Preface

For some time now I wanted to get a head unit that would be able to not only connect up my iPod, or any other external device, but I was in search for the elusive head unit that could control an iPod at the head unit itself. This search literally began years ago and there were only a couple units out there that could achieve this feat and for those that did they required an additional module to control an iPod.

Now that the demand for this feature is constantly increasing, many manufacturers were finally getting into the game developing head units that have a direct USB connection to their head unit. Some elected for a front panel solution, seemingly good if you wanted a simple way to plug an iPod (or flash drive which seems to be a good solution in this case) but that leaves for a somewhat unappealing dangling cord from the front. Others like Kenwood have developed a rear mounted USB solution which allows for a much more integrated solution if one wishes.

The other feature I was looking for was to have a lot of information from one’s iPod available on the head unit.  While there are a number of head units that have good displays that even show album art, if one was budget conscious you were delegated to 8-12 large LED-style characters.

So my goal was to find a unit that had all the above features, iPod control, rear mounted USB cords, beyond basic equalization, and all for a budget of less than $225. Sounds impossible? Think again.

The Kenwood eXcelon KDC-X693

I happened across this head unit by chance after posting to a couple forums to find a good budget head unit. There were only a couple quick reviews I could find on it but they all were positive. Additionally there were a number of good reviews for a close sibling of this head unit that had Bluetooth on board but it cost nearly $100 more. While the Bluetooth feature was nice, I opted to stay within budget and get the X693. If I would like in the future I can buy modules for Bluetooth, Satellite Radio, and other features which seemingly makes this a great base head unit to work with. So I took a chance and purchased it through Crutchfield for $209.00. While you can get it at Amazon for considerably less, you have to include shipping since it’s offered by a partner business and once you get the wiring harness for your vehicle the price becomes a wash.

Opening the box presented me with the box for the head unit, the cable to hook into the Infinity “Sun & Sound” system in my 2004 Lancer RalliArt, and instructions.

 While this might not be some exotic packing al la Apple, it at least seems they took a little care in packaging this. The head unit is covered completely in plastic so it won’t get scratched.  It also includes what you would expect; instructions, batteries, screws, and wire ties. One thing that I did not expect was a convenient plastic mount that you can secure your USB wire to so you don’t have to have the wire dangling around. Kudos to include something so simple but a very nice option to have for your installation. In this installation the only other things I had to buy was some connectors and some wire loom to tidy up the install.

Pre-wiring

Thanks to a bit more standardization over the years, almost anyone can wire up your harness adapter to your head unit harness. I have done a lot of installs in the past where you had to be performing all of this wiring inside the car so it’s nice to be able to literally plug and play and drive.

As mentioned above I own a 2004 Lancer RalliArt with the “Sun and Sound” system. I will be the first to admit that the stock system really does not sound that bad. While you don’t have discrete audio adjustments, the seven speaker system does an adequate job of reproducing sound at even fairly loud levels.  This is helped with the separate amp located under the driver’s seat pushing out a Mitsubishi reported 310 watts. OK so this is an exaggeration IMO, but it probably does push out a respectable clean 40-50 watts per channel.

One thing I was a little disappointed in with Mitsubishi is the amp only has four discrete channels. I had assumed given that it had a subwoofer that there would be 5 channels. I can only assume that they have some inline crossovers off the rear channels. No biggie in the end. If I really want to I can always remove the current sub and put a replacement sub in with a separate amp.

I spent probably 10 minutes wiring up the harness together. Since I am going to plug into the existing Infinity amp I only have to connect up 5 wires; constant power (yellow), power (red), “antenna power” (blue), illumination (orange), and remote power (blue-striped). Everything else will be connected via RCA to the head unit.

One small nitpick in this was that the constant power and the main power lengths of wire on the Kenwood side of the harness was longer than the rest of the wires. No real biggie, just a nitpick. To tidy up the install I cut a couple lengths of wire loom and stuffed my wires inside.

Installation

Installation was pretty much a breeze thanks to the wiring harness. It just takes four screws to get access to the radio. Another small nitpick thanks to the people at Mitsubishi is there is no ground wire at the OEM harness. I finally found a place to hook up the ground but it’s just a little burdensome that there would be such a glaring omission from a harness.

There is a great spot in the Lancer to place a iPod or iTouch/iPhone and that is in the little plastic tray of the two-chamber center console. Again just two screws anchors it down and after about 20 minutes I fished through the Kenwood USB cable and coupled it with a standard Apple USB cable. The finished product looks like this.

