Alpine Head Unit and iPod Adapter Review

Surprising to go so far, and not upgrade the speakers

When the iPod is connect, it turns off fucntion from the unit right? (Like if you had it in the Mini iPod setup.)

In comparison to the H/K system, just a headunit upgrade can’t really compare since it is also a speaker upgrade. Definetley a nice iPod setup though.

Gianni,

I believe you can’t which is why I went with the Ice Link. The display on my iPod is fine, to see which track is playing.

The Griffin IS terrible, but obviously FM transmission is going to be limited no matter what you go with…

That being said, in a pinch, I can recommend the XtremeMac AirPlay… very simple and very effective for what it does. Nice too that you don’t have to install any special software on the iPod to use it.

XtremeMac AirPlay

My 2 cents on alpine and stereo upgrade:

I went (somewhat) wild and here’s what I have:

Alpine CDA-9855 (same one) with Sirius radio adapter; Rockford Fosgate amp, 4 channel (forgot model); Focal 6.5″ Polyglass components front; Alpine 5×7 (forgot model) rear; Infinity basslink sub. It’s about $1000 give or take – no iPod / iPod adapter (yet).

Installation was a bitch. All those custom mounting plates for front/rear speakers, plenty of wires to pull, etc.

While I used to love Alpines this one is not so good. My experience is mainly with Sirius radio, so judge accordingly. I have this setup for about half a year.

Problem No 1. That glide touch sucks, because you can’t really tell which button you’re pressing while driving – it’s OK when you not moving, but driving is hard. It only has little raised dots to tell which one you’re pressing, same ones you have on phone keypads, etc. More so, driving in a MINI over potholes makes it even harder, because your finger slips from that bar. And stupid thing they did is that whole bar is like a big button. If your finger not on that white strip while pressing it, it presses “function”, which switches modes on display. More on that later.

Problem No. 2: to switch preset on radio, you have to press glide touchbar twice. Yes, twice. First time to “activate” glide touch bar and show 1-6 presets, and then actually change it. “Activation” goes off in about 10 secs, so practically you have to press twice every time. So let’s say you’re trying to switch from Ch 5 to Ch 4. Accidentally your finger slips from white strip (pothole or something), and you press whole bar. It switches to “source” view. Since you have to press twice, you press it again. Of course you don’t see what it’s doing, so you end up switching source to FM radio, or CD or what-not. Then you do have to look down and see it’s in completely wrong place. SUCKS!

Problem No. 3: very nice 2-line display, called “Biolite” or something. Supposedly is much brighter than regular displays, blah-blah-blah. Well it might be brighter, but the clear plastic window is very reflective and rounded, so you do get a lot of glare on that plastic, rendering whole display hard to see.

Problem No. 4: Getting info from Sirius like artist / song sucks also. First, info shows up in about 5-7 secs. Song starts, you wait this much, you get the name. On top of that ,In all the configuration you have, you can’t config the stupid display not to scroll the info – only thing you can do is configure to scroll once or all the time. Well the problem is that Alpine’s Sirius implementation doesn’t get all the info from satellite, I believe it’s about 10-15 characters, so everything after that gets cut out. It’s info 1-2 characters too short for display, meaning the display could fit more. So there’s no logical reason to scroll,because there’s no mo info, but it does it anyway. Really annoying – first the song starts, you want to know who’s playing, can’t see it, wait 5-7 secs. Then as soon as info comes up, in about 1 sec artist info starts scrolling, disappears for about 2 secs, comes back. Then the song info. So basically you don’t have artist/song info for about 20 secs to glance over and see who’s playing. It’s even worse if you’re jumping channels trying to see what’s playing, it’s simply takes too long – you switch preset by double-clicking the bar (can’t do it too fast either), then you get the song info, decide not to listen, then double-click on bar again. So on, so forth.

All-in-all, setup is good, I like the sound, although I heard better – something’s not right but I can’t put my finger on it. This head unit model is compatible with “OEM remote”, which supposedly will enable steering wheel controls. I’m not sure if it’s out yet.

Any questions, drop me an email or post here.

Morris

The link to the iTrip is broken. Give this link a shot:

http://www.griffintechnology.com/products/itrip/

I have an iTrip and several of Griffin Technologies products and they have always worked great for me. Obviously you are dealing with FM quality but i currently dont have the option of a interface so the iTrip (i also use the RoadTrip which is the same but with a charging base and transmitter) is great until i can get a plug in interface

Thanks for the comments.

I can’t speak to the times it takes for the Sirius display to show up, as I have XM, and it’s only a couple of seconds.

Yes, you have to push the button twice to call up a station preset, but it’s not THAT big a deal. Hey, we have to open the door handle twice to get out of the car. How much more difficult is it?

Why didn’t I upgrade the speakers? Because after adding in a good head unit and great amplifier, realistically, they didn’t need to be upgraded. Throwing good power and a clean source unit behind good speakers will always make them perform like great ones.

You can add in MFSW functionality through a IR blaster type piece, but it was something that honestly, I didn’t even care for. You get volume up and down, and station preset/CD track up and down. Not worth it to me, though for some it might be. If I want that, I’ll use the remote control that came with the Alpine deck.

