Sorry about that. I had meant to come back and post an update. Long story short, I sent the Alpine unit back and ordered a Sanyo head unit with line inputs.
As stated in the original e-mail, I ordered a CDA-9825 ($199) and the KCA-420i ($99) from Crutchfield
http://www.crutchfield.com/. Last time I ordered something from them was about 15 years ago and they are as good now as they were then. They have free shipping on orders over $199 and include harnesses and trim pieces needed for installing aftermarket radios into any vehicle. This also includes instructions specific to your vehicle on how to get into the dash and all the other places you need when installing various car audio items. The order arrived at work (so I didn't have to worry about a signature for the UPS delivery) and I was barely able to refrain from opening up the box to take a look at it.
I installed the radio into a 2003 Dodge pickup (with the Hemi)
, of which the most complicated step was soldering up a wiring harness for connecting the head unit to the factory radio connector. This involved simply matching the colors on the harness from Crutchfield and the one from Alpine and soldering/insulating them. The install of the radio took a little bit of time so I could fish the Ai-Net cable (connection between the head unit and the iPod interface) behind the dash. Total install time from opening up the box to playing with the radio was about 90 minutes and I went pretty slow.
Controlling the iPod from the head unit worked relatively well. I suspect that part of the problem was that I purchased the absolute lowest end Ai-Net radio from Alpine. If you already had a high-end Alpine unit, this would probably be a lot nicer. I didn't want to spend $600-$1900 to attach my $500 iPod to the car stereo.
Things that were nice about the unit include:
- Large display on the head unit is easier to read track information than from the 2" LCD on the iPod
- Keeps the battery in the iPod charged avoiding the need to purchase a ~$30 cigarette lighter adapter.
Limitations of the hardware include
- When browsing a playlist, only the first 511 items are shown (the 511 items was listed as a limitation, and I'm pretty sure this is what they were talking about). You could use a playlist with more than 511 items, but I never really tracked down exactly what it did with the "extra" items.
- When browsing a list (tracks, playlists, artists, albums, etc...) it would only advance at one item per second. This made it impossible to randomly select "Midnight Oil" (artist 150 in a list of 292 artists for my library) since goofing off with the radio for close to 3 minutes while driving is not very safe.
- When the iPod is attached to the KCA-420i, the interface and all the buttons on the iPod are totally disabled.
The combination of items 2 and 3 in the limitations were the deal-breakers for me. If either one of them weren't the case, I would still have the hardware and be totally enjoying the setup. It's really too bad that the product was released with such a serious limitation on browsing for music.
I found one review on the web that stated the problem about the scrolling speed (the reviewer was using one of their $500 head units) when browsing for items. He stated this was a limitation of the 2004 lineup of head units and would be fixed in the 2005 lineup.
Instead of using something with this limitation, I simply returned all the Alpine hardware to Crutchfield (free return and they even pay for the return shipping) and purchased a Sanyo ECD-T1540 from Crutchfield. This head unit has RCA line inputs on the back of the unit, so I'll simply run a cable up to the headphone jack on the iPod and use it's interface. I'll probably break down and buy the car charger for keeping it charged on longer trips as well.
I was really disappointed about the outcome of the Alpine iPod Interface. When it was announced at SEMA in Jan '04, I decided I would buy one and had been anxiosly awaiting it and living with the poor sound quality of a battery powered FM modulator. Maybe after the next batch of Alpine head units is released, this will work much better.
PS: Now Alpine will need to release a rev two of this product to tie the iPod Photo into the LCD displays people are now putting in their cars. :-D
Steve
