Kenwood DNX-6960 Review

spearfish25

I recently had the Kenwood DNX-6960 installed in my 370Z Sport/Touring (aka, had to replace the Bose headunit) and figured I'd give the community a little feedback on the unit. It's been 'in' for a week now. While I wouldn't say it's a homerun, overall I'm very very happy with it.

The good:
Beautiful screen, packed with features, and EXCELLENT navigation. Kenwood really put all the bells and whistles into the Excelon line. The 6960 comes with Parrot bluetooth handsfree, A2DP streaming (but not for iPhone, thanks Apple/ATT), optional Sirius or XM satellite, optional HD radio, Garmin nav with optional traffic, steering wheel control option, rear cam option, plays DVDs, controls your iPod/iPhone, 3 user selectable skins, ability to change background picture, ability to change the LED lighting of the unit's face. There's more and you can see it all on the Kenwood site.

It's missing a few things the big brother 9960 has. These include full voice control, 3D navigation with lane assist, and a few other things like 5.1 DD sound, etc. Frankly, those features weren't worth paying $600-800 more to me.

What I like:
Navigation: Garmin just gets it right. The navigation is intuitive and gives you all the info you could possibly want right on screen (time to destination, distance to destination, elevation, direction, etc etc). I installed the optional traffic tuner and it's really well implemented. The 6960 will route you around traffic hotspots every time. If you do end up in a jam, it tells you how long the delay is (time), the length of the delay (distance) and if there is a better route. Overall, I think it's worth the extra $120 so far for the traffic antenna.

iPhone control: very nice. You hook up the iPhone and you can stream both music and video to the unit, using the screen as the controller.

Parrot Bluetooth: people hear me much better than they did with the stock system. Two issues...see below

Audio quality: Very good. I don't get the full benefit as I'm still using the Bose amp and speakers.

Remote control: Initially I thought this was stupid but it's actually a godsend. You'll see why below.

Rear Camera: excellent. The system bypasses the camera feed through to the monitor on a cold start. So while it takes 20 seconds for the unit to boot, you have your backup camera in about 3 seconds from turning the car 'on'.

Movie playback: You can bypass the parking brake and play DVDs and iPhone videos through the screen. Great feature...dangerous while driving, but...great feature.

What I don't like:
Interface: Kenwood could have done better here. The touch screen buttons for most functions are small and difficult to use if you're driving along. i find I have to stabilize my hand by dropping a pinky on the ledge just below the touch screen to get better motor control for button pushing. Also, Kenwood has made many features take 3-5 button presses/menus to get to. Say you're listening to FM radio. You have to press List to get a station listing and then press the station button to choose it. If you want a preset, you have to open a different menu, but if you want a preset in FM2, you have to go back a screen, change to FM2 and then enter the next menu to choose an FM2 preset (to be shown in video of use below). This is a recurring theme with many things including iPhone control.

***this is why the remote control is KEY! You can't easily change bands, stations or presets using the touchscreen. But, the remote makes it a breeze. There are buttons for source change, FM1/2/3 change, station up/down, and you pick presets using the numbers 1-9 on the remote. Overall, the remote may be one of the most important parts of the whole unit.

Steering wheel controls: I blame PAC for this. You just can't get all the features you had before swapping units. I loved the buttons to start voice dialing and to end calls. So far with the PAC controller, no dice. There is also a delay in button presses which is annoying but you can get used to how long to hold the button to make it work correctly.

Interface with Bose factory system: You will lose your subwoofer control. The line output converter takes front and rear channel inputs (four total). The Bose amp then splits the rear into a subwoofer signal. While the factory Bose HU can control the sub, the 6960 through the Bose amp cannot. For now, we adjusted the rear/sub levels using the LOC pots. Fine tuning is then done by adjusting the EQ levels or shifting fade front/rear. It works fine, but this may be a reason for me to change out the amp and speakers in the future.

Bluetooth: There is a glitch currently where the 6960 only auto-connects to my iPhone about 50% of the time. The rest of the time I have to go into the menus and manually connect it. Kenwood says this will be addressed in an update this month.


Installation Pitfalls:
The install overall went well. However, there were a couple tricky spots, one being the Bose system. With the Bose system, you need a line level converter to adjust the output signal levels. We found that the rear speakers and subwoofer require higher levels than the fronts. My first trip home had a dead subwoofer and weak rear speakers. After turning up the pots on the LOC, all was fixed and working nicely.

The Sirius antenna was initially placed in the passenger side A pillar. I kept getting dropouts so we moved it to the dash. The Garmin nav antenna works fine in the A pillar though.

Videos:
Pardon the POS quality of this little video camera. I'll redo this when I have some time.

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2013 Cadillac V-Wagon, RIP Z

second_2_nun

nice writeup I'm def picking this up when i get my z!

caneman88

Any pics of your install I just installed the 9140 in my Titan good HU

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RedBullRR

Sorry to bring this back from the dead. But do you know if Kenwood addressed the reconnect bluetooth issue. It's really fkn annoying.

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2010 Solid Red Z: Mods: Stillen G3 Intakes | BC Coilovers | H&R 20/25 Spacers | Stillen Splitter | Stillen LW Pullie TBI | Red GTR Start | LED Interior | Kenwood Double Din

fairlady_Z

No Bluetooth reconnect issues here, but the other person on the line can't hear me, but I can hear them fine thru stock car speakers. Maybe a mic issue, but I was wondering if any of you guys are having the same problem? It could also be my phone (Motorola Droid 2) as I don't see it on the "official" phones that Kenwood supports.

spearfish25

I've contacted Kenwood five times. They can't tell the same story twice. The last time I spoke with someone, they said there was an update on the brink of release that would fix the connectivity issue. That was in March.

I'm never buying another Kenwood POS again.

__________________
2013 Cadillac V-Wagon, RIP Z