Blast83

iTrader: (1)

Thought I'd write a good review on this receiver and some initial settings in case you buy it and use it with stock speakers (current setup).

First thing first. First time I ordered this from Crutchfield and I'll be doing business with them in the future. Ordered it on Sunday night and it was at my door on Wednesday. I live in the middle of the country so that helps but I thought it was nice that it was shipped on Monday.

Install is pretty easy. This is the 2nd time I soldered and there's about ~12 wires to solder. It's not hard at all. I just left one wire strait as is and wrapped the other one around it and soldered it like that. I couldn't get a butt connection like the picture showed. The power antenna wire isn't used so just tape it off. When you're done tape all the wires together. I didn't at first and had a hard time getting it installed with a ton of wires going everywhere. Install is pretty strait forward so just follow the guides on here. Instructions that came with my order had everything I needed. Install the outside trim bracket after you put the HVAC face on though. Takes a little bit of pushing.

The look of the unit makes the interior a LOT nicer, imo. Everything flows a lot better. I'm not looking to get subs or anything, so I wasn't looking for a unit with a preouts and such but it has 2. I'll take some pictures later and post them if anyone is interested. It looks like it was made for the dash though (flow wise), after the trim piece is installed.

The initial sound is just horrible. I thought I made a huge mistake buying it and would need to buy speakers. I played with the settings and found the following improved the sound immensely: Turn the bass to level 3, turn on the loudness feature (improves base/treble at low(normal) volume), and move the sound to 2 to front to even out the sound. As far as I can tell there is no treble button. I played with the other sound settings (the 50/100Hz equalizer) and decided to leave them off with these settings as I started to hear the hint of distortion which means the sound was being raised up way too much.

Result: Speakers now have a good level of bass and sound quality is pretty good. There is still a slight sound in a can sound. It's not bad but I'm pretty damn picky when it comes to audio quality. Bought the nicest audio card for PC and a pair of $150 headphones. Not a total audiophile but slowly getting there It's good enough for me where I don't think I'll need new speakers, which was my goal. I used to have factory woofers in the back of my old sunfire and that produced really good bass for a factory system. It might be that I'm just not used to 4 true speakers anymore. Without my recommended settings the hollowed out sound is very bad. Hope this helps if anyone wants to get this unit.

NVmySKILS

Blast83

iTrader: (1)

Pfft. Fine. I was going to be lazy and not do that, but here you go

Car is a little dirty right now as I don't have a lot of motivation to clean it when it's 8 outside and going to be snowing in in a few days =/ I'll vacuum it tonight though.

The display and pretty neat but the spectrum analyzer isn't as responsive as I'd like. I'm used to Winamp for playing music on my PC though. Sort of hard to make out in the pictures. It does come with about a 2 foot black USB cable, which is nice but I still need to buy an iPod cable for it and find a good place for it. It may be a summer project to drill out a cable hole in the center console and mount it/just stick the cable inside there.

Last pic is of the unit to be taken off. After you turn off the car it will pop out about 3 seconds later to be taken off. If you don't, within about 5 seconds it will go back to normal.


Edit: Forgot a lot of my review :P

The unit seems pretty good. The interface is VERY user unfriendly at first. I work on PCs for my job and I had to look up in the manual just how to set the stupid clock. Logic would think it has something to do with hitting the the clock button but to set it you need to look down the SRC button to power down and then the large button until the initial settings menu pops up and scroll to clock. Well.... after I started to understand it more and use it, I'm getting used to it. The graphics is selectable but only 2 are worth a damn. The equailizer one I have in the pictures and a random city fly by that doesn't move to the music. Like I said before, they aren't responsive to much too much. There's about a 1/4 of a second delay so it's a large disconnect for music. The sound quality is decent. My evo is stock but it still has a lot of engine noise compared to a normal car (not that I'm complaining).

I would recommend the unit. The downsides are the initial learning curve, one button for everything (good and bad), and the head unit container is a piece of junk with two tiny slit of padding.

Upside: Even though a little laggy for my taste, the backgrounds are pretty good. They are all ok but I'd only use the two I listed. It came with a remote but no idea what the hell I'd use it for. Sort of large and flat so not really steering wheel mountable. iPod interface is cool but still havn't used it. It has a feature so you can control the songs from your iPod or stereo but seems nice since I rather use the iPod for initial playing and then stereo to skip ahead. The blue color is cool but red would be nicer for our car but it still flow very nice at night.

kilgoja

i got the pioneer 6700...it looks great...it's on my cardomain page here

http://www.cardomain.com/ride/2439460

401tuner

i really like pioneer products

AWD OWNZ U

iTrader: (4)

I have the same unit and I hate the rocker knob control. Maybe my car is just bouncy but I click the damn thing by accident a lot when changing presets while I'm driving. It sounds trivial but it gets really annoying. I can always use the remote but I think I'd just buy a different unit next time.

TwoFour

iTrader: (6)

I also have the Pioneer unit, and what AWD OWNZ U said ! I hate that damn button!!! I'm buying something different next time, the iPod USB connection is really slow!