Dragging my S2 kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

[Heat Seeking Missile]

Tapes and tape players are not cool, nor do they sound particularly nice. So, yesterday I bought myself an Alpine CDE9881 RB head unit with iPod connection and spent about half an hour today fitting it.

After removing the old (really old) Pioneer tape deck,



I found an absolute jumble and mess of wires and home made connections behind there and immeaditely thought the worst....I'm going to have to hard-wire this in myself.



Once I'd pulled all the rubbish out, it became apparent that I didn't need to hard-wire anything at all. 15 minutes and numerous skinned knuckles later, this was the end result.




Its not as OE-looking as I was hoping for but, Alpine seem to be a top quality product and it sounds great with the Infinity speakers that were already in the rear doors.

Mark

[philKS2]

Hi ... I've got to say...just replaced the original old cassette player that was in my S2... with a Sony GT CD50Ui ( bargain at £120 including postage on Ebay).

It's NOT state of the art, boom-bass, touch screen etc etc... BUT...

It's amazing what a difference it makes. I reccommend anyone who's been like me and delayed buying a decent stereo to get on and do it.

The Sony takes an ipod (through cable into glove box), a memory stick thru USB on front, or aux via a mini jack, and runs my 10-disc CD changer.

It's 50 watts per channel, and sounds fantastic. I know I'm a sad oldie...but the technology has changed so much in the 13 years since my previous stereo !!!!!!

Being able tp play music off a USB memory stick means CDs REALLY are history.

Mind you... it hasn't got one feature my old stereo had... whenever I went over a bump in the road, the old stereo used to auto-mute the volume... a dodgy connection meant the volume gradually turned itself down. VERY annoying.

[S-Express]

Now re-wire the head unit with its own (and make 'em fat) +ve and -ve cables direct from the main in-comer (can be found in the passenger side next to the cill.
Once the head unit has its own power supply with low resistance, hi amperage cables, the inbuilt amplifier will be very grateful and as a result, give you a much better sound higher up the volume scale
n.b. you must do the earth as well as the +ve otherwise its a waste of time....

[Acidburn]

Nice headunit, I have normally always upgraded my headunits in cars, I've used alpine before but seem to have settled on pioneer for the general all roundness of functions/sounds it offers.