Upgrade from Avic-d3

i've heard bad reviews on the new navi line from pioneer. i went to a local dealer and he told me that all his customers have *****ed bout it or tried returning it cause its a pain in the ass. he recommended me the eclipse or the kenwood. i ended up picking up the kenwood dnx8120

the EQ is a HUGE improvment from the D3

13 band eq for the front spears and 13 bands for the rear

time alignment also

well if you want/need navigation the DNX8120 has it all with garmin nav and built in bluetooth

if you dont need nav the DDX812 has everything the 8120 has but no nav and no built in bluetooth,

but the 812 does have the option of add on nav

basically

8120 nav

8120 no nav, no built in blue tooth

price: I got my 8120 for $800, it was a refurb but works great, they usually go for 1000-1100 in ebay, in stores about $1500-$1700

812 is much cheaper, usually 7-8ish on ebay new

well i dont care for the blue tooth but the navigation is nice.
are they still in production?? i think ill just wait for them to go down and sell my avic-d3.

btw preout voltages? high low? hows the ipod interface? and im sure garmin navi is amazing //content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/eek.gif.771b7a90cf45cabdc554ff1121c21c4a.gif

Click to expand...

Yeah they should still be in production, no replacement models yet...

As mentioned you can get a DNX8120 unathourised for around $1100; a DDX812 will cost you about $700, add a KNA-G510 for about $250-ish and you can save yourself around $150 but you just have to wire and mount the nav module (which is quite small) somewhere.

The Garmin nav gets raves but I don't find it spectacular. Then again I haven't really used much else, heh. The nav works as you want it to, but it's just a little "disconnected" from the rest of the HU. It's funny because people complain about that, for the Alpine Wx05 and Blackbird II combination but not for the Kenwoods with Garmin. I guess it's because the Garmin nav is as good as it is.

You can sync the time on the HU with the GPS though, so you never have to set the clock, which is nice //content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/smile.gif.1ebc41e1811405b213edfc4622c41e27.gif

The separation of nav and HU makes for some strange situations. Like if you get the XM NavTraffic antenna you can apparently get XM Radio over that too. However if you use that the only way you can listen to XM radio is by going in the GPS "side" and using a rather primitive XM player that's built in there. If you get the XM tuner designed for KAB though, for the HU (and not for NavTraffic) then you can get XM as normal on the HU. I really don't care for sat radio so no big deal for me but just thought I would mention that.

Being an eXcelon unit, pre-outs are specified as 5V 80-Ohm which is pretty good in this segment. The DNX8120/DDX812 is the also the only current double-DIN video unit with nav capability that has built-in DD/DTS decoding. (All other current models just downmix to 2ch, and require an external processor to do DD/DTS. Sony has a double DIN video unit that has built in processing but they have no nav facility on it.) Though this is only really relevant for DVD movie playback, as a side benefit of that it also can do DPL-II processing for 2ch. material if you want.

The one thing that disappointed me, but perhaps not many others, is that with the new models (DNX8120, 7120, 5120 and the DNX equivalents) they dropped CD changer control in favour of their new KAB (Kenwood Advanced Bus). However the only thing you can connect to this are sat tuners (XM, Sirius, or HDRadio) and only one of them at that. No adapter is planned nor are any CD changers or other devices. Forget about using an old Kenwood changer or MusicKeg, it's just not compatible.

Can't comment on the iPod interface, because I wouldn't buy any Apple product if you paid me, but I've read it's fine.

If you don't care for the bluetooth you can step down to the DNX7120 (or DDX712 if you also don't want nav) but you lose DD/DTS processing, only get one USB input and also lose eXcelon so it's down to 2V pre-outs unfortunately.