Sony XNV-660BT 6.1-Inch WVGA In-Dash A/V Receiver with Bluetooth, USB, Satellite/HD radio ready, and Integrated Navigation from TomTom Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Pros: Start-up is under 5 seconds, Nav, DVD player, IPOD integration is great for the most part, Blue tooth, radio tuner has many presets and even has ability to search regular FM for genre specific stations (great for traveling). Buttons are large and it feels very user friendly and there aren't a lot of layers to get through when trying to switch through your sources.
Cons: Sirius Satellite radio integration is not good! It only displays 1 line and 8 characters and scrolls. In order to get all the information typically provided by satellite radio you need to hit the Display button 4 times (while waiting for scrolling time) to get the radio station name, song name, artist, and channel number. This is just not acceptable at this price level. Sony's website states "seamless" satellite radio integration, I don't quite understand that.
Second con is with the IPOD, but when your listening to a song and you want to go back through the layers to the album then artist etc, it doesn't let you. It will make you start at the beginning of your library and have to dive back into the artist then album to get back to where an ipod would normally go with one click. Kind of difficult when you just want to change albums by the same artist or even when you want to skip from track 2 to 10 without pressing seek 8 times.
Last con I care to discuss, SENSE ME software is only written for windows, and I don't have a windows computer, leaving this function of the radio completely useless for me.
This radio is going back this week, as I have called Sony and they have no answers for any updates in the future. Check my video review out as it was too big for amazons site:
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The Sony XNV-660BT A/V Receiver with Navigation delivers incredible audio and video picture quality and integrates navigation from TomTom. With the most accurate maps and over 1 million more miles of road in the US than others, plus features like USB 1-Wire connections and Bluetooth technology, you're ready for the road trip of a lifetime--not to mention your daily commute.

Incredible Audio/Video Picture Quality
6.1-Inch Touchscreen Display High-resolution TFT (WVGA) 6.1-inch touch screen display that will inform and entertain you, making everything easier to control with gesture command and on-screen touch buttons. Separate audio and video power supply circuits provide added clarity.

USB 1-Wire Connectivity Connect, charge, and control your iPod, iPhone, Walkman player or other compatible USB devices via the USB 1-Wire on the rear of the unit. You can also view metadata like song title and artist on the front display.

Integrated Bluetooth Technology Taking calls and enjoying streaming audio has never been easier with the XNV-660BT A/V Receiver with Navigation featuring Bluetooth technology. Connect compatible devices and easily choose between Hands Free and Phone Book Access or Audio Streaming.

Plays DVDs/CDs and Digital Files The XNV-660BT A/V Receiver with Navigation accepts just about every digital format you'd want on the road. The XNV-660BT can playback CD or DVD and MP3/WMA/AAC/JPEG/MP4 (Simple Profile) CODEC files.

Satellite Radio/HD Radio Ready The XNV-660BT integrates seamlessly with Satellite Radio and HD Radio using Sony Bus adaptors so you can receive digital satellite radio or HD Radio broadcasts.

Advanced Sound Engine With EQ7 The Advanced Sound Engine uses EQ7 equalizer, adjustable LPF/HPF crossovers, Listener Position calibration, DM+ advanced sound restoration, Rear Bass Enhancer, and Center Stage Optimizer to create an ideal in-car listening environment.

Integrated Navigation From TomTom The Sony XNV-660BT A/V Receiver with Navigation features TomTom navigation and delivers incredible audio and video picture quality. TomTom is the only company to incorporate real world, real-time feedback, providing the most accurate maps available. Preloaded Maps of US and Canada TomTom navigation provides the most accurate maps with over 1 million more miles of road in the US than other GPS brands.One Year Free Map Updates Ensuring that the digital map content remains completely up-to-date. Included in the box provides 4 verified US and Canada map updates for the first year.TomTom Home Software TomTom Home makes it easy to get new software, download new maps, access free content and more. Simply bring the exclusively designed TomTom Navigation Module from your car and connect to your computer via USB.IQ RoutesTomTom IQ Routes Technology puts the driving experience of millions of TomTom users into your maps to shave time off even the shortest trips. Calculates the fastest route possible based on time of day. With TomTom IQ Routes you'll always drive the smartest, most efficient route. IQ Routes saves you time, fuel and money.
Traffic isn't the same during Monday morning rush hour as it is on a lazy Sunday afternoon. Heavy traffic, rotaries, traffic lights, and even pedestrians can slow you down. The route you need changes depending on the day and time, so the shortest route isn't necessarily going to be the fastest. With TomTom IQ Routes you'll always drive the fastest route.

