Mk2 fabia best budget stereo upgrades

[Justin55]

Hi I'm looking  to upgrade  my stereo in a 2008 fabia estate to one of these

All singing and dancing  units 

I've seen some on the various sites with mixed reviews mainly that they are slow etc

Ca  anyone recommend  one 

I'm thinking up to 200

Cheers  

[UrbanPanzer]

anything cheap with nav and all the gizmos etc etc from china will be slow, annoying and probably sound crap aswell.

 

You would be better off buying a decent single DIN unit, something like a Sony with bluetooth / USB inputs and play the music either from your phone (spotify for example) or off a mem stick.

[Justin55]

Thanks mate

[KeithCheetham]

It all depends what you are wanting, I am running a cheap Chinese Android unit, think it was about £60, on which I am running sat nav  (Co-Pilot free from the Google store which receives updated maps occasionally), Torque and all my music from the internal memory storage. I am also using DAB via Nextbase DAB external unit but this is not very strong signal wise, maybe due to the supplied ariels quality, or could be due to local signal strength. This was not a straight swap for the Dance unit and has been a bit of a learning curve on suitable apps for the DAB input, and wiring. The main issue with the Chinese units is that while they advertise something such as Android 10 they may only have Android 8 and that may be a "lite" version. The main thing to remember is that a modern smartphone in a dash or windscreen holder can do most things that a headunit will do.

[Justin55]

Thanks for that , as it happens I did exactly that last night I bought a cheapy for 89 euro from Ali express 

It should do me for now 

I will update  as and when  I have some  more  info, 

Thanks again for the advice 

[KeithCheetham]

 You may need an in-line aerial booster as it is built into the Dance unit, and possibly an adaptors for the existing aerial plug (Fakra?) into the head unit, or the existing plug cutting off and replacing. Compare the spec of the socket in the new unit with the dance.

[Justin55]

Ta Keith.i may come back to you when it arrives 

[KeithCheetham]

On 13/11/2022 at 15:55, UrbanPanzer said:

anything cheap with nav and all the gizmos etc etc from china will be slow, annoying and probably sound crap aswell.

 

 I am unsure if this is actually Android units in general, or the cheap/cheap Win CE units that generally only have association to "Android" in the title. The other issue may be the Ram fitted, mine is a 1Gb but they are now being advertised with 2Gb.

[Filipelol]

I think the best bang for buck are the RCD330 and RCD360+

 

I got the RCD360+ model, they say it's oem components, and the outside bezel and buttons are chinese

 

The RCD330 is oem from the chinese vw cars, and they change the software for english and different languages/cars 

 

I got it from aliexpress, there are different sellers, I got mine from lemonshark, took 5 days to post from china, and I think it came to about 250€ 

 

It was plug n play, works with steering wheel controls and has bluetooth, apple carplay and android auto, depending on the version you get.

 

Highly recommend 👍

[John Fisher]

Hello, I replaced my dance unit with a JVC KW-DB92BT. The improvement in sound quality was a lot. It also has DAB radio and a cd player. These units seem to be getting hard to get. The fitting instructions were fairly poor but managed to get it going in the end. It needs a wiring kit to fit the new unit to the old wiring and also a new surround so that it fits the bigger hole that the dance unit took. The dab aerial sticks on the windscreen about half way down the A pillar. I didn't replace the speakers they seem fine.