A real Avic-F90bt review hope this helps.

[michaelgates]

Okay so you want an Avic-F90bt, you want to think twice. I have one and unlike the preview that you have seen I’m going to give you the real deal. First let me start off by saying that this is a beautiful unit. It has the clearest screen that I have seen on a stereo unit and it is a pretty much all in one unit. So installing it is a relatively easy job. The only thing that is external to the unit or at least in my case is the XM turner. The unit uses something called MSN Direct which gives you traffic updates and gas prices unfortunately I don’t get any information that is helpful where I live at in South Jersey, about 17 miles outside of Philly.

Overall I like what this unit could be, but I am disappointed in Pioneer. This is not my first experience with Pioneer, previously I had an Avic-N2 and I liked some of the features that it had and I thought that everything was laid out in a thoughtful and intuitive way. This is not the case In the F90bt. To change your EQ settings is cumbersome, maybe because I’m used to the old way but I don’t think so, you have to go all the way back to the top menu and then go into settings and then into sound settings. Once you get to the EQ there are a number of settings to get the sound just the way that you want it. And the radio sounds really good in by Benz.

Lets get to the navigation, there are many things that I don’t like about the navigation system, for one the system doesn’t seem to be very accurate, for example if it is tell you to make a turn the screen might say make a turn in 100ft but really it might be like 5ft (yes I have the VSS wire hooked up, its no more accurate than without it), this may be a problem if you are on the high way doing 75 mph and exits are stacked on each other. There is only one English voice that has TTS (Text-To-Speech) and that is Samantha’s voice. So if you want the street names announce you will have to use her, but there is a problem. Instead of saying 1.2 miles she will say 1, 2 miles. The poi search resets my system, and if you do a poi search without narrowing it first, you will get an out of memory error. It is very difficult to search for example Best Buy, you have to go to the top menu, and then you have to select destination. Once you are there you have to select shop and then search through the 50 pages of results for Best Buy. So if you have your system bypassed, it makes it dangerous to do a search on the fly while driving or if you are at a red light you have to hit so many key strokes just to get it programmed. Also to cancel a route is very difficult, again if you are listen to XM or whatever, you have to go to the top menu and then destination and then cancel route.

The Bluetooth works well in my car, I guess due to the fact that the cabin is really quite, one thing that I don’t like, once you are in a call all functions on the radio are disabled, except the volume button for the phone and the hang-up button. One good thing is that you can still hear the routing instructions while you are in a phone call. I have not tried to stream any audio or video to the unit yet but ever since I synced the phone to my radio, every time I get in the ride my phone links to it, it usually takes about a minute or so. I also tried to sync my work phone Treo 650 and it would not sync, you if you want one of these and you have this phone you may want to look to upgrade or wait for pioneer to update the Bluetooth profiles.

The radio load time is very long. I have not connected my IPod to it yet, but it takes about 1-3 minutes to load, but whatever input you had on last will play while it loads, the problem is that the unit is unresponsive until it completely loads, after it loads the phone will sync.

SD music and video play back is pretty good. I have not crunched any videos designed for the native resolution of the screen, but the videos I had, played pretty good. One video I played on it was choppy but it was choppy on my phone as well, I guess a good rule of thumb is, if it plays good on your phone it will play good on your radio. Sometimes music will hesitate if you are in the radio playing with options. DVD playback is flawless. The black levels are not as good as your TV at home, but your are watching it in your car, if you want black levels watch it in your home theater system. The sound is awesome in my car but then again I have a 12†Kicker solo baric L7 hooked to an 1800 Watt MAudio amp, the only way to listen to music in car.

The radio doesn’t seem to pick up radio stations as good at the stock radio I had in the car but I think has more to do with the antenna setup that I had and the adapter that I had to use. I don’t get any annoying popping noises turning on and off my radio even though I have an amp hooked up to it, but that might be my amp, more than the radio just thought I would mention it. Also if I am in the ride jammin’ the radio doesn’t flash or dim when the bass hits but I do have a 20 farad capacitor in the trunk attached to the amp, that’s right 20 Farads. I was going to use a two amp system but when I had the radio hooked directly to the car it sounded so nice that I didn’t see the need to install the 800 watt four channel amp that I brought, so I will just sit on it for a later time. I do have the pioneer steering wheel adapter hooked up (CA-R-PI.133, ~$230, I could only find it on Ebay.com, and only from one seller) and it does what it’s supposed to do. I can adjust the volume and change the tracks. I think I can change the inputs too by using combinations but have not done that yet.

A family member has my IPod so I haven’t had a chance to check out the interface yet. I did try to hookup a 250GB 2.5†HD and it didn’t read it. I could not format the whole disc as FAT32 I think there is a 32GB limit so I made a 32GB FAT32 partition and formatted that and put some mp3s on it but It would not read. I have read in the manual that if you connect your IPod it will show the album art but it will not show the album art off your SD cards. The largest I have is 2 GB so I can’t tell yall if it will read HCSD chips.

Voice recognition does not seem to work well at all, but I have not really played with it that much. My road noise is very low, so I know that the radio can hear me fine but I have not really played with microphone placement or tried it with the car stopped. One thing that you may have heard is that you will not be able to give voice commands as far as navigation; hopefully they will correct this in the future.

The volume knob does seem a little cumbersome, but it works. The radio is loud, I guess that what 5v pre-out will do for you and the internal amp is nice, although I have not really check but I may have an amp somewhere in the car feeding my speakers but I don’t hear any distortions that some people have reported from the beeps and voice. I don’t know about the bug when turning the beeps off because I have not tried to turn it off. One thing that don’t like is when you getting navigation from the unit it beats you up with directions, like they are giving your too many directions for example turn right in 500 ft, turn right in 400 ft, turn right in 250 ft, turn right in 100ft, I mean it is a little ridiculous and I didn’t see any way to slow the directions up. Hopefully that can fix that; I would think depending on how fast you are going would dictate how often the directions would come. Also my Avic-N2 had a diagnostic page to make sure that all your signal wires where hooked up correctly and functioning right, but there is no such page on this radio, there is a constellation to show you how many satellites you are tracking but I would like to see that diagnostic page return for all you do it yourselfer’s out there like myself.

To some it all up I would, if you have a Z3, Z2 I would not upgrade. Although I always get a little worried about HD it I temp areas bee it cold or hot. I think that this will be a nice radio once they fix all the bugs. It would seem that most of the bugs can be fixed by a software update. I’m kind of surprised at pioneer for shipping a product that has not clearly been road tested but maybe they just wanted to get it out there with the reasoning that they can put out a software update that will fix all the problems, I guess we will see. I hope this helps anyone out there and clears up any questions that you may have, I apologize in advance if there are any grammar mistakes but I don’t really feel like proof reading this.

If there is something here that you would like me to try or have any questions please let me know and I will try to help.

[HiFiSi]

you have to go all the way back to the top menu and then go into settings and then into sound settings

If you are on any of the AV (ipod, radio, xm, sirius, SD card, etc.) source screens, there is a button at the top right of the screen that lets you cycle through the EQ settings. That includes the factory EQ presets as well as your custom EQ settings if you have them set up. It's right next to the function button. You can see it in this picture.

 

[michaelgates]

Yeah, thanks. I know that but they are presets, and then the customs one too, but if you just want to do fine adjustments then you have to go to the top menu and then AV sound under settings. I don't know about you guys but you but it takes weeks of tweeking for me to get my sound just the way I like it.

[skicrave]

Wow, that was hard to read, I gave up after the third sentence.

[jdmeyes]

Long read, but very in depth. Thanks a lot for the review.