subject: Head Banging In Your Car [print this page] High tech spy gadgets are very popular now and the various James Bond movies have made them even more famous all over. There is plenty of demand for such gadgets and hence there are various manufacturers out in the market slogging for producing them. These gadgets may not be as good as the fictional ones in the James Bond movies but they do get close. Techmagnet.net is a blog dedicated for audio-video devices and also the high tech spy gadgets that come in the market. I feel honored that the manufacturers send them to me for review and I take a lot of hard work in testing them and then composing a review.This blog also covers car audio devices and I want to tell you about two such gadgets that I have tested before on the blog.
Alpine CDE-102 This is an excellent OEM replacement stereo. The sound quality is good but it is still miles behind audiophiles requirements. However, if you arent too particular about the sound quality, I will recommend you the Alpine CDE-102 for the features that it has to offer. I did have some problems while reading from bigger eight GB drives but smaller thumbdrives worked fine. They were detected really quickly. The system has a power output of 50 watts x four channels max. The average RMS output is 18 watts per channel. This is quite good for an entry level stereo system.
Pros:
Lots of supported formats - Alpine CDE-102 supports WMA, AAC and MP3 audio formats. There is also a USB port for plugging in a thumb drive and playing music directly through it.
Easy to browse There is a feature called percentage search which makes it really easy to browse through large libraries.
Cons:
No out of the box support for Bluetooth / iPod This needs additional equipment. You have to spend extra here.
Not enough preamp outputs - Alpine CDE-102 doesnt have enough pre-amp outputs for making this a serious starting point for building of the system
2. Alpine iDA-X305 is another cool car audio system. The interface is really user friendly and even people who havent used a car audio system before will get hang of it pretty quickly. This system is not a high end one and is just made for people who listen to a lot of AAC, WMA and MP3 music
Pros
Libraries are easy to browse through Alpine iDA-X305 makes browsing through huge libraries really easy through the QuickSearch function and two-way encoder scheme. I could easily locate the song that I wanted in seconds.
Cons
No CD player - Alpine iDA-X305 not having a CD player and this will certainly disappoint people who have a lot of discs in their collection.
But people having a lot of MP3 tracks on their computer will have little to complain here. I liked the extendibility of Alpine iDA-X305 through Alpines collection for add on modules. It also gives you the freedom to build your own tech experience one piece at a time.
