DPSM

Posted on by Ian C.

I heard a DPSM installation today (it’s actually the second time I’ve heard one – but the first was very unimpressive, there must have been something wrong!)

MINI friend Keith (MisterMINI on MINI2) had the DPSM installed in his MCS at MINI of Peabody and I happened to be there yesterday to see some of the early install work (basically all panels in the car get removed), and today when the install was finished … and WOW it sounds incredible!
There’s much too much volume available – my ears rung for an hour after leaning in to listen … we basically shut the doors, opened the hatch, stood about 6ft away and were almost literally blown away!

The DPSM speakers provide excellent bass and higher frequencies both in the doors and in the rear position – much better than the stock system or the H/K (which puts bass only to the rear, and highs only to the doors); this comparison pic of the DPSM rear speaker and the removed stock 6×9″ gives you an idea of the abilities of the new system (you can see that the rear speaker has a small co-axial tweeter which helps it give the highs):

The DPSM harness is amazing – they didn’t compromise on wire gauge, and the amp is more impressive than the H/K one too, although it sits in the same location:


Keith – I’m looking forward to a report when you’ve tried it out for a while 🙂

Meanwhile, GP friend George is struggling to fit the DPSM into his GP – the problem there is that the rear 6×9 speaker positions are lost to the luggage bar, so George has to figure some other way to install those huge new speakers! Maybe my aftermarket choice for GPMINI wasn’t the best one after all!

UPDATE:
George has completed the DPSM install in his GP and contrary to MINI USA opinion it does work (of course!). He eventually installed the huge rear speakers into the GP rear storage area (where the rear seats go in a regular MINI) – they fit fine and should have enough air volume to work well. George cut into the underside of the storage cover, enough to remove the solid part but not damage the carpet, then used foam to seal the speakers against the underside – the speakers will be driving through the carpet, but that should be fine for low frequencies.

Aftermarket stereos in GPs

Posted on by Ian C.

The GP offers less in the way of audio entertainment than stock MINIs – unless you count the engine & exhaust noise 😉
One problem is that the luggage bar mounts where the rear speakers would normally fit, so there are only door speakers (a “woofer” and “tweeter” in each door).

It’s possible of course to rip out the rear of the GP and install amplifiers, speakers, subwoofers, etc – but I wanted a less “aggressive” install! I began by ordering a Panasonic 7703 kit from MikeyTheMINI in England – the great benefit of ordering from Mikey is that he supplies a simple “plug and play” kit, including that the steering wheel controls still work. I had Mikey include the iPod interface too:
Panasonic1.jpg

The Panasonic 7703 offers two significant benefits for GP owners: an external power supply booster provides 50Wrms/channel (double that of most aftermarket stereos), and the display color can be tuned to match the GPs amber …

As always, I first do a test install to make sure everythings working OK … but this was as far as I got!
Panasonic5.jpg

The problem I found was that iPod control, while it worked well, was very painful to use! The only way to select a particular artist/album/song is to select the category, then press “DOWN” repeatedly to get to your choice – this is VERY tedious when you start at “A” and you want to listen to “M” (or “Z”!)
You can’t turn the knob – that still controls volume – and you can hold the button to auto-repeat (no effect).
Panasonic9.jpg

If you mostly want to listen to random iPod music, or if you need a stereo that matches the GP interior, I recommend the Panasonic (in fact I have one available at a good price!) but it’s not for me …

So instead I switched to my backup plan. I knew that many Alpine stereos have great iPod control due to their “iPod full-speed” feature, and I’d checked out MINI friend Rich’ install at MINIsOnTop … so I visited Tweeter and had very helpful service including connecting an iPod cable so I could check out the interface.
It worked much better than the Panasonic: firstly you can spin the (volume) knob to click through the list, and secondly the “1”…”6″ (preset) buttons jump you a varying distance into your collection (so if you’re looking for someone near the end, press “5” or “6” to get close in one click).
The Alpine CDA-9857 was discounted $50 (end-of-year) so I bought one!

