The Insight only came with a cassette deck, so I needed something with a CD player. Because of the new cell phone lawhere in Ontario (Must use handsfree), I decided to pony up some dough for a headunit with Bluetooth capability. Surprisingly, these seem to be relatively new and there aren't that many choices. After researching, I ended up with a Pioneer Premier DEH-710BT. It's their top-of-the-line single DIN Bluetooth headunit.
I had the install done by a place called Car Tunes in Allen Park, MI. I'm pretty much an electrical idiot. It's just something I've never been good at...so I leave it to the pros. The pricing itself was amazing. $309 US installed and out the door. With our strong Canadian dollar, this was a sweet deal! I'd be paying more than double this in Canada. A nice bonus was the place was right next door to a cigar place! I'm a fairly big cigar smoker. So as the install was being done, Import Queen (my girlfriend) and I each smoked a cigar and sat at this little bar they had at the window. They also had a lounge in the back. I had a NUB 460 Conneticut and Import Queen a CAO Bella Vanilla. YUM!! These lasted us about an hour or so. When we were done, the install was too.
What can I say? This is a sweet headunit, and I'm no audio/video weenie. It has every feature a very good OEM Bluetooth system has...and more. The Bluetooth system understands TTS (text to speech), and has a stereo microphone installed in the liner near the A-pillar. When a call comes in, the radio dims, you see who's calling on the display. You can initiate a call by touching the headunit or by the really neat little remote mounted on the steering wheel. Call clarity is crystal clean on both ends. I did have a weak connection the one call, but I just turned up the stereo, and was able to hear perfectly. Your phone book is loaded into the headunit, and you can scroll through it exactly like you can an iPod with a 3 line list. That's because the headunit had input from Apple and so it's directly compatible with iPhone/iPod products. But it works just as well with my POS LG8100 phone or Import Queen's primo Samsung Omnia. So no worries about compatibility just because this headunit had input from Apple. The headunit is Dual USB. You can have
both your iPod and iPhone plugged in at the same time. In a worlds first, you can do iTunes tagging right off the FM radio. Don't want to plug in via a cord? No problem...the songs can be streamed via Bluetooth from your device to the headunit! The display shows by artist, genre, and album. Your passenger can even control what's playing with
their iPod. It works seamlessly and my audio guru buddy was greatly impressed. I'm actually considering getting an iPod because it's so easy.
The display itself uses something called OLE. It's like LED, but the pixels are really fine and do full motion. They even have "screensaver" that are shown on the radio display and are liquid smooth. You can even have full motion "movie screensavers" that play. One of them is a drift race between cars and it's pretty cool! Another one is of the same movie, but this time it has active EQs showing on the bottom of the screen. You can choose between 10 different face screen choices. Obviously, the screen shows who's playing on the radio, the time, your phone bar strength, the time, and EQs if you want. The only thing I don't like is that the display colour is blue. It's not hard on the eyes (it even dims when you turn your headlights on), it's just blue. The rest of the controls in the Insight are red-ish. No biggie.
Other features are HD, XM and Sirius ready. The steering wheel mounted remote is very cool. The sound was amazing. Even though the Insight has only 2 speakers (and factory ones at that) this unit sounds very good. I dunno much about audio specs, but the headunit has a built in amp that does 50wx4. I was actually pretty shocked at the increase in sound quality. I does seem to keep better sound quality as volume is turned up.
Overall I'm really pleased with this unit and would recommend it to anybody. It first took me a few minutes to acclimate to the unit since it does so much. I did check in the manual how to do a couple of things, but the manual was clear and easy to follow. This is a feature rich headunit for sure. And the price was amazing. For those who have double DIN in other cars, they have a unit with pretty much the same specs but with Navigation for "about $100 more". We've pretty much decided we're putting one of these in our Lexus. Even though the Nakamichi sounds amazing, the Bluetooth functionality and GPS ability of the Pioneer makes it tough to pass up.
Here's the specs:
Pioneer USA - Pioneer CD Receivers
Here's a couple of quick pics (as always, sorry for the poor quality, I'm not good with a camera.):
Installed Pioneer DEH-710BT Bluetooth Headunit in Insight! SWEEEET!