Advanced Lane Guidance* TomTom Advanced Lane Guidance gives you extra clarity when navigating difficult junctions by showing you which lane to take, so you won't miss your turn or have to make sudden, dangerous lane crossings. Photorealistic images and a pulsing green arrow indicate exactly which lane to use, so you can go confidently.

Spoken Street Names When driving to your destination, the XNV-770BT will announce turn-by-turn directions, including street and place names.

6 Million Points of Interest Preloaded with the locations of millions of gas stations, restaurants, hotels, hospitals and more.

QuickGPSfix GPS data that predicts satellite positions and enables quicker GPS pick-up. Faster satellite pick-up means quicker start to the journey.

Help Me! Emergency Resources Menu Comprehensive Help Me! menu to assist in any emergency. Quickly obtain address information to the nearest help location (hospital, police station, etc.). First aid guide also provides info on what to do if an accident occurs.

*Feature only available in the US and Canada

What's in the Box
Sony XNV-660BT A/V Receiver with Navigation, RM-X170 Wireless Remote, CD-ROM (Application Disc), Installation Hardware, Microphone, Navigation Module, User's Manual, Installation Manual

About TomTom Founded in Amsterdam in 1991, TomTom has established itself as a global leader in navigation by being an innovative company with a strong brand, clear customer focus, and high quality products and services.
TomTom is the world's leading navigation solutions provider with navigation products sold in 30 countries and in over 20 languages. To further our commitment to car navigation, TomTom acquired Tele Atlas maps in 2008 so we can continually provide the most up-to-date maps and intelligent routing.

We have our own mapping company! Did you know that every year roads change by up to 40% in high-growth areas? Tele Atlas manages this by using the world's most comprehensive systems to identify and incorporate these changes into our maps with unprecedented levels of speed and accuracy. All TomTom devices benefit from the Tele Atlas advantage--more coverage, more points of interest, and more freshness and accuracy.

Why TomTom? At TomTom, we believe that personal navigation should be as easy and safe as possible. We develop smart technology that gives you straightforward solutions, innovations to make life easy.

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Car Cassette Adapter For MP3,iPod,XM,CD,MD,Sirius Review

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(More customer reviews)What I wanted was to use an FM transmitter to pipe my iPod and my Sirius radio. Unfortunately I live in a big city (Phoenix, AZ) and in my route to work the radio stations change just enough that I cannot find any FM stations to transmit on without interference. I have a 2002 Porsche Boxster S and for whatever reason, Porsche put a tape deck in that model stereo. I bought this tape adapter and presto no more FM transmitter! I had to make the modification mentioned in a review for "Coby CA-747 Dual Position CD/MD/MP3 Cassette Adapter" to bypass the automatic tape flip feature. (It seems to be fairly common for people to have to do this with tape adapters.) The Porsche unit has a door that flips open and closed to access the tape deck. This door must be closed for the unit to play. I had to carefully feed the tape adapter cord through the face plate in a place where it did not pinch it upon closing the door. This turns out to be the middle top of the face plate.
This tape adapter unit works like a charm. I've only had it for a week but I already love it. One thing I noticed in using a tape adapter with the ipod is that the sound quality improves if I only turn the ipod volume up to 50% and use the stereo volume for the rest of the sound. I plug this adapter unit directly into the iPod. I don't notice any static or distortion now that I balanced the iPod volume.