Feel free to email me if you want to see photos:

Axtell2k3@yahoo.com

As far as if I like it or not?

I love it. I have had countless stereo systems, and this is by far my favorite. Not only (as was mentioned) can you customize the head unit’s buttons to exactly match the amber illumination of the dash, but to have CD, XM, and Ipod control all through one unit is amazing. I was about to add in the Alpine MP3 CD changer, but figured that was overkill :)

The sound quality is great. I am not sure why the above poster had such a difficult time with installation (maybe it was replacing the speakers…I don’t know), but replacing the head unit, adding in the XM and 4 channel amplifier was about a 4 hour installation. Having the battery in the trunk made the amp installation very quick.

As far as the MFSW control, even if I had access to a hard-wired type control, I probably wouldn’t have done it just for the fact that the cost to have volume control and track/station up and down. To each their own.

As far as comparison to the HK system, I’ve never heard it, but for $550, I can’t help but feel you can do better in the aftermarket area. If you want to make any changes to am amplified system like the HK, typically it involves changing everything…and I’ve never been big on factory systems, as they are always blown away by items available aftermarket.

Ian,

Thanks for the info… I already asked Mike and he said the UK Nav doesn’t work with aftermarkets as far as he knows so I’m looking for anyone with US experience on replacing the headunit in a MINI with Nav.

Dale:

I think you’re screwed. First, I thought about buying H/K and I was told by various people in forums that H/K is all or nothing (meaning, keep it factory or replace all), and on top of that you have Nav, which I heard people have plenty of problems with aftermarket H/Us.

Mykl,

Glad it works for you, I tried it with several diff level of radios never did work very on any of them. Maybe it has improved in the two years since I bought and sent mine back. Also, I called the Griffin lads and got no help, at all. I actually found the RoadTrip worked better, for me they all have nothing on the ICE-Link-Plus.

I found the griffin FM modulator works great with an analog tuner…being able to fine tune the frequency works wonders.

But how many of us have an analog tuner? I have it only on a cd alarm clock next to my bed.

As far as speakers go, I think there’s a commom misconception that they need to be changed first. When in fact, you will notice sound quality improvements by adding an amplifier or source unit first.

If I add in speakers, I have already decided it is going to be the Polk Momo 6.5″ seperates. They are easily the best speakers I have heard.

These head units all look very nice, but I must say I’m quite happy with my factory H/K unit, and the aux input connector. My MP3 player (Treo phone) sounds great though it, and volume is obiously adjustable OK through the MFSW.

FM transmitters could in theory be very good quality, but usually in large cities with full FM spectrum, they work very poorly. I wouldn’t bother even trying another one.

-James.

“Does display cut out info in XM also, or is it just Sirius? Meaning, artist/song name are only so many characters, and it gets cut.

I’ll call Alpine today to find out if there’s firmware or something.”

On XM I think the song and artist each can be 15 characters long…and I think it’s a limitation they set up to minimize bandwidth needed from the satellite to the radio.

I don’t think that a firmware upgrade would do it, as I am nearly certain it’s a limitation from XM/Sirius. I’ve had 4 different XM units and they have all done the same thing.

Paco-

Do you use playlists on your ipod? I’ve found (even before hooking it up to my head unit) that it’s the best way for sorting songs….having one big folder with all my music in it was too complicated.

Brian: I’m mostly interested in your decision to retain factory speakers. You felt Alpline hu was not enough to power them, but how many watts are you pumping into them with your amp? Which model Alpine amp did you add?

Hugh

yay markdown! :-)

The amplifier I chose was a 2004 model..the model number is MRVF-540. It’s their biggest 4-channel amplifier (or was, not sure about the new models). It’s rated at 75 watts by 4 channels at 4 ohms and 12 volts (but typically in the 85 watt range).

With the top down at 75 mph, I am able to overcome all the wind and road noise easily while still attaining very, very good sound quality.

I like the UI actually better than the Ipod one…the only downside is that with the top down, it’s difficult to see (as it would with any head unit…so that’s not that disappointing to me).

And power will never blow a speaker…distortion will. You can have a speaker rated to handle say 100 watts, and you can run 500 watts of clean power to it, and won’t blow it up.

But if you run 100 watts of dirty (or high distortion) power, then you’ll kill that speaker fast.

I have the amplifier crossed over so the front speakers don’t see any frequencies below 80 Hz (they couldn’t play them anyways), and the rear ones the same way. The amplifier is tuned as such that I can turn the head unit to nearly full (volume 30 of 35) before any distortion can be heard.

The glide touch is incredibly slow to scroll through artists/songs on the 9855. I think it would be great to have the volume knob act as the scroller but it does not let you. It takes some time to get to the bottom, or even the middle because there is no acceleration when you scroll like there is with an ipod. You can go backwards from z-a so getting to m is about as long as it takes, which is still way too long when ur driving. Apart from that, i love the unit… i might just need to program some playlists though (on the go) before i start driving and just play them. Also if you are playing a song before you connect the ipod to the adapter, it continues playing when the deck turns on, a handy feature which will at least make selecting the first artist easy!