Twisted Kites

Here’s the new music player for the car. Decided to upgrade, and it’s a treat for the car for behaving well this year.

Decided to get an Alpine iDA-X001 from Elliotts in Coventry and it’s a lovely bit of kit. This unit has no built in CD player, it must be one of the first, if not the first, unit with no moving parts inside. As it comes it has the usual RDS radio tuner (FM/MW/LW) but in addition is the main feature; it’s fully iPod compatible.

A USB comes out the rear which plugs into 5th generation iPods and also certain Nanos I think (other iPods can be used with a different cable not included). The beauty of this is flawless control and browsing, top sound reproduction (bypasses iPod’s DAC for Alpine’s own), the ability to display album art and also charges the iPod at the same time. I’m going to get nother iPod and leave one exclusively for car use. The iPod fits nicely into a car cassette holder and can be safely stowed there permanently.

Also a standard USB memory stick can be used (although without fancy album art), and a CD changer is available as an accessory. The faceplate detaches, as they all do, but is only about two-thirds of the normal size, handy for carrying around. The illumination can be red or blue, although as the 6 grid buttons are actually transparent blue, with red light shining through in some light seem purple, which matches my car. Bonus.

Sound tuning is simple (Kenwood had a myriad of audio tweaks!) yet sounds amazing, well as good as the standard speakers will allow. Menu and navigation is good (apart from the search/enter buttons should be the other way around, read the review linked at the end to see what I mean). Various wallpapers can be set with others downloaded from Alpine website, a nice touch.

One thing was that the dimmer cable isn’t attached on this (my JVC and Kenwood were pre-wired) so I had to plug the loose cable into the spare ISO socket. That meant buying a spare ISO connector from Halfords at a silly cost, take the orange wire out of that and put it in mine, simple to do. So now when I put my headlights on the unit dims (3 levels), making night driver better.

And now for some pretty pictures:

1: Simple install on my centre dashboard. 2: Ipod sitting in the armrest cassette holder.

3: Main panel lit. 4: Alternate blue illumination. 5: With main panel removed.

6: Clock-view mode. 7: Main menu front screen. 8: iPod album selection screen.

9: Radio title-view mode. 10: iPod main-view mode. 11: Main panel detached (size compared to payment card).

12: Illuminated at night (before dimmer-wire connected). 13: A home-made faceplate protection case (Police sunglasses case and spare Alpine sticker, I’ll make a smaller one sometime).

Links: (new windows)

Alpine product page (UK) / Alpine product page (US) / ZDnet Review

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 19th, 2007 at 2:23 and is filed under Photoblog, Weblog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.