JVC XR-KW810 Review

I recently upgraded the factory stereo in my '02 Lexus IS300 to the new JVC XR-KW810, and thought I'd share my experiences thus far.

I didn't really want to swap out the factory stereo, as it still sounded (and looked) quite good. Unfortunately, I recently picked up the official Google car dock for my Nexus One, and really wanted to use it as a music player in the car. Since the Google dock only has Bluetooth audio output, my only options for the factory Lexus stereo were to use the headphone jack on the phone to a tape adapter or a yet-to-be-hacked-in aux input. I tried it with a tape adapter for a couple of days, and decided it was time for a Bluetooth-capable stereo. My only requirements were Bluetooth, an aux-in, double-DIN with a real volume knob (and preferably lots of other "hard" buttons), and custom color configuration (to more closely match the IS300's orange illumination). This led me to the JVC XR-KW610 and it's bigger brother, the XR-KW810. The 610 was okay, but the segmented display looked kinda hokey and it didn't come with the Bluetooth adapter in-box. The 810 has a better looking matrix display and Bluetooth is included. Done.

Installation was very smooth (at least around the head unit itself- reusing the Lexus factory amp and speakers on a non-Lexus head requires a special part). It includes a sleeve for "roll your own" setups as well as an assortment of screwholes in the unit itself. The included Bluetooth adapter just plugs into the rear USB port (there's also one on the front), and the handsfree mic hangs off the back. The unit has a headlight switch input, which is pretty handy for dimming the illumination when the headlights are on. After putting the car all back together and booting it up, my first impressions were pretty good.

Sound quality through my factory amp was quite solid, though the default EQ settings were a little bassy on my setup (I didn't try the unit's built-in amp). This was easily rectified by tweaking the ProEQ settings, which allow for finer unit-wide EQ adjustment (as opposed to the front-panel EQ settings, which are per-input and fairly coarse). In addition to the ProEQ settings, there's a decent array of loudness, LPF, HPF, amp and sub gain adjustments. Also, each source's gain can be adjusted individually.

The controls are generally intuitive and pretty easy to operate without looking. There's a four-way button on the lower left of the face, three large buttons next to the volume knob, source/power and EQ buttons, and 6 preset selector buttons. The buttons are large, but have a somewhat cheap feel. The glossy finish on the unit looks nice under low light, but shows every smudge and speck of dust on a sunny day. The illumination color adjustments are extensive - buttons and display can be colored independently, and different colors can be set for day and night profiles. The display can be difficult to read in direct sunlight, though it does have a polarizing layer that helps somewhat. The real low point on the display is the low LCD update frequency, which causes horizontal text scrolling on long titles or RDS messages to be difficult to read.

On the initial install, I hadn't purchased the separate KT-HD300 HD Radio tuner yet. FM reception on the built-in tuner was quite good, but AM was a little weak compared the the factory unit. The one thing I missed from the factory head was RDS display (station ID and "now playing" info), which the built-in tuner doesn't have. However, the HD tuner adds this, so I ordered it (online, $89). The external HD tuner disables and replaces the built-in tuner by plugging into the back of the head unit. Luckily, it includes long antenna, power and data cables, because it's rather bulky (about 5x9x1 inches)- it took a bit of creativity to find a niche for it. It works as advertised, and does a seamless "upgrade" to the digital signal once it's locked in on the analog. Direct tuning to an digital-only station (ie, via a preset) can take a couple of seconds- the display flashes "Linking" while this is occurring. My only other beef with the HD tuner is a pretty minor one: it disables the "up/down" controls for scanning through presets that are available with the stock tuner (with the HD tuner, up/down is used to switch between HD channels on the same station). The unit supports 18 presets on the FM band, but only 6 are accessible by hard button. Without the up/down access, presets are selected by tapping the menu button, turning the knob to select, and tapping the knob. It works, but nowhere near as conveniently as with the built-in tuner.

The Bluetooth support is fairly advanced compared to other units in the same price range- it supports A2DP, AVRCP 1.3, HSP/HFP and PBAP. In English, this means you can use it to listen to high-quality audio from your music player, remotely control it, get the "now playing" info, navigate playlists, voice dial your cell-phone and answer calls, and copy or navigate the phonebook from the unit. I've only been able to try parts of this thus far, as the Nexus One's Bluetooth implementation doesn't yet support all this functionality. What I have tried is pretty solid- the unit can pair with two different devices, and has a dedicated call/answer button on the face. The handsfree mic volume seems a little low, so it needs to be routed pretty close to your face (maybe the visor). I use the Nexus One car dock for my handsfree calling anyway, so it's not an issue for me.

The USB support is pretty complete as well. If using a thumb drive, it has full folder navigation support and displays album/title info while playing. It also supports USB iPod control and charging, which works quite well, supporting standard functions (playlists, artist/album/song, podcasts, etc). It does disable the iPod display and control (shows a nifty "JVC"), so you have no choice but to control the music from the head unit (difficult for the backseat DJs, though they could use the included remote control in a pinch).

