tickerguy

Their larger drives have registered over 4 watts maximum consumption. Yes, the port is rated at 1.6A @ 5V but that assumes the port can run in "Type B" mode. "By the specs" that means the same port is NOT passing data. While passing data the USB (rev 1 and 2) spec says the bus power limit is 500ma. That's 2.5 watts, and you need some for the interface chip. USB rev 3 is the first revision that allows high power connections while data is also being run on the same port, but the NEX units are USB rev 2. Feel free to play fast and loose with the rules if you'd like but if you get bit

Just use a 2.5" (laptop) SSD; that's your best option. That "drive in a box" thing on Amazon is a bit expensive (but not ruinously so) however there are comments that it does not support TRIM. For this particular application that doesn't much matter, but I prefer to buy known devices from known manufacturers. This is a device that you might want to use for some other purpose at a later date, and it's nice to have one that will work that way. The SSD I'm using is a Vertex II that I happened to have laying around..... so my cost was just that of the enclosure. Note that the Crucial dr

Yep. BTW use a USB3 SSD enclosure. I like these; they're inexpensive and work well: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005EIGUD4/ref=oh_details_o03_s00_i03?ie=UTF8&psc=1 This comes with a double-USB cable (two USB "A" plugs and one micro-USB3 to go into the box.) For SSD use you need only one of the USB plugs, so you can thus buy a single cable such as this: http://www.monoprice.com/Product?c_id=103&cp_id=10303&cs_id=1030310&p_id=11168&seq=1&format=2 I mounted a piece of acetyl up under my glovebox on a pair of unused studs, lining the top side with velcro.

I use a 120GB SSD on my 4000 and it works fine. Format it in FAT32, however, because you can sort a FAT32 drive -- you CANNOT sort a NTFS one, and Pioneer brain-farted on this particular aspect of things when going through things by artist and album in "file" mode.

This is the reason I paid a small amount of money (under $20) once, to have a local GPS mapping app (with updates provided regularly) on my smartphone. It works perfectly well with cell reception turned OFF (or where unavailable), and thus leaks nothing back to anyone. Not one person in a hundred understands how this data mining actually works or how precise it is in aggregate. I do; I've worked in the general field since the late 1980s, and I assure you none of these firms have any interest in what's good for you -- only for them. WHEN (not if) that clashes with your interest you will

The biggest problem is that CANBus protocols are mostly-closed; this is much-more of an issue than just entertainment, and IMO it's unacceptable. Tied sales are supposed to be illegal unless the "tied" service is FREE for the life of the product. That's the law, and yet automakers manage to skirt the requirements (they "technically" get around it.) It would be nice if we had a choice but ALL of the automakers do this, which means there is no market force to change it available. I'm not normally one to back government intervention but there's a reason the Sherman and Clayton Acts were

"Regular/Normal" works fine.

You can run it off the red (ignition) wire; it will be "on" whenever the ignition is, but that's ok. That is typically good for at least 1 amp (most of the afternarket steering wheel control interfaces such as the PAC unit are); the actual power feed from the car, if you get it directly from the harness, is typically fused at a much higher level (3 or 5A is common.)

90% isopropyl is what I have used to clean LCD screens (plastic-faced) for literal decades. You put it on the CLOTH, not the screen.

Microfiber cloth. NO LIQUIDS! If you insist on using liquids 90%+ isopropyl alcohol on the microfiber cloth (NOT on the screen!) can be used. That should be safe. However, the lower-concentration (e.g. 70%) you typically find is not as it has too much water in it. Isopropyl alcohol is used to clean flux and such off boards during manufacturing, but you still have to be careful with the potential for shorts.

Correct. All SD cards over 32Gb require exFAT. The reason is fairly complex (I went into it in detail in the other thread); the short version however is there's no way around it. If you try to cheat you risk losing everything on the card without warning. exFAT is not in these head units because exFAT is a Microsoft-licensed thing so Pioneer would have to pay a fee to Microsoft for EACH unit sold, whether people used that feature or not. This is what we, as consumers, get for buying things from companies that collude like this in a form and fashion that drives up prices for eve

That card requires exFAT formatting and won't work, and if you reformat it you run the risk of it becoming trashed without warning, losing everything on it.

Yep. Most modern vehicles have an antenna amp and it needs to be hooked up; the usual connection is to either switched power or the amp enable wire. The Pioneer NEX radios do not have a "power antenna" wire, which used to be the one you'd use for that purpose. I recommend switched power (typically red in the radio harness) as that usually has an amp or so of capacity where the head unit's amp-enable wire is designed only to be a signal wire to an external amp to turn on.

Yes it does, especially considering how EASY it is to fix.

Yeah, this problem is Pioneer's, not the interface box's. Whether Pioneer will listen to complaints is another matter.

This is kind-of correct right up until the last sentence The response of auto speakers is grossly influenced by the door (or other surface) they're mounted in. It is basically impossible to properly match a speaker to the "enclosure" in a car (where the "enclosure" is the door or trunk) because you don't control the volume of the cavity (you get handed that) and you usually can't change it with absorption material in the door itself (most of the time you can't use absorption material in the cavity space at all.) What you can (and should) do is try to isolate to the greatest possible ext

Not at all. Remember that when it comes to microphone performance what you want in a given microphone changes from use to use. What I want for a presentation in front of a room that has a decent amount of background noise is a cardiod pattern with a low-frequency roll-off starting at about 100Hz because low-frequency energy in speech is mostly absent but rumble and rustle from things like the person's tie are not. My point is to capture the speech accurately. If I'm micing a singer I have a somewhat-similar set of desires. If it's an acoustic instrument I may want as near to full-ra

Correct. And the call to sort a returned list is literally one line of code in Android.

My ears are quite good as well but the auto-EQ can set the front and back EQ separately (or at least it appears to be able to, as it's measuring both separately!) and there is no way to do that manually! Well, not unless you have a rather expensive outboard 4-channel (or 5-channel) EQ anyway. That's one of the big challenges in a car -- the front and rear speakers are going to have materially-different frequency response curves due to the doors they're mounted in and other acoustic factors in the vehicle.

Actually you can. With AutoEQ on the manual equalization is on top of the automatic profile..... which is quite nice! From everything I can determine the head unit expects a flat microphone on the auto-cal input (which of course is a pipe dream, but it's far better for them to do that than to try to invert the response curve of a particular other mic!) -- so the better your mic is, the better your autocal results.

Handbrake works. Beware that if you have high-bit-rate encoded video it may not play. Note that the head unit itself has relatively low resolution, so that's wasted anyway in terms of quality -- but if you have pre-existing MP4s some may not work.

No I didn't, and yes, I have an MC20. The results it produces blow hairy chunks. Save your $20 and either use a good mic you own or find someone who has one.

I thought they might have, which is why I didn't know whether it would produce superior results or not. But.... it turns out it does, which strongly implies they didn't.

Turns out it was (bitrate problem) I took Handbrake to the original source and cut a MP4 with H.264 for the video codec at a size compatible with the head unit's display, and they play fine off my SSD. Of course this means downconverting a lot of my stuff if I want to play it in the car. Fortunately, most of the time I don't, and the few things I do (e.g. concerts and music videos) I'm as much interested in the music part as the video part if not more-so.

That should work pretty good.....