DougMorgan

Thanks BigRedGuy -- I sent an email to MR2NR a couple days ago asking if he had any on hand but so far no response. However, I am trying to get the store to exchange the alpine that was installed last Friday and I'd rather have them just swap it at no additional cost to me so ordering another deck from a 3rd party would be a fall-back option.

Cokesniffer: I managed to do some tests at a different store location on Sunday with the x494 and mp445, both of which are the single-line display with front USB. I brought three thumb drives, two of which had been run through Kenwood's utility program to create a data base and a smaller drive which had not. In all cases the Kenwood was much faster than the alpine -- both for initially reading the drives, for searching and just for going from album to album. The ones with the database had almost no lag but even the basic drive was significantly faster than the alpine. The Kenwood also correctly read the directory structure when the drive was formatted with a folder for each artist and a subfolder per album. Also the Kenwood kept stuff in alphabetical order whereas the Alpine does not.

All in all I wish I had not let them substitute the Alpine and that I had just waited for the Kenwood decks to arrive. I'm going to talk to them tomorrow and see what we can work out. My first choice would be the x994 (the original selection) followed by the BT900 (if the price difference isn't too large) and then the BT945. The last gives up a few configuration options and a couple bands on the equalizer but it's still going to be more live-able than the alpine.

If anyone has additional info or suggestions I'd be happy to read them and I'll keep this updated to it's conclusion....

Thanks
Doug

DougMorgan

Epilogue:

As luck would have it the shop received an unexpected x994 yesterday and it is now mounted in my car along with a few other tweaks.

I must say that I am very happy with the deck and Andre's. The USB controls are simple and very quick and the display is easy to read after a bit of fiddling with the settings. Songs magically appear in the same order as the album and the list of artists is alphabetical -- a miracle of modern science. The Kenwood pc utility makes a large difference here.

I was expecting the sound to be about on par with the alpine but it actually sounds quite a bit better, clearer and more dynamic. I would think that this is at least partly due to setup parameters -- when the alpine was installed it ran past closing time and they may not have had enough time to configure properly. At any rate my wife commented within the first 60 seconds on the improved sound (without prompting) so it's not just me.

Thanks very much for the input......
Doug

sx4life

iTrader: (1)

i am runnin a 994 it seems solid, sounds good and usb is quick