The CD player is pretty standard- it supports CD-TEXT, so newer CDs or burned ones will display title and track info. Not much else to say here.

Thus far, I'm very pleased with the JVC XR-KW810 head unit and KT-HD300 HD tuner. Now if Google would get around to updating the Bluetooth stack to support AVRCP 1.3, I could use all the goodies over Bluetooth.

X-25M update

Coming up on a month of living with the X-25M SSD... Right after my original post, Intel released a firmware update to address the slowdown issues. I, of course, applied it immediately, with no issues.

A month later, things are still going great. The one nasty side effect is that this drive has RUINED me for working on anyone else's computer (including my home PC). Everything else just feels like molasses when compared to my work laptop.

I also have to be really careful with SQL Server performance. I was writing a little tool that did some LINQ to SQL stuff recently, and the way it was doing a GroupBy() hid the fact that it was doing hundreds of queries on the DB. Normally, I'd notice such a thing because what should be a lightning fast query would cause the machine to grind for a few seconds. With the SSD though, even the hundreds of queries came back lightning fast. I had to run SQL profiler to see what it was really doing- glad I did, because I was able to tweak the query to run fast on "normal" machines with a single DB query and do the fancy grouping behavior in memory after the fact.

Anyway, I'm still giving this thing two big fat thumbs up!

Intel X25-M SSD on the dev laptop

Just today replaced my 7200rpm drive on my main dev laptop with a 160G Intel X25-M SSD. Been drooling over this since it came out, and my expectations were very high. Two words: holy crap. In just about every way, it's as fast as I hoped. Some of the high points:

- Boot time (Server 2008): 15sec, down from 45sec.
- SQL Server 2005 Database restore (30G DB): 9min, down from 45min.
- Query large SQL Server table (3m rows) on an unindexed column: 20sec, down from 3min
- VS2008 load of our main .sln: 13sec, down from 50sec
- Full rebuild of our main .sln: 39sec, down from 1min 15sec.

The rebuild didn't go down as much as I'd hoped, but then I tried doing it DURING the large DB restore mentioned above. Wow! Previously, my machine was completely useless during the DB restore. With the SSD, the restore chugged away, and the full rebuild took 45s, only 6s longer than an "unloaded" machine.

Overall the machine is very snappy feeling, and app startups are noticeably faster. I did the February pre-SP2 hotfix rollup for Outlook 2007, which contains a bunch of SSD-friendly fixes, it's also very snappy now even with my bloated mailbox.

Really pleased with the first day performance. Hopefully it holds out- I'm almost planning on needing to do an image-wipe-restore process every couple of months (to combat the well-documented internal fragmentation slowdowns), but we'll see how these metrics hold up over time first.

Squeezebox Boom

After visiting a friend in New York a couple of weeks ago and playing with his Slim Devices (nee Logitech) Squeezebox Classic, I just had to have one. I just wished they had one with speakers- the place I want to put it doesn't have a stereo handy. A quick visit to their website shows the new Squeezebox Boom- perfect! Clickety-click to Amazon, and it's on the way...

Fast-forward to last night, when I "To My Desk"'d it from my EarthClassMail account and ripped the box open in the office to set it up for a late-night coding session. Right out of the box, I was enamored with the build quality- it's got a beautiful black enamel finish with really clean lines, and it feels quite dense for such a small device. Lots of little niceties like the magnetic remote "dent" in the top of the unit and the sleep/snooze button on top in case you want to use it as a hella-spendy clock radio. Plugged it in and had my SqueezeCentral account created and the device on the network within a couple of minutes. I went for the wired connection at the office- didn't even try the wireless, since our office wireless network security doesn't play well with a lot of devices. I didn't set the local server up (that's for home), so I was just playing with the built-in internet services. There's quite a bit of content available for free- even more if you're willing to create accounts and link them up. I was pleased to see the "local radio" option- it shows you all the internet streams of the local radio stations (all my favorites were on there), as well as allowing you to browse around the world right on the device.

I had pretty low expectations for sound quality. The device was kinda spendy ($279), but not enough of a premium over the speaker-less Classic model's $199 price tag to set my expectations very high. Right from the start, I was blown away. This thing sounds great! It has great mid-bass response from a pair of 4" speakers- the low end is "as expected" (eg, not going to rattle the windows out with sub bass-y goodness), but they do provide a sub-out if you're worried about it (I'm not).

I've seen the device UI described as "fiddly", and I'd have to agree- it takes a bit of getting used to, and the navigation isn't terribly friendly unless you know the whole sequence (as well as whatever nagivation the radio service you're using provides too, since they're all different). Things also work a little differently via the remote than using the wheel. It is more or less consistent, though, once you get used to it. My wife had it figured out within a couple of minutes and was having a blast with the "artist search" stations on the Slacker service.

We're both musicians, and yet there's not a lot of music around the house most of the time. Hopefully this thing will make it easier for us to have music around the house wherever and whenever we want.

Recommended!