Of course I didn’t have plug-and-play from Mikey this time, so I made myself a wiring harness adaptor and installed it in GPMINI:

What I didn’t expect was the amazing sound difference that the Alpine has given me – even with the GPs limited number of factory speakers! The Alpine offers a “BBE” feature that manipulates the sound (see here) … the Alpine offers three BBE modes, and basically the effect is to dramatically enhance clarity, and also to “install” subwoofers in the car! That’s what it sounds like anyway.

Sound clarity seems to be improved by certain sounds / instruments / etc being “pulled out” from the music and highlighted – I hear sounds I’ve not heard before! Rather like the H/K effects, and similarly nice!
Low frequency performance apparently forces the factory speakers to work really hard, and provides a good simulation of subwoofers – admittedly it’s not quite as good as the subwoofers in GBMINI#3 but it’s close, and I wonder how much better it will be if I replace the factory door speakers with some aftermarket ones, and some Dynamat …

alpineatnight

UPDATE:
One curiosity: MINI of Peabody today couldn’t access the customer preferences configuration because of the missing factory stereo – we had to temporarily re-install it!

Joining the iPod craze

Posted on by Ian C.

(a little late maybe!)

In both GBMINI#2 and GBMINI#3 I’ve used a Kenwood head unit and Kenwood Keg to store music – the Keg stores 20GB of music (more than I care to load onto it) and has an excellent interface at the head unit, and reasonable software on a PC too.

However, the Keg is ancient technology now and support for it seems to be vanishing since the rest of the world moves to iPods! I’ve started using iTunes to buy music I don’t have, and to get it to the Keg I have to burn it to CD in iTunes, then encode the CD into MP3 format, and manually type in the title/artist/etc because iTunes doesn’t burn that to the CD.

There’s also podcasts, especially White Roof Radio [woofcast] which I’m rather enjoying! So recently, I succumbed and bought an iPod!
[UPDATE: there’s was a shout-out to me on WhiteRoofRadio!]

It’s so much easier to move music onto the iPod – especially bought-from-iTunes stuff and the automatically handled podcasts; now I must replace my old Keg with iPod.

So trial one, I bought a Belkin TuneBase FM; I looked at many options and this one seemed nicely designed and easy to use – and the black matches GBMINI#3 (and the black iPod I bought).

Minolta DSC
Minolta DSC
Minolta DSC

It works quite well, but there is a noticeable loss of high frequency (corrected to some degree using the iPod EQ); also, it takes quite a few seconds before it starts broadcasting when the car is started – during that delay, the radio is playing annoying static.
Finally, there is some background noise and occasional upsets to the FM transmission when driving – I’ve tried a few different frequencies and while some are better than others, none are perfect.

So, trial two: I bought a Kenwood KCA-iP500 on eBay; I’d read some time ago that Kenwoods iPod implementation isn’t great, but I never expected it to be as awful as it is – at least in comparison with the Keg!

Firstly, it doesn’t display all the music information I’m used to – it’ll show the track title but only the artist / album / whatever if I select to play by artist / album / etc. And since the random function only works for the current “playlist”, I want to choose “all music” instead of a particular artist/album!

The head unit has a “magazine random” as well as “disc random” – these two work fine on the Keg, but the “magazine random” is disabled on the iPod (if it worked, it would give me random across all artists/albums which would somewhat resolve the display problem).
Also, when in random mode, the track number goes 01/02/03/… irrespective of the actual track number (it’s a random number sequence instead); I suppose it’s not important, but I’m used to better with the Keg!

Thirdly, it’s sluggish – press SCAN to switch between playlist/album/artist/genre/etc modes and it’s at least 3s before it’s ready to play again …

So now I’m thinking I need a new head unit – Alpine are pushing their superior iPod support; but maybe all head units are poor at the iPod interface; maybe it’s the iPod that limits random, artist/title display, etc.

So, if you have a good iPod solution in your MINI, tell me about it – how quick is it, how good is random mode, how good are the track info displays? And I’m not going back to the stock radio (no pre-outs to my amplifier)!