M
mleboeuf
Guest
Hello all, Im a complete noob here. I hope my first post doesnt ramble too badly! I did a fair amount of reading on this forum and many others regarding the Alpine iDA-X100 both before and after I bought one. I thought Id share my observations and issues with the group.
First off, Ive owned the iDA-X100 for a little over four weeks now. The head unit is solid and functional. The overall sound quality isn't on par with the higher end CDA-7894 that was in the car before. This is mostly due to the fact that the wizards of Alpine have relegated the finer audio controls to the IMPRINT module (available at extra cost naturally) which were built into the 7894. Aside from some minor nits such as the volume control and the glare on the LCD Screen, Ive found the unit to be an admirable replacement for my older CD/MP3 player. At the same time I purchased myself a 160MB iPod classic (6th generation).
Installation was clean, all the connections are made into the back of the head unit and the only wire dongle is for the power. Everything else plugs into jacks or sockets. Its a high power unit so your best bet is to run a dedicated line to the battery. I lucked out in that my car came from the factory with a high powered stereo so the fused lines to the factory head unit were AWG12 with a 20A dedicated fuse. The USB Cable attaches to the rear of the head unit as well although it has a screw in thumb screw to keep it attached. The USB lead is long enough to reach to the glove box or center console of most cars but not nearly long enough to reach to the rear seat or trunk of most mid sized US cars. Luckily, the wiring harness was identical to my older CDA-7894 so changing the wiring harness wasnt necessary to upgrade to the iDA-X100. This saved me over an hour of cutting, stripping and applying heat shrink to the speaker and accessory wires. A word of advice, if your car has dash dimmer controls, Id recommend hooking up the illumination lead of the head unit. Having the head unit dim with the rest of the dash lights definitely separates your install from the rest.
Operation with the iPod classic is fairly straight forward, when you connect the USB dock cable provided with the head unit into the iPod, the unit displays an Alpine splash screen and disables the iPod controls. Everything is controlled through the round jogger control and the center select button. There are several different search modes available depending on how you set up the options on your head unit. The manual sorts them out fairly well. It will pay off when your driving if you spend some time with the jogger control while parked so you can find your songs quickly and easily. Otherwise, frustration, cursing and potentially an accident will result. Its not quite as intuitive as the Apple, but not bad. Also pay attention to how Alpine lets you search the folder or several folders by pushing down on the outer ring of the jogger and twisting slightly left or right. This also works on play-lists.
As a side note, you can use a massive hard drive hooked up to an IDE/SATA to USB dongle. As long as the dongle is USB2.0 compatible, the Alpine will recognize the drive as storage. The downside is that the head unit will start playing at the first song on the drive every time and will not remember the song you were playing when you turned the car off. Even if you wire the drive to run while the car is off, the head unit starts from zero every time it searches the drive. USB Thumb drives operate in the same way. This is a major bummer since 1TB drives are available in the US for less than $250. Also, even though the Creative Labs Zen Vision has a docking port, this head unit will not control those MP3 Players unless you enable disk mode on the player. Then the head unit accesses the Zen the same way the basic hard drive works. Again a bummer since the Zen players will handle WMA files as well as WAV and MP3 Most ratings put the WMA format slightly above the AAC format used by the iPod in terms of musicality and tonal quality. Honestly, I cant hear the difference between WAV, WMA and the Apple Lossless compression, but I can hear a marked difference between any MP3 and the above mentioned compressors.
Now for the fun parts. I noticed early on (the first day I drove the car to work) that the iPod classic will randomly stop playing music. The display will stop counting the time on the song and the audio will stop. After several seconds, the audio will resume and everything will be as it should on the display. This happens several times during my commute (70 minutes) and has no apparent pattern or cause. This occurs with iPod Classic software 1.03 as well as 1.1.1 and 1.1.2 The only visible difference between the three versions is that now the iPod backlight turns off after the time out period where as before it would stay on as long as the iPod was connected to the head unit. At first I considered that the hard drive was skipping as the suspension in my car is fairly stiff. I orientated the iPod horizontally, vertically and at 15 degree increments between the two, both face up and face down. Orientation made no change in the frequency of failure. I also ran the head unit and iPod with the car standing still. Again, the failure was present with approximately the same frequency as before. I did have one error free drive the other day and the only physical change I can think of is that it was cold outside (mid 50s) versus the mid 60s during the other drives. It was also overcast and there was no sun shining on the iPod as it sat in the passengers seat. Ive yet to fully test this theory, but I dont have high hopes based on my other observations.
The Alpine manual mentions that iTunes versions higher than 7.4.3.1 are not tested with the head unit. I downgraded my iTunes version to 7.4.3.1 and re-synced my iPod. The problem was still there and with the same frequency. Since there was no difference, I went back to iTunes version 7.6.2.9.
Thinking that the iPod was having problems keeping up with the data stream caused by a massive library ripped using Apple lossless compression, I re-ripped several playlists down to 128kbps MP3, 128kbps AAC, and even WAV encoder with no positive reactions.
Doing some research on the internet, I found this type of problem quite prevalent in the earlier models of the iPod Classic and suspect its a firmware/hardware/software problem yet to be sorted out by Apple. Out of frustration, I went and got the 32GB iPod Touch. This unit runs software version 1.1.4 and does not exhibit the problem that the iPod Classic has. It has run for hours on end without failure, it runs in direct sunlight (hot) and even sitting right under the A/C vent. It also responds much quicker to user input which is understandable given this unit does not employ a hard drive. The down side is that the touch will never hold my media collection in lossless format.
Based on my experience thus far, I would highly recommend this head unit. While its not the cheapest head unit available from Alpine that will allow you to play compressed music and control an iPod, it has some nice features that made it worth the $349.99 here in the USA. I would not recommend using the iPod classic (either the 80GB or 160GB versions) as there seems to be some issues that Apple needs to work out still.
