reccomend me a head unit please

[jerryfreak]

I have a vw phatbox, and am looking for a music keg+head unit for another vehicle.

I have yet to find good info on exactly what fields the kenwood head units display and how the interfaces work. can someone recommend me a head unit (doesnt have to be top-of-the-line or even current model year)

I'm just curious how it works. some pictures of the display in action would be great.

I tried to pick some kenwood head units that were lsited as compatible, then download the manuals for more info.

unfortuantely, they make no mention of the phatbox in the manuals.

thanks in advance!

[SteveC]

Any modern Kenwood unit that supports an external CD changer will handle a Phatbox/Keg.

I recently bought last year's Excelon 7 series (789?), and find it works quite well. I like the 3 lines of text, especially for XM radio. My one gripe is that I hate the "knob on a stalk" control they use for the track/disc selection. What in the world was wrong with buttons? I find it's way too easy to mistakenly skip to the next track when I just wanted to fast forward. Not a big deal with songs, but it makes listening to podcasts/long recordings very difficult.

[judb]

You can get the 2005 kenwood XXV-01D for like 350 bucks on Crutchfield which is a pretty good price considering all the mounting and other hardware that comes with it that most places charge you for.

[timps]

This is a picture of my Kenwood-PSW 9531   2005 model which is the same as KDC-X990




In the picture it is set up to display track / artist /album scrolling on one line with  my own picture (loaded via CD-RW).
You can also have a muti -line display with no picture & change  the text font colour .
The text  displayed is user configurable and can be set in any order.

[jerryfreak]

the 789 seems to be more in my price range.

is that configurable for what tags it displays?

[timps]

the 789 seems to be more in my price range.

is that configurable for what tags it displays?

Never used one.

The settings to configure the order and which  tags you display are setup using PMM on your computer and are  a function of the Phatbox rather than the head unit.

Mine has three lines of display the first is not configurable & is factory set at playlist number & track number

The second two lines are user configurable and an educated guess would say this is the same for all Kenwood head units that are CD text compatible but some may only display one line of user configurable text.

[SteveC]

I'm pretty sure I can configure all 3 lines of the display on my 789(?) - I know I can set them all in Sirius mode. I don't have my DMS in this car right now, so I can't test it with the phatbox at the moment.

One thing to note is that you don't choose which tags to use, per se. IIRC, in PMM you select what the phatbox outputs as the album and song tags, so it's entirely possible that only two tags are available at the headunit. Some experimentation would be in order.

[timps]

One thing to note is that you don't choose which tags to use, per se. IIRC, in PMM you select what the phatbox outputs as the album and song tags, so it's entirely possible that only two tags are available at the headunit. Some experimentation would be in order.

You can choose more than two tags & which tags to display with “edit patterns ”  this is how I did it on this link http://forum.phathack.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1136696440

[SteveC]

My point is that I'm not sure if the Keg actually sends more than two values - Playlist ID and Song Title - to the headunit. You can cram as many MP3 tags into those values as you like by editing the patterns, but that doesn't turn it into 3 lines of text on the headunit.

[timps]

Having read your post again (slowly this time) I understand what your getting at.

It was the

so it's entirely possible that only two tags are available at the headunit

that stuck in my mind when I replied sorry .

And you are correct in that the Kenwood can only display a maximum of two lines of CD Text  when used with Phatnoise PMM  but you can set it to display any or all of the 7 different Tags on each of these two lines of text.

The third line (in my case) displays play list number & track number  no matter what the other two lines are set for so you can get three lines of different text but you are unable to change what the third line displays.

Again sorry for any confusion