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Grace Digital GDI-IR2500 Wi-Fi Internet radio Featuring Pandora, NPR On-Demand, Sirius and iheartradio Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)I have owned the Grace GDI-IR2500 now for a couple of months, and I will try to be as brief as I can with my thoughts and comments.
Build quality: Fair - not terrible, but not great. The black vinyl or plastic wrap used over the wood housing is attractive but not assembled very well, with very noticable imperfections/large wrinkles on both the top front right corner and the top back right corner. The controls are of comperable quality to those of a $10 clock radio, and will probably start wearing out after a couple of years of heavy use. The 4-line LCD display is relatively easy to read.
Setup: If you have ever setup any other wireless devices such as a laptop, smartphone or other wi-fi enabled device, it is not much different and pretty straight forward. The only area that can be somewhat cumbersome is the same issue I have in other areas of operation: the poorly functioning and designed remote control. The remote basically offers up and down keys for entering a security key, scrolling through each number and letter of the alphabet, locating the character you need, then selecting, then scrolling... you get the picture. A remote offering a numeric/ABC type of entry would be preferred, and for $130 to $150, should be included.
Station selection: Good - but not nearly as good as some of the applications offered on iPhone, Android, and Blackberry smartphones such as WunderRadio and RadioTime. Searching for stations is also poorly thoughtout. Other than Clear Channel Communication's "iHeartRadio" offering, you can't even search stations by state, let alone city - and searching by call letters is again an entry where you have to scroll through every letter of the alphabet and enter each character, which is a pain.
Connectivity: No complaints, it starts up relatively quick once you have your wireless settings configured. Regarding connecting to a station url, it depends on the stream format... most .AAC streams begin playing quickly, .mp3 streams fairly quick, .WMA streams a few seconds longer, but none are frustratingly slow. It also played all streams consistantly for hours at a time without interruption.
Sound quality: Fair at best. I guess for $150 I expected this radio to sound at least as good as some of the $50 Sony or Panasonic tabletop radios from the past. There is no reason it couldn't on most mid-to-higher kbps streams - but Grace chose to cut costs on one of the most important aspects of any radio - the speaker - and the speaker quality is about on par with that of a $20 GE table radio. That would be OK if the radio cost $50, but for what these relatively cheap to build radios cost the consumer, I expect the materials and components used to be of higher quality.
Remote Control: Poor quality, poor layout, and many times you have to hit keys two or three times to get a response. I thought the included battery might have been old, but the Duracell replacement battery I bought did not improve the remote's performance.
The bottom line: If you want an internet radio that somewhat gives you the look and feel of your old tabletop radio, and you use the presets a good part of the time, it's an OK radio. I don't hate it, and have actually had some fun with it, but in reality it is worth about $79 tops. I would however look at the Logitech Squeezebox before this or any other internet radio. I played with one at Best Buy a couple weeks back and the build and sound quality is light-years better, and it also offers an optional battery pack.
If the old-time feel of a tabletop radio isn't important and you are wanting to just tune in stations from around the world and have decent sound quality, and if you own an iPhone, Blackberry or Android smartphone with 3G and/or a wi-fi connection, I recommend one of the many decent wireless bluetooth speaker systems (I own the Altec Lansing inMotion SoundBlade Bluetooth A2DP Speaker/Speakerphone, which I paid $50 for, or the Creative D100 Wireless Bluetooth Speaker, both of which sound much better than this Grace unit, and operate on either the supplied AC power adapter or batteries) and install some free to very cheap apps on your smartphone such as Pandora, Slacker, Sirius/XM, iHeartRadio, Yahoo Music, WunderRadio, and TuneIn (formerly RadioTime.) The beauty of smartphone apps is that you can also use them with many new car audio systems (wirelessly via bluetooth or wired via an auxiliary in jack), at the office, at the beach, and pretty much anywhere you have either 3G data or a wi-fi connection.February 20, 2011 note: I find it interesting that in one day my post went from "27 of 29 people found the following review helpful" to "27 of 37 people found the following review helpful"... yes, in one day, and over 4 months after the review was posted. Seems as though some Grace employees or dealers might not have appreciated my honesty.June 10, 2011 note: I have also owned a Logitech Squeezebox radio now for 6 months, and it is an outstanding radio, and a vast upgrade from the Grace radio. Build and sound quality are far superior, and the various interfaces available to control the unit, including the optional remote control, Android application, Squeezebox Server computer software, and mysqueezebox.com are all far superior to anything Grace offers. Also, while Grace touted that their radios supported iHeartRadio, this is no longer the case, with iHeartRadio confirming they will no longer be supporting Reciva, the radio station database used by Grace Radios.
Buy the Logitech Squeezebox radio.

