Well, it happened. I finally got sick of the crappy Nav unit in the XK.
No Bluetooth, no aux input, no USB... It just wasn't working for me anymore.
I went a little (well a lot) overboard, and picked up a Pioneer SPH-DA120 with the "RadioPro 4" RP4-CH11 harness kit.
Some things worth mentioning. The input for the amplifier from the factory are only left/right with a different wire to control the front/rear fading. That caused some issues. If you just hook this unit up to the harness, front to front, left to left, etc. you end up with only the rear channels pushing sound. on an old school head unit, that might be alright. The problem her, is that all the bluetooth, navigation, messaging... basically everything interactive with this unit is only sent out the FRONT speaker lines.
After finding that out, I gripped and stomped around the house for a while. Then I pulled it all apart and rewired it so that the front speaker outputs went to the rear speaker lines on the harness. No ability to fade, but it doesn't seem to have any adverse affect on anything, and isn't bothering me.
There is a setting on the unit to "disable rear speakers", so now there isn't a fader option, and it seems that all the power from the 4 channels is dedicated to the "front".
That caused another issue. the volume controls were SO SENSITIVE that going up or down one notch was either too loud, or too quiet. Fortunately, Pioneer decided that it was a good idea to give me the ability to set the gain on each speaker output. So, after a little fiddling, I ended up somewhere between -15 and -20DB.
It has the ability to adjust the input gain of all the inputs relative to the radio. That's a nice feature.
After all that, the volume of Siri was SERIOUSLY LOUD! It took a little bit of hunting before i realized that Siri (including navigation) was controlled by the "alerts" volume control making it a little harder to adjust than it is on uConnect.
With the exception of the navigation directions in gauge cluster, I would have to say that i prefer this unit to the factory (8.5 inch) uConnect in my '14 Trailhawk.
On a side note. The hex bolts (screws?) on the dash are functional! I thought they were purely decorative. Most of them are actually holding the dash together. There are a couple that are for show, but most of them are functional!
Of course, I didn't remember to take pictures of the original carnage of disassembly...
