Kenwood 8120 vs. Eclipse AVN6620

[Baller23217 10+ year member]

Kenwood dislays album art. Id go with the Kenwood better EQ and also has T/A. Overall I think the Kenwood is a better H/U. But I am bias.

whats T/A?

 

[djeazie 10+ year member]

time alignment.

 

[Mr. C 10+ year member]

Both are pretty **** good units, but the Kenwood gets my vote. Displays album art and video from the iPod on screen, plus in the 350z, you can have your steering wheel controls control all of the basic functions with the Kenwood interface. Two USB inputs so you could put a thumb drive on one and a dedicaed larger capacity hard drive on the other. Navigation is so dead on the money, it's beautiful. Simple to bypass, very expandable, and a great bang for the buck considering all of the included features.

 

[Baller23217 10+ year member]

I don't need time alignment. I'd never use it.

Doesn't the Eclipse play video from an ipod too? and I would think there's an adapter to keep the function of the steering wheel controls for that unit too.

 

[AppleBonker 10+ year member]

Anyone use the USB port to run music off a flash drive? Any info on how well that works? I'm looking to see how fast the interface runs and refreshes music off the jump drive. IE, is it slower, faster or comparable to running music off an iPod?

 

[Doola36 10+ year member]

Anyone use the USB port to run music off a flash drive? Any info on how well that works? I'm looking to see how fast the interface runs and refreshes music off the jump drive. IE, is it slower, faster or comparable to running music off an iPod?

I use to have a Kenwood 7019 and when I use my flash drive it took a few minutes before you could go to the next track. I never got a chance to use the IPOD connection. But when I would go from ACC to starting my truck I had to wait some minutes before I coudl go to the next track.

 

[blazeplacid 10+ year member]

no delay when switching on the 8120 with usb or ipod

 

[AppleBonker 10+ year member]

no delay when switching on the 8120 with usb or ipod

Would you mind telling me how you have your music organized on the usb flash drive? I definitely think this has something to do with the speed of accessing and scrolling through the directory.

 

[Doola36 10+ year member]

Would you mind telling me how you have your music organized on the usb flash drive? I definitely think this has something to do with the speed of accessing and scrolling through the directory.

After reading other post about the kenwood HUs I didn't have it organized in a way where it would read the media fast. So I just learned something new for my next Kenwood HU.

 

[AppleBonker 10+ year member]

After reading other post about the kenwood HUs I didn't have it organized in a way where it would read the media fast. So I just learned something new for my next Kenwood HU.

What is the optimum organizational method?

 

[blazeplacid 10+ year member]

Would you mind telling me how you have your music organized on the usb flash drive? I definitely think this has something to do with the speed of accessing and scrolling through the directory.

just got full albums

maybe 5 or 6 ,its a 1 gb flash drive

no problems at all.

Ipod is a bit faster

when i had the Eclipse there was some lag but nothing to get upset about

people just like to be picky and cant wait 1-2 seconds //content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/rolleyes.gif.c1fef805e9d1464d377451cd5bc18bfb.gif

 

[Doola36 10+ year member]

What is the optimum organizational method?

I juat read it soemwhere on CA.com. I just organized it by types of music and thats it. But someone was talking about organizing by albums-artist-etc.....something along those lines. I will be getting another Kenwood DD and play around with it differently. I used a 4GB Flash drive

 

[Sierra08! 10+ year member]

I got the 8120 as well, and use a 1 gb flash drive, just name the folders (i also name the song correctly) you want and if you dl songs with cd cover or other art it will show on the screen , nice feature, not to mention all the other things it does as well, nice HU

 

[helotaxi 5,000+ posts]

Hands down, the Eclipse will have better SQ

//content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/rolleyes.gif.c1fef805e9d1464d377451cd5bc18bfb.gif

 

[greynolds 10+ year member]

I've got the Kenwood DDX812 and the optional nav unit for it (which makes it pretty much identical to the DNX8120 and for the purposes of this discussion, completely identical).

With a smallish USB thumb drive (I've got an 8GB drive that I picked up pretty cheap the other day at Officemax), the user interface for selecting artist, album, song, etc. is great. It's very quick to build up the initial list and easy to navigate.

However, with a much larger 120GB Western Digital Passport drive that's pretty much filled, it takes some number of minutes before the Kenwood finishes loading the list, it truncates the list of artists (at around 214, which I suspect is the published limit of folders within a folder - reorganization by grouping artists into genre or A-Z folders should help that), and seems to be sluggish.

I've also tried out the iPod interface, but only with a 2GB Nano so far (my older iPod Photo 60GB isn't compatible). With the Nano loaded up, the iPod interface is blazingly quick and loads right up. I'm hoping that it will be (nearly) as quick with a larger iPod as I'm figuring on getting one of the new iPod Classic 120GB models. If anyone has used the current Kenwood HU's with a large iPod with 5000+ tracks, I'd be interested to hear how fast the user interface is.