Eonon D2107 Car Stereo Review
I’ve recently replaced the OEM head unit from my 2007 Subaru Forester with an Eonon D2107 head unit. The D2107 is a 2 DIN unit with an 800x480 pixel touch screen, CD/DVD drive, USB + iPod support and Bluetooth.
There are several comparable models out there, but I ended up going with the D2107 mainly because it has rotary knobs for volume control and navigation.
What follows is certainly not a comprehensive review, but just highlights some things that may be of interest to others.
Installation
Installation was relatively straight-forward. I purchased an adaptor plug from Ebay to convert from the Eonon’s ISO plug to the Subaru’s wiring harness which saved a lot of soldering, but not all - I still had to solder the illumination wire and the ‘brake’ wire.
I had to widen the hole in the dashboard in order to accomodate the unit’s facia.
Illumination
When you switch the headlights on, the display dims (it dims very slightly and not enough in my opinion) and the buttons are also illuminated by LEDs so you can see them in the dark. This does not work unless you connect the illumination wire (marked ‘ILL’, indicated by green arrow in picture below) to the corresponding wire from your car’s harness. Eonon could have easily included this in the ISO plug but for some reason haven’t, so you have to connect that manually.
Video Display
By default, playing a video or viewing a still image (including from DVD or USB drive) causes the display to show a blue screen with a warning message. This happens even when the car is in park! To get around this, simply join the ‘brake’ wire to the ground wire.
Operation
File formats
One surprise for me is that this unit seems to have relatively limited support for media formats. I haven’t found any official documentation that lists what formats are supported but, by trial and error, I can say that it doesn’t support VBR MP3s (at least not at low bitrates), Ogg Vorbis or FLAC. It will play CBR MP3s and MPEG4 (AAC audio)
User Interface
The UI does have some nice aspects and is certainly useable. One big disappointment however is music playback - the interface is pretty bad. They have 800x480 pixels to play with and yet they’ve decided to cram the music list into a small box in the middle of the screen which is hard to read and even harder to navigate. There is no ‘home’ button; you have to iterate up through the directories to get to the root of the filesystem. There is no way to jump to a point in a song, you can only fast forward or rewind which is very cumbersome. Fast forward and rewind doesn’t even work with some file formats!
Another minor annoyance is volume control is too fine-grained. You have to turn the volume knob a whole revolution to get a noticeable volume difference. For me that is too much.
The responsiveness of the interface is slightly laggy but passable.
Bluetooth
The unit supports making and receiving calls and setup is simple. Unfortunately, it does not support phonebook - you have to dial the number from the phone handset or manually via the D2107’s touch screen. There are a couple of microphones built in to the front of the unit which seem to do a pretty good job (no support for external microphone). Streaming music from your phone is also supported and works quite well.