More new toys!

(Imported from rocketcat-v2)

Went to JB Hi-Fi yesterday and picked up a Sony CDX-F7710 head unit for the new Bora.

Installation was pretty easy as I made sure I got a new ISO Plug to easily make up the wiring harness for the back of the stereo. It was all quite straightforward - the wiring harness from the back of the stereo had a heap of coloured wires that I matched up with the coloured wires coming from the ISO Plug - only problem was that there was a red wire from the stereo that had to hook up to a yellow wire on the ISO Plug, and a yellow wire that hooked up to red.

I originally hooked it up according to the instructions in my Bentley service manual, but thought that maybe there was a mistake, as all the other coloured wires matched up 1:1, so I tried hooking it up red to red and yellow to yellow, only then the stereo didn’t have power when the ignition was off, so it lost the time and all it’s settings.

Anyway, once this was sorted, it was relatively easy to mount it in the dash and being a gunmetal colour (the main reason I chose it, other than the fact it was reduced by $300) it looks pretty good - nothing worse than having a car with a fully black interior and fitting a silver stereo!

For a Sony stereo, it’s got fairly tame graphics - you can turn off all the flashy animations which is good. It’s got a pretty easy to use interface and it’s got a rotary volume dial - which I much prefer over using buttons. It plays MP3 (and ATRAC as well, interestingly enough) and it’s got a Line-in on the rear that I’m planning to use to hook up the iPod.

All-in-all, not a bad unit - I wouldn’t have paid $700 for it, but $400 is pretty reasonable...

Apologies for the crap picture - it’s taken off Sony’s website and it’s all blurry.