Custom Jobs (5)
Our guide for upgrading your car with high-end audio, video, GPS and more
February 1, 2005
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Alpine Mobile Multimedia Station IVA-D310
DVD/CD unit with retractable LCD headscreen |
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WHAT IF I WANT THE WORKS?
Until this point, we've looked at each upgrade piecemeal, a solution here and a solution there. Another way to approach this is to consider a soup-to-nuts soup-up. Alpine, one of the major players in car tech, makes most of the pieces required to turn your car into a living, breathing entertainment dynamo, a theater your living room would envy. Alpine's Jeff Fay recently described this scenario:
Start with Alpine's Mobile Multimedia Station IVA-D310, a one-DIN DVD/CD head unit with a 7-in. motorized retractable LCD touchscreen, yours for $1,600. Throw in Alpine's KCA-420i Interface Adapter for iPod ($100) and a satellite-radio tuner of your choosing ($50 and up). Navigation is next: the $1,300 NVE-N872A, which uses the D310's display, can be operated by remote control, touchscreen control and even voice control. As an added bonus, that same voice control can be used for hands-free manipulation of audio and video sources. For instance, when you hit the "speak" button and say, "iPod," the D310 will switch to the iPod. Say "play," and you can guess what happens. Not just whizzy but a feature that improves safety, voice control is extremely useful for programming destinations into the navigator. Alpine says it will offer realtime traffic updates from either satellite radio service by this summer.
That's just the front seat. For the rear, install two TME-M770 6.5-in widescreen touch monitors ($500 apiece) into each headrest, then manage the flow of video with the VPE-S431 A/V controller ($300). That lets you add a game console, or a second DVD player (DVA-5210; $700) or a TV tuner (TUE-T151; $200) so that Child A and Child B don't have to fight over what to watch. (In car-A/V parlance, this is called "multi-zone" entertainment.)
You can get true 5.1 surround sound in your car by connecting the D310 receiver to Alpine's MRA-D550 ($950), a "digital theater" amplifier which decodes the Dolby Digital or DTS surround sound, then routes it to the appropriate speakers. Because of Alpine's proprietary digital connectivity, you can even control the levels of each speaker independently via a visual interface on the D310. You would, of course, need an additional subwoofer amp.
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