HU Upgrade/CarPlay Questions

Hey all, I need some help on upgrading my HU.

I’m looking to upgrade the stock HU for a couple reasons; better sound and Apple CarPlay. I’ve pretty much narrowed my search down to

$585 Kenwood DMX9707s 6.95" Capacitive Touch Screen, Car Stereo, Wired and Wireless CarPlay and Android Auto, Bluetooth, AM/FM Radio, MP3 Player, USB Port, Double DIN, 13-Band EQ, SiriusXM

Kenwood DMX9707s because with the shortage of available units, this is one that’s in stock locally and in my price range.

Couple questions about CarPlay. First, is audio quality better on wired or wireless CarPlay, or does it matter? The reason I ask is that on the stock HU, I find that music on Bluetooth is not as good as when I plug in my phone through usb.

Second, I really only want CarPlay so I can get navigation on the screen through Waze or Google maps. I really could care less about receiving texts/calls because quite frankly I find it distracting and turned off that feature on the stock HU. Is there a way to turn off messaging, etc on CarPlay? I hate having my music interrupted by incoming texts alerts. Plus I’m not gonna answer it anyway until I’m not driving, so it’s not a feature I need.

Thanks for any feedback!

 

Bump…any help on this?

 

I find the quality to be excellent with wired or wireless carplay.

The upgrade in power output to the factory speakers is a huge advantage.

when texts come through it does not interrupt music play.

 

Wireless CarPlay doesn't use Bluetooth for music playback - BT just serves as a control channel to start up the connection. Your phone connects to the HU over wifi and has a much higher bandwidth and music quality doesn't suffer (at least compared to BT).

As far as the texts/calls/etc, you have the option to have the phone alerts go into Do Not Disturb mode while connected to CarPlay. It's in the CarPlay settings app on the head unit when you're connected to your phone.

 

Thank you both for the replies!

 

I have a Kenwood 996xr with wireless CarPlay. Audio quality is great. As mentioned, CarPlay uses your phones wifi to transmit data, so audio quality is not lost during data transmission

 

Wired or wireless doesn’t really make any difference. It uses WiFi due to the amount of data that needs to transfer

you can customize notifications to be as much or little as you want

 

One other thing that’s nice about CarPlay is that the head unit will read your text messages and you can voice text back. Essentially it removes the need to even pick up or look at your phone. So while it may be distracting it isn’t AS distracting. I have been very happy with the performance of CarPlay and use the voice commands often. YMMV