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Not Ready for Prime Time |
February 25, 2008 |
| Reviewer:
Brian
from Albuquerque, NM
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In short this unit is not ready for release to the public. I have owned Alpine products for over 20 years and have loved every one of them. This one is hard to love.
Bluetooth function is average at best. Sound quality is average on both ends. Sometimes the phonebook functions will work...sometimes they do not. Perhaps I was simply spoiled by my old Sony HCB300 unit that worked great.
It took weeks to get the iPod audio to sound right. I will say that now that I have worked on it the sound is great. The sound is better than my old Harmon Kardon iDrive unit. The problems that I had to work through were numerous.
Forget about using the power adapter...the engine noise is terrible. I was able to hard wire the unit even though Alpine does not make this easy. At first the vocals and highs sounded awful. After days of troubleshooting I ended up having to ground my mini stereo cord. That solved the sound issues but introduced terrible engine whine. Long story short I ended up wiring the unit directly to the battery, ran all ground wires to a common ground and installing a power filter. The whine is gone unless you turn the stereo up to ridiculous levels.
Now the unit will power up at will, the phone functions are not that great but the sound is great. So at this point I am keeping the unit installed; I have too much time and effort involved to give up now! Be warned that if you buy this you will have to do some work to make it perform properly.
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biggest e-disappointment ever: be warned |
February 4, 2008 |
| Reviewer:
William
from Philadelphia
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In a world where so many new products work so well this is an enormous disappointment. I spent 200$ getting installed professionally, so this is not a trivially-priced gizmo, and it looks like were going to have to get a new stereo just to make it work.
Problem 1, the biggie: despite buying it because it was supposed to be hardwired, and despite paying all that money for installation, the sound quality is seriously disappointing. In my car I run the ipod simply from a cassette plug-in, and it sounds far better. And that's when there's not static. The deal-breaker problem is that you can't actually drive for any length of time without encountering a lot of static. And we don't have high audio standards: we just want to be able to listen to recorded books. And you can't really do it, at least not for long.
Problem 2 is the remote, which is totally non-intuitive to the extent where you really don't think it's working. It reacts slowly, and the display is slow, so you can barely (if at all) stop, start, change tracks, etc. At least, not without pulling over onto the shoulder.
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Has serious flaws |
January 30, 2008 |
| Reviewer:
David
from Aurora, CO
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I had high hopes for the new Alpine product. I could believe they did as well, but let the product out too soon without correcting the flaws. Where do I begin?
The entire concept of the stuck-to-the-dash and wires-everywhere installation is not attractive or safe. Alpine should accommodate professional-style installation, whether by professionals or capable DIY's in the kit. But the real problems are in the function of the unit.
The Bluetooth telephone operation is dismal. Two completely different phones, that work correctly with other brands of Bluetooth handsfree equipment, could not maintain connection or reliably make calls. Relocation of equipment provided no help.
The use of an IR remote is absolutely ridiculous for use in a vehicle - and dangerous too. My wife's headunit made FM modulation the prudent way to install, but no arrangement of direct wire or otherwise could fix the poor sound quality (other FM modulation installs have sounded much better).
A final perplexing problem: Even with the unit off, an Ipod left plugged in will be drained of battery power in little time.
Crutchfield's support tried their best to help with this and I commend them for their efforts. It's a shame a good name like Alpine's will be suspect forever for letting a product like this out the door.
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Terrible dissappointment - fails to follow thru on |
January 28, 2008 |
| Reviewer:
Rich
from Wilmington, DE
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I had many problems with the EX-10, so I returned it for a new one - and had the EXACT SAME problems with the new unit. It is obviously a design flaw, as all problems I encountered happened on both units. While the cusotmer service at Crutchfiled is first rate (Thank you!!), I am terribly disappointed with the overall product, which looked very promising out of the box, and is appealing visually.
As others have noted, I had the same problem with the AUX input having a hollow sound and dropping out the vocals (the sound is TERRIBLE (FM sounds better). Terribly disappointed as the hardwired AUX input SHOULD provide the cleanest sound. Not so in the case of the EX-10.
The FM modulator worked OK - but - the FM techinology itself does not lend itself to the best sound quality. I did not buy this to use it through my FM, if I wanted a cheap sounding FM modualator I would have spend $30 bucks not $200.
The bluetooth linked easily to my phone (Verizon LG EnV 9900) and would stream music from my phone via the bluetooth connection, and the sound was quite good.....HOWEVER...my phonebook would never load, and it kept self-activating the streaming music on my phone!!!! Everytime I got in the car and looked at my phone and it was playing music - VERY annoying, as I had to keep stopping the music, only to find it streaming agian in 10 minutes.
The remote actually controlled all of my ipod funcitons as promised. The load times were very slow. If you have a larger ipod classic with lots of tunes (I have 16,000+ songs in my 80GB classic) - your response time will be very slow. Not sure this is a fault of the unit, just somethign to be aware of -
My album artwork also did not load properly. The artowrk showed correctly in itunes, and on the actual ipod itself, but not on the EX-10. I doubt this an itunes or ipod issue, but more an Apline issue.
Overall the EX-10 really is a stinker. There are many funcitons that do not work as advertised, or at all. This is basically just a shoddy FM modualtor with limited bluetooth capabilites, masquerading as a high quality piece of audio equipment.
Apline needs to go back to the drawing board on this one - the concept is there - however the quality control is not.
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January 28, 2008 |
| Reviewer:
Jeffrey
from Chicago, Il
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Tested with Ipod Nano using AUX input.
The first major problem was trying to get a good ground to eliminate the whining from the engine. Totally eliminated the cigarette ligher adapter and wired the unit directly to my fuse box with no improvement. Finally installed a line filter which eliminated most, but not all of the noise.
The quality of sound from the unit is distorted in that the vocals are very low. I finally just plugged the jack from my AUX input directly into my Ipod which resolved this issue and the engine whine.
This basically left me with one feature to use which is the display and remote for controlling my Ipod. This function worked well, but it a pretty expensive solution just to control my Ipod. Don't waste your money on this product.
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