Upgrading the terrible 8” 2020+ CarPlay/AA Radio to a Kenwood & Maestro RR

Good info, it’s definitely a Maestro RR problem. After switching to the RR2 I have had 0 reboots.

Doing what you did is a good solution…I’m guessing your “retained accessory during cranking” feature still works? Since you only bypassed the actual power and not the ignition trigger wire, correct?

Curious, what backup cam issue you having? Edit: never mind I see the thread. Let me read through it and see what I think.

 

What is the retained accessory during cranking? thanks for looking! I appreciate it.

 

There’s a setting in the “OEM setup” section of the maestro’s portion of the head unit. Retained accessory during cranking is a setting where it will do exactly that, it will keep the radio triggered on while you crank the motor. In pretty much all aftermarket installs, if you turn the key to accessory for a second, the radio turns on….then if you go to crank the engine, radio reboots. Maestro prevents that from happening because it now applies accessory power to the radio during engine cranking to keep it on instead of rebooting. Factory radios already do this, it’s just an annoyance of going aftermarket.

It’s a great feature and I highly recommend turning it on. It should work as long as you only jumped the battery power and not the accessory power. The maestro needs full control of the radio’s accessory wire. I’m assuming the reboots from the old Maestro RR were due to poor circuitry inside that physically dropped the connection now and then on the battery power side. Especially since if you’re not running an amp, all the speaker power is also running through the Maestro. Kinda asking a lot of that little box at that point, though my RR2 has been up to the task for around a year.

 

Makes a lot of sense, thanks. I’ll check this out next time I mess around with the radio. I have a push to start, but when I crank the engine from accessory, I don’t think the radio reboots. (From memory)

 

Yeah, could be a keyed only problem. I flip to accessory quite often and stop there before cranking, so I’ve had lots of situations where the radio didn’t reboot whereas it would have had the setting not been on. So it’s been great for me for sure.

 

If I could go back in time and find this thread (and you felt like spending $$), I’d recommend the

$930 DMH-WC6600NEX Digital Multimedia Receiver with Wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, 9" Floating Capacitive Touchscreen, Modular Double-DIN, Built-in Bluetooth, WiFi and Amazon Alexa

DMH-WC6600NEX. Cleanest looking install in my opinion. I had a 4600NEX, but the rattling drove me crazy.

this:

To this

 

I brought over the DMX957XR from the Frontiers. Which it fit really well in those. So I used it initially in the Tacoma and then eventually when I upgraded to the DMX958XR (mostly for faster 3A USB charging which vast majority of radios don’t support), I decided to stick to what I knew. So what’s why I went with the 958, including the charging spec.

I’ve seen the Pioneer and it does look nice but I’m not unhappy with the looks of what I’ve got either. I don’t know what it’s worth but the audio shop I bought the 957 from originally really pushed Kenwood over Pioneer, JVC and Sony. I’ve used Pioneer with no issues in my Jeep so I personally have no complaints with them, but when I mentioned Kenwood to the audio shop they really seemed to think KW is the best so that helped secure what I was going with.

But at this point I just really wanted 3.0 charging and it was one of the only radios on Crutchfield to offer that.

 

Just enabled accessory during crank. Thanks for the suggestion. I almost never go into accessory.

 

Great thread, lots of info!

A few questions, when I go to the Maestro website, it proposes an adapter for the USB, did you have to use it to retain the existing USB functionality?

Same goes for the GPS antenna, the DMX958XR comes with a under dash GPS antenna. Apparently Maestro sells the adapter for connecting to the OEM antenna. Did you use it? How is the GPS reception with what you chose?

Final question, where did you mount the microphone and how well does it work? I am trying to see how I can mount it to the OEM location. If its decent I'll give it a try, if not I might try the enfig mic that fits in the original location and seems to have good reviews.

Thanks!

 

Pretty sure I used the idatalink (maker of Maestro) adapters for everything. For sure I got their satellite kit which adapted both the gps antenna and also included an adapter to make the satellite work if you buy a satellite tuner.

And yes, for the factory USB, I got the iDataLink adapter for it, ACC-TO3-USB.

I did not use the included GPS antenna. I have used that one before on my Frontier and it caused me nothing but trouble, it kept putting my point on the map about a block away from where I actually was located, which meant maps kept giving me directions back to the road I was already on (since it thought I was on a side street). Maybe that’s fixed with the 958, never tried. Still adapted with the stock antenna and the maestro adapter so I have had no reason to try the Kenwood antenna again.

For the mic, I originally mounted the included Kenwood mic to the underside of the dash in front of the cluster. That worked fine, but I checked with some folks and they said the Enfig sounded better. I briefly tried the Kenwood mic in the upper console location (same place the Enfig goes) and that didn’t work well at all. So I put the mic back into the cluster area for a little while until I found the Enfig. Highly recommend Enfig.