Once everything is snapped back together the installation was finished. I wish the head unit was flush, or that it was slight more risen so you can put the trim ring on. But otherwise this was a pretty easy install.

First Thoughts

My very first thoughts on the X693 is WOW, this thing has so many options, so many in fact that it took me a good hour plus to acquaint myself with all the features and nuances of the unit. Even things like setting the date took an extra minute because you have to set it in standby mode. That being said I would rather have to spend a little time on such a full features product than to have fewer features.

Everything is customizable. The head unit colors are customizable down to the left and right knob lights. The display can give you a number of different settings and text combinations. Sound is extraordinarily customizable with different EQs, cabin profiles, even speaker size profiles to maximize the sound from your head unit. Unfortunately I can only take advantage of some of the features since I don’t use the head unit amp, but right out of the gate it made the Infinity system sound better, and with some tweaks it sounded really, really good.

The Bad Things

So this is not far from perfect so let’s list out the imperfections of the unit. First the display reflects lot of glare, almost the point that it’s unreadable. Luckily there is a contrast option to help brighten up the display to combat the glare.

The radio presets have no direct input on the face panel. Now this isn’t a big deal since you just select the search function and it lists the six presets per bank (3 FM banks and 1 AM bank), but it is only listed as “Preset 1”, “Preset 2”. It would have been nice if Kenwood would have displayed the station and possibly call letters for each preset.

It would have been nice to have two small FF/RW buttons on the display. This is solved by the right jog wheel but it seems to take an extra push from time to time for it to register.

There might be a way to turn off some of the animation of the head unit but I have not seen that option yet. When you switch between menus or sources it goes through little short animation bursts that I could do without.

The Good Things

There are a lot of things to praise about this unit. The audio sounds above average especially with the price point of this head unit. The direct iPod control seems to be spot on only taking a couple seconds to register songs from a 80GB iPod Classic or a iPhone 3G v3.0 8GB. The radio turner is superb pulling in stations the stock head unit could not and its RDS tagging comes up quickly. There was a comment on Amazon that stated “this is the head unit for geeks” and I could not agree more. While I could see this being intimidating for some, for anyone with a grasp on technology can discover a treasure trove of features and dial in the head unit to act exactly as they want.

Conclusion

While I have only had this for a day now I am thoroughly impressed with it thus far. Far from perfect this unit has features that some units $100, $200, even $300 or more simply do not have, I have had Kenwood eXcelon equipment in the past, namely some V12 amps about 10 years ago and I was very impressed with those amps as I am now with the X693. I will have a longer term synopsis later on this after it’s broken in for a couple months, but for now I will be enjoying my long rides from NY to VA and back with an incredible new head unit.

I recently purchased some new Dell Optiplex 755’s and ran into an issue with one of my most tried and true tools, Ghost. I have used Ghost for a very long time but there is a growing issue with SATA drivers that rendered using ghost useless since it wouldn’t recognize the DVD-R drive. In a quick rush I started to research alternatives and ran into Windows Deployment Services (WDS).

I used it’s predecessor (RIS) a couple times in the past and really didn’t like it, so I was walking into this project with the notion that I could dislike it. I can say that ended up being farthest from the truth. Since most of my machines are PXE enabled I can boot off the network, and with a couple tweaks to my boot image (I needed to seed some network drivers into it) I have a great WinPE booter to work with.

I’ve been transitioning my images to WDS now which was a great starting point since I needed to start creating images with XP SP3 and Vista SP1. I can honestly say I am not looking back at Ghost.

I haven’t been able to post much of late thanks to a lack of time. The daily grind of work has been insane the last couple weeks thanks to us switching over to a new pipe (from 1.5MB to 4.5MB) to our CT office and switching over to a hosted VoIP solution with a company called Smoothstone. The transition went pretty smooth considering and as of Thursday night the majority of things had finally completed. Over the next couple months I will keep an eye on the system and give a real work view of what they offer.

A few months ago I gave a tryout to a free inventory management tool called Spiceworks. I had always been hesitant trying out freeware but it was worth a look at and since then I haven’t looked back. While it is not perfect (I still wish it had AD integration) you can’t beat it for the price, especially in today’s dwindling IT budgets.

Well I just stumbled upon another tool (thanks 4sysops) called Spotlight on Windows. This looks like a dream tool to manage your system’s health, monitor Event Logs, etc. I hope this is as good as Spiceworks!

