Howdy,

 

I recently had an Ezi-Dab proffesionally fitted to my 58 plate Octavia. It cost £285 for unit and installation (including internal windscreen mount antenna). Having an inquisitive toddler I thought the more expensive 'integrated' option would be better than having cables trailing all over.

 

After a couple of weeks of annoying signal dropouts (on BBC and Absolute stations) I decided to give up on the windscreen antenna. On my daily commute from Nottingham to Long Eaton I would typically encounter a dozen or so drop-outs of signal - these became particularly annoying when stuck at traffic lights without any signal. I decided to spend a further £250 and have a Hirschmann Auta 16V DAB amplified roof mount DAB / FM / AM car aerial fitted. As expected this delivers a much better signal although I still experience the odd drop-out. Although a significant amount of cash lighter I am satisfied with the radio side of things.

 

The Ipod interface is very disappointing though. The sound quality is poor when playing music from my Ipod via the USB connection - the same tracks played from the Ipod through the Aux connection sound so much better. After a week of trying it out and eliminating leads etc. I took it back to the installer and they agreed the sound was poor and 'distorted'. They have since swapped the unit(or at least they're telling me that) and it still has the same poor quality sound. Has anyone else experienced any issues with the Ipod interface? Does a USB lead provide poorer quality sound compared to standard 3.5mm aux lead? Or, is it a superior connection that just highlights poor quality downloads (256kbps). The tracks I've ripped at 256kbps from CD do sound better (not as good as aux) than standard 256kbps downloads.

 

I've only found one other review that mentions this issue and that was for the Pure version of this unit.

 

Apologies if I've rambled a bit - I'm a wee bit sleep deprived at the moment. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Cheers,

Beeskodia.

 

 

256k is actually a high bit rate , esp if talking about vbr. USB is digital with the decoding done by the HU. What are you using to encode? , lame?