectly - it's just the track time that is displayed incorrectly. This issue is completely inconsequential to me. It may not even be present on the newer models.