iDA-X100 or iDA-X305 for the iPhone?

This is my attempt to be involved in a participatory internet. As much as I use it, I don’t actually post a lot of useful information to the internet (except my movie reviews of course). Basically I search for product info, then I go out and buy it and never post anything back to the forums that I searched so long to find the info in the first place. But that ends now!

I recently had to buy a new stereo for my car as the old one died. To me, having a car stereo is a necessity, I did some snap research and decided on the Alpine iDA-X100. It’s actually a Digital Media Receiver which basically means it has a whole bunch of inputs and a radio, but no CD player. It was also designed to work with Apples iPod. This meant I could control all my music on my iPhone by just hooking it up to the car stereo, great news! I get all the album art, playlists and song search capabilities on my car stereo and I only lose a CD player that I never really used anymore.

But not so fast! It turns out that designed for iPod does not mean designed for iPhone. Had I done more research, I probably would’ve figured this out. But the iDA-X100 has a problem with the iPhone that manifests itself about 50% of the time that you plug the iPhone in. It will read the songs from the iPhone and start to play them, but there is no sound. This is a known problem and again, had I done more research, I most likely would’ve found it.

Lucky for me, in the week that I had the iDA-X100 installed (and was battling with it) Alpine released a new iDA-X305 which was made to work with the iPhone as well as the iPod. I went back to Car Toys and had them put the iDA-X305 in and wonder of wonders it works. I have run into the ‘silent audio’ problem twice in the two weeks I’ve had the deck but you just need to unplug/plug in the iPhone and it goes away.

I am really happy with the iDA-X305 and the way it lets me really access all the music on my iPhone. I previously was using a headphone connection to play the music via the iPhone and while that would still work, having the digital connection is a much nicer convenience!

Ok internet, I hope you’re happy now.

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