I was looking at upgrading my Sienna's sound system I was looking at a nice modern Pioneer 2DIN unit with Bluetooth, but then I had no idea which adapters I would need to retain the steering wheel controls. I really should've asked here first lol. I love my steering wheel controls for volume and mute. So I ditched that.
So step one, I got a Kinivo Bluetooth unit, hooked it up to a tape cassette adapter for now. The wires run behind the panel for the most part. The button is hooked up in whatever mystery button comes with the XLE maybe. The face is a main button that you briefly press to play/pause/answer/hang up calls, and hold it to activate your smartphone's voice activation -- in my case, Siri. Then there are buttons to skip or go back a track. Music streaming quality is very good. Voice is OK, the microphone will make your voice sound robotic but everyone hears me clearly otherwise. $40 USD on amazon.com or oddly $36 CAD on amazon.ca. No brainer since with the exchange rate the amazon.com unit would've cost me $44.80 CAD. I may eventually get an aux input adapter eventually but it's not too important at this time.
Next, I upgraded the speakers (Alpine SXE-1750 components in the front, Pioneer TS-A1685R in the back) and planned to drive them with an Alpine KTP-445U amplifier which I bought from Amazon. 1. The unit that I receive does not appear to be powering on, and 2. I found that the cassette deck's preamp doesn't appear to output a signal amplifiers can recognize anyway. I found this odd. I thought about tapping in high level speaker inputs which the amp supports because maybe the amp does work after all, but my stock amp's rear right channel was defective anyway. Sigh. The unit is sitting on my shelf right now while I figure out whether I should warranty or return it. I kinda lost the instruction manual unfortunately so I don't know if returning it will be an option.
I was still hell bent on keeping my cassette deck with its missing knobs. At the same time, my recent Lexus obsession started.
Lexus. Lexus must come with nice sound systems stock. I wondered if any of their amplifiers could be hooked up to the Sienna. Behold, the 97-02 Lexus ES300 amplifier, made by Pioneer. 195W on 5 channels, yes this bad boy has a subwoofer channel. A seller on eBay was selling these for $25, couldn't hurt to try?
Received it this morning. Hooked it up. Wow a remarkable improvement in sound quality. I can crank up the volume with very little distortion. Improved clarity on the high end and improved midbass on the low end. I will be dealing with the sub bass by adding a subwoofer over the coming weeks. The amp requires a 2 ohm subwoofer and I think it should be able to drive a 100-150W 8 incher so that's what I'll be sourcing. I'm thinking of placing the subwoofer between the driver and passenger seats in a downfiring format in an enclosure designed to take a little bit of weight. FYI, the subwoofer connections are the two empty pins in the smaller 6 pin connector that connects to the amp, between the rear speaker outputs.
Just one very minor little quibble, the amplifier appears to be sensitive to alternator noise and dimmer noise. The alternator noise I will likely tackle by adding an inline ground loop isolator on the 12V power supply but this noise is barely audible. The really audible noise is the illumination/dimmer switch noise which goes away when I turn the instrument panel lights off. I've gotten it to find a sweet spot a couple of times where the instrument panel lights can be on at a certain setting although this sweet spot has to be refound each time the lights are turned off and on again. I'm not sure if another ground loop isolator here will solve it? I wonder as well if I should bypass the harness and just ground everything straight to the chassis.
Overall, I'm happy with the purchases. Both have immensely improved enjoyment while driving for a pretty small cost. Well except figuring out what I'm going to do with that Alpine amp.
