The Gadgets Page

The stock stereo system in my car is probably the most proprietary system on earth. It was used for only a few years in only a few makes of German cars, and there are literally no 3rd party components or options that can be added to the system. It uses a fiber-optic loop, so there’s no way to adapt typical audio components to it without creating a custom fiber-optic bus adapter. This is exactly what Dension did when they came out with their ICELink Plus I2O adapter for the iPod.

I had an iPod (or rather, my wife had an iPod) and I am a geek, so I had to get it connected to my car.

Quality

Quality is actually a huge problem for Dension. The first unit I received (from logjam electronics was defective. This cost me $250 dollars at the Benz dealership to find out. Logjam was excellent about replacing the defective unit—far better than I expected. They cross shipped another unit, and I took it back to my Benz dealer for another try.

This time, they got close: Everything worked just fine, but after 15 minutes or so, the unit would shut down and take the radio, integrated phone, and navigation system down with it. They had to remove the unit to keep the rest of the audio system functioning. Flush another $350.

At this point, I was frustrated. Each attempt at the dealer involved a lot of effort, and the dealership was being very good about accomodating me.

This time, I called Dension directly. The support technician listened to the trouble and told me he thought I had a unit with “bad firmware” (i.e., a version with known bugs). I told him that I’d already had one defective unit, and I wondered whether any operational units actually existed. He assured me that they do. But I’d been down this road and was running out of money I could spend on the project without my wife killing me.

I then mentioned that I only lived about an hour from their facility and would be willing to drive up and have them install it. They happily accepted, so we scheduled a time.

I took my car up, and their lead support technician started taking my dash apart. But it became apparent that he didn’t really have the tools or experience to perform a non-trivial car stereo installation. After two hours of waiting around, he finally gave up, handed me a third new unit, and told me to take it to Ed & Al’s Autosound to have installed. So, after being assured that this unit worked just fine and that he had just bench tested it, I left. When I got to the Ed & Al’s near my house, I stopped in an scheduled an appointment to have it installed.

To make a long story short, the third unit was also defective–the installer at Ed & Al’s could not get it to power on or to power the iPod. This intrepid installer disassembled the main module and found that the power supply jack had a broken solder joint. He got out his own soldering iron to fix it, and viola, everything worked. They put everything back together and charged me $170 for the installation.

So, to make a long story short, the initial quality problems are terrible. For long term quality, there is sometimes an issue with the unit not playing sound after turning the car back on unless I disconnect the iPod. While annoying, it’s easy to solve and not particularly critical. I presume that this will be fixed in a firmware update.

Usability

The ICELink Plus replaces a stock CD-Changer, which means that in many automobiles you can’t have both. But in all honesty, once you’re iPod is connected to your car stereo you’re probably never going to use your CD changer again.

The ICELink Plus is a piece of cake to use: Plug the iPod into the charging cradle or cable (your choice—I put mine on a cable in the glove box) and your in-dash head unit will drive the iPod. Each “CD” in the changer is a playlist—the ICELink Plus maps the first five playlists on your iPod to the five CDs that a stock Kenwood CD changer supports. Then, within each playlist, the track change changes the song you’re playing. Some automobiles support reading the text from the iPod and displaying it on the stereo or nav system display. Mine doesn’t, but the Dension application on the iPod displays the artist and song in a large font, so if you’ve got iPod in the cradle, you’ll have no problem seeing what’s playing.

The big feature for me was being able to change playlists and songs from the steering wheel stereo control buttons, and having the whole thing muted automatically when my connected phone rings—and here, the ICELink Plus does exactly what it says it will do.

Similar Models

The ICELink Plus is available for many different kinds of vehicles, with some components in common and some unique for various vehicles. Prices vary from $200 to $400, depending on the complexity of the integration problem and whether significant competition already exists.

Conclusion

The Dension ICELink Plus is an expensive solution for people who want their iPod integrated into their stereo system. The initial quality doesn’t come anywhere near the price point, and because most consumers won’t perform the installation themselves, all quality problems cause snowballing expenses.

Retailing for $400, the unit is as expensive as the iPod. But that was far from the only expense involved: I spent $800 across three attempts to get it installed and took a day off of work to go to the factory to have them try to fix the problems. Further, the installation had to replace the CD changer that I’d spent $1000 on when I bought the car. Throw in the cost of the iPod and the unusable CD Changer, and I’m down about $2500 on this project.

I can’t recommend any directly-connected iPod systems that don’t come with a warranty that covers installation labor. Frankly, unless your car has a factory option for an iPod connector or uses a very typical stereo system, you’ll be way ahead by using an FM radio transmitter such as the Griffin iTrip or the Belkin Tunecast II.