kstokes's Full Review: Alpine iDA-X001 FM / AM Receiver
I originally bought the IDA-X001 as a great way to eliminate having to cart a bunch of CDs around with me. My car has virtually zero storage space in it, so having my iPod dishing out tunes to the stereo just "made sense". The IDA-X001 does make this possible, and if you look aside from it's major flaws, it will play tunes just happily. That being said, for the price it costs, it's impossible to ignore those flaws.
The IDA-X001 has literally dozens of firmware quirks/problems/bugs/annoyances. Just a few:
-You can't turn off the silly scrolling, as it displays a track name. This gets old, quickly.
-The scrolling when displaying song titles in the list where you browse through an album is --slow--. We're talking 45 seconds to display a full track name.
-If you use anything older 5th generation iPod, you must use the "Full Speed" cable, as opposed to the USB cable. If you do that, the "BACK" button on the unit doesn't function.
-Operation with a USB-stick is very dodgy at the absolute best of times. Many devices will flat-out not work. If they do work, and the IDA stumbles across a track encoded in VBR, it will display "Unsupported" and lock up until you unplug the USB stick. Even worse - the directory view of the stick is in absolutely no order whatsoever. No alphabetical sorting, nothing. It's just a random display of folders.
-It takes well over a minute to scroll through my well-organized list of artists. I rely on playlists to make the thing usable at all.
-There is no internal crossover. I can't set a high-pass filter onto my front speakers, I have to rely on my external amp to do that.
-The previous/next track buttons don't "queue up" presses. If I press "next track" five times in a row, I'd expect to jump ahead five tracks, but it doesn't. It might advance by two, maybe three, sometimes four.
-If you hook up a dash control interface (so that you can use your steering wheel audio controls) and you enable the dimmer, with RED button coloring, it will miss commands. It's the fault of the IDA, not the dash control interface.
You really might as well skip it and get something else, given it's price.
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