As I am planning out my 2009 data-center implementation at my job I learned that Dell and HP are going to be releasing their servers with VMWare ESX 3i “embedded” in early April for Dell and March 31, 2008 for HP. For those considering virtualized environments and are considering diskless servers, this might be the way to go!

For almost 17 months my household had enjoyed a 40 hour Series 2 TiVo with almost no problems at all, but for May and June the unit was progressively dying, what was once the occasional artifacts became “Dark Screens of Infinite Pause”. Since then we had contemplated what its replacement unit would be. After moving to NY, we decided to give the Scientific Atlanta 8300HD a test spin.

Preface

This article was originally two articles (published on 07/19/2005 and 11/16/2005) first praising the unit and then scaling back that praise. I have decided to combine both articles into this single article.

Introduction

It was time to contemplate a TiVo replacement. Knowing that we were now in New York and Time Warner land (my previous cable provider was Comcast) I knew that they had a TiVo-like unit that I began investigating. The Scientific Atlanta 8300HD was a huge step in the right direction for Time Warner, many people had complained about the older unit (the S/A 8000) had a cumbersome UI and was breaking left and right. For what few reviews I could dig up, the S/A8300HD was a big improvement over the old PVR, but would it be good enough to replace my now dead TiVo?

So for a period of time we decided to experiment with the S/A 8300HD, learn its strength and weaknesses, and if the unit proves unworthy, we will buy another TiVo.

Available models

There are 4 major models from Scientific Atlanta that Time Warner uses in its DVR arsenal. The S/A 8000 (Standard, MR, HD, HD/MR) and the S/A 8300 (Standard, MR, HD, HD/MR). Now as you can deduct from logic, anything with the suffix HD is a high definition unit, the MR is a designation for Multi-Room which will allow you to stream to other digital cable boxes from the main box programming you have recorded. The MR units were not available in our region, so I opted for the S/A 8300HD. The older units are famed to have a horrible UI and a lower capacity hard drive to boot, so for this task I was going to go for the biggest and the best. Ensuring that we got the proper unit wasn’t nearly a problem as I thought it would be, but the Time Warner customer representative had the notion that the HD unit was inferior to the standard units. I just simply passed this off as nonsense, and continued with my order for the S/A 8300HD.

S/A 8300HD Specs

The S/A 8300HD has a list of impressive features including:

• 160GB hard drive (90 hours standard recording, 20 hours HD recording)
• Dual Tuner
• Composite, HDMI, Digital Audio, S-Video Output
• 480i, 720p, and 1080i HD video choices

What the S/A 8300HD lacks

• Suggestion programming
• Grouping of recordings “by name” or other criteria to organize your recorded list
• Passport software will re-record the same program on the same day
• Only 10 days of data compared to 14 days of the TiVo

Initial ImpressionsAfter the Time Warner technician dropped off the box and ensured everything was working, I immediately went to programming some “Season Passes”, now the Passport software does not call them season passes, but they will record all shows in a season, only at certain times, channels, you control how expansive the recording parameters are.

One thing I noticed is that Passport is not intelligent enough not re-record a program like the TiVo can. But with the large capacity and normal pruning of the list, this is easily maintained. A feature that I wish that Passport would incorporate to make things more organized is a “group by” feature so people can group by date, show, or other criteria that will allow people to better organize their recordings.

The unit’s guide and setting items to record are very responsive, and it reduces the live program to the right corner of the screen so you are not sitting through total silence while managing your programs.

Long Term Impressions

After a couple months of use, the S/A 8300HD has been increasingly showing signs of unreliability. These have included:

• Random multiple reboots
• System freeze-ups
• Missing programs to record
• No intelligence to know not to record programs just recorded

With those facts out of the way, my wife and I have been increasingly longing for the return of the TiVo into our entertainment cabinet. My wife was the first to want the TiVo to return, literally days after trying the S/A 8300HD out, and since the technical malfunctions have been happening, and now so have I. We have moved the S/A 8300HD to the bedroom to perform minor recording tasks, and our replacement TiVo now sits comfortably in our entertainment center.

This is not to say the S/A 8300HD is a total failure, quite the contrary. If Time Warner could improve to make features like suggestions a reality, and work out the bugs that make the unit not perform as expected, I think they could give TiVo a real fight.

For now I would recommend only getting the S/A 8300HD if you want to keep your entertainment center streamlined, demand dual-tuner capabilities, or if you feel suggestions are not needed for your experience. With the TiVo series 3 on the horizon it could be that there are no reasons to switch over to a cable company’s DVR offerings.