First off, Ive owned the iDA-X100 for a little over four weeks now. The head unit is solid and functional. The overall sound quality isn't on par with the higher end CDA-7894 that was in the car before. This is mostly due to the fact that the wizards of Alpine have relegated the finer audio controls to the IMPRINT module (available at extra cost naturally) which were built into the 7894. Aside from some minor nits such as the volume control and the glare on the LCD Screen, Ive found the unit to be an admirable replacement for my older CD/MP3 player. At the same time I purchased myself a 160MB iPod classic (6th generation).
Installation was clean, all the connections are made into the back of the head unit and the only wire dongle is for the power. Everything else plugs into jacks or sockets. Its a high power unit so your best bet is to run a dedicated line to the battery. I lucked out in that my car came from the factory with a high powered stereo so the fused lines to the factory head unit were AWG12 with a 20A dedicated fuse. The USB Cable attaches to the rear of the head unit as well although it has a screw in thumb screw to keep it attached. The USB lead is long enough to reach to the glove box or center console of most cars but not nearly long enough to reach to the rear seat or trunk of most mid sized US cars. Luckily, the wiring harness was identical to my older CDA-7894 so changing the wiring harness wasnt necessary to upgrade to the iDA-X100. This saved me over an hour of cutting, stripping and applying heat shrink to the speaker and accessory wires. A word of advice, if your car has dash dimmer controls, Id recommend hooking up the illumination lead of the head unit. Having the head unit dim with the rest of the dash lights definitely separates your install from the rest.
Operation with the iPod classic is fairly straight forward, when you connect the USB dock cable provided with the head unit into the iPod, the unit displays an Alpine splash screen and disables the iPod controls. Everything is controlled through the round jogger control and the center select button. There are several different search modes available depending on how you set up the options on your head unit. The manual sorts them out fairly well. It will pay off when your driving if you spend some time with the jogger control while parked so you can find your songs quickly and easily. Otherwise, frustration, cursing and potentially an accident will result. Its not quite as intuitive as the Apple, but not bad. Also pay attention to how Alpine lets you search the folder or several folders by pushing down on the outer ring of the jogger and twisting slightly left or right. This also works on play-lists.
As a side note, you can use a massive hard drive hooked up to an IDE/SATA to USB dongle. As long as the dongle is USB2.0 compatible, the Alpine will recognize the drive as storage. The downside is that the head unit will start playing at the first song on the drive every time and will not remember the song you were playing when you turned the car off. Even if you wire the drive to run while the car is off, the head unit starts from zero every time it searches the drive. USB Thumb drives operate in the same way. This is a major bummer since 1TB drives are available in the US for less than $250. Also, even though the Creative Labs Zen Vision has a docking port, this head unit will not control those MP3 Players unless you enable disk mode on the player. Then the head unit accesses the Zen the same way the basic hard drive works. Again a bummer since the Zen players will handle WMA files as well as WAV and MP3 Most ratings put the WMA format slightly above the AAC format used by the iPod in terms of musicality and tonal quality. Honestly, I cant hear the difference between WAV, WMA and the Apple Lossless compression, but I can hear a marked difference between any MP3 and the above mentioned compressors.
Now for the fun parts. I noticed early on (the first day I drove the car to work) that the iPod classic will randomly stop playing music. The display will stop counting the time on the song and the audio will stop. After several seconds, the audio will resume and everything will be as it should on the display. This happens several times during my commute (70 minutes) and has no apparent pattern or cause. This occurs with iPod Classic software 1.03 as well as 1.1.1 and 1.1.2 The only visible difference between the three versions is that now the iPod backlight turns off after the time out period where as before it would stay on as long as the iPod was connected to the head unit. At first I considered that the hard drive was skipping as the suspension in my car is fairly stiff. I orientated the iPod horizontally, vertically and at 15 degree increments between the two, both face up and face down. Orientation made no change in the frequency of failure. I also ran the head unit and iPod with the car standing still. Again, the failure was present with approximately the same frequency as before. I did have one error free drive the other day and the only physical change I can think of is that it was cold outside (mid 50s) versus the mid 60s during the other drives. It was also overcast and there was no sun shining on the iPod as it sat in the passengers seat. Ive yet to fully test this theory, but I dont have high hopes based on my other observations.
The Alpine manual mentions that iTunes versions higher than 7.4.3.1 are not tested with the head unit. I downgraded my iTunes version to 7.4.3.1 and re-synced my iPod. The problem was still there and with the same frequency. Since there was no difference, I went back to iTunes version 7.6.2.9.
Thinking that the iPod was having problems keeping up with the data stream caused by a massive library ripped using Apple lossless compression, I re-ripped several playlists down to 128kbps MP3, 128kbps AAC, and even WAV encoder with no positive reactions.
Doing some research on the internet, I found this type of problem quite prevalent in the earlier models of the iPod Classic and suspect its a firmware/hardware/software problem yet to be sorted out by Apple. Out of frustration, I went and got the 32GB iPod Touch. This unit runs software version 1.1.4 and does not exhibit the problem that the iPod Classic has. It has run for hours on end without failure, it runs in direct sunlight (hot) and even sitting right under the A/C vent. It also responds much quicker to user input which is understandable given this unit does not employ a hard drive. The down side is that the touch will never hold my media collection in lossless format.
Based on my experience thus far, I would highly recommend this head unit. While its not the cheapest head unit available from Alpine that will allow you to play compressed music and control an iPod, it has some nice features that made it worth the $349.99 here in the USA. I would not recommend using the iPod classic (either the 80GB or 160GB versions) as there seems to be some issues that Apple needs to work out still.