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Grace Digital GDI-IRA500 Wireless Internet Radio Adapter Featuring Pandora, NPR and SIRIUS Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)The Grace Solo internet radio does a great job connecting the world of internet radio to my home stereo.
The Solo is good looking and connects simply out of the box. Plug in the power, connect the standard rca cable to your stereo, turn it on, choose your home network and within 5 minutes you are listening to Pandora or one of the 17,000 radio stations. While Grace has many models of standalone table top radios, I like the Solo because it connects directly to my home stereo (or even powered speakers). The solo even has a headset jack.
When you first take the Solo out of the box, you see the Solo internet radio tuner, a power cable, manual, remote and rca cable to connect to your stereo. It uses WiFi to access the internet. Make sure you have Wi-Fi in your home, and that it is strong in the area you put the solo. The Solo does have a built in Wi-Fi signal meter to see how strong your Wi-Fi is. So if you put it on the bottom shelf of your stereo system and notice a weak signal you may want to put it on a middle or top shelf. The Solo works with any 802.11b,g or n router and has a built in 802.11g receiver.
After you connect to your wireless network (you will need your wireless WEP or WPA password to do this) and set the time zone on the clock, the Solo remembers everything (including station presets) when you unplug it. That is nice because no one wants to type their wireless password in more than once.
Once you are set up you can start searching for stations by genre or location or type the call sign of the station directly into the radio. You can do this via the remote control or directly on the unit itself. I like Pandora. In order to listen to Pandora you have to register your radio at Grace's web site [...] . After you create a Grace account you enter in your Pandora user name and password on the Grace site and the radio is linked to your Pandora stations. Within a minute your Pandora stations are on the Grace radio in the `personal radio' folder. Pretty cool. You can create stations on the Grace Solo, although I prefer to do that on the Pandora web site. Grace plays SIRIUS and Live365 as well but I do not have SIRIUS or Live365 VIP accounts so I can't comment on that.

I really love the Grace unit. I get all my local radio stations #my FM reception is bad at my house but my favorite FM stations - most do these days - broadcast over the internet .. so I get those, Pandora, NPR and I even started listening to the BBC 4 which is kind of cool#.
Obviously I give this a 5 star. The only negative I would say is that on a few random stations they do not show the song metadata (they all show the station metadata). I'm not sure if that is because the station is not sending it or what. You get the station and song metadata for Pandora which is the most important for me. Oh - you can even thumbs up or down Pandora songs .. very of cool.

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Convenient Access to Online Music in Your Home AM and FM radio stations all over the world stream their audio content over the Internet. Grace Digital Audio's "Solo" product line of Wi-Fi Receiver and Media Streamers allow you link this massive amount of free content, as well as a variety of pay Internet radio services, conveniently and efficiently to your stereo or home entertainment system. Setup is simple, all you need is access to a broadband Internet connection and a wireless router. Acting like any wireless device, once configured to the Wi-Fi signal(s) available and its security, if any, the Solo Wi-Fi Receiver provides quick access to literally thousand of Internet radio stations and podcasts from your home stereo without having to fire up a computer. In addition, users can listen to the hottest premium online music services like Pandora, Live365 and Sirius*. Easy access to thousands of free and premium Internet radio content streams without using a computer. View larger.

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