Buy Parrot, Inc. Bluetooth MK6000 Car KitParrot, Inc. Bluetooth MK6000 Car Kit Product Description:
- Compatible with Most Bluetooth compatible phones
- 1 Year warranty
Product Description
The Parrot MK6000 is the first professionally installed Bluetooth hands-free kit dedicated to music. The Parrot MK6000 captures the music sent by your Bluetooth stereo mobile phone or MP3 player and redirects it to the vehicle's speakers. It combines the very latest generation of signal processing with the capability of playing MP3 music files via Bluetooth. To call a contact, go to the phonebook and listen to the Parrot kit read out your contacts' names! Confirm your choice and start talking.
Customer Reviews
Most helpful customer reviews
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
Great handsfree, some quirks with music/audio streaming
By Tor Slettnes
I got this from last week, and installed it just a couple of days ago in my 2004 Toyota Sienna, using a custom wiring harness from parrotkits.com. Since cars sold in the US do not typically use the standard ISO connectors that the Parrot kits are made for, such adapters are needed.The installation itself was a little bit of work, but with the harness, relatively straightforward. There was simply no way to go wrong, each connector fit exactly where it needed to. The only trick was to locate suitable spots for the three parts: * The main unit ("blue box"). I attached this in an open area inside the dashboard behind the stereo head unit, using velcro tape. * The microphone, which already came with adhesive tape under the stand. I attached this at the front of the ceiling console, right above the rearview mirror, and ran the wire behind the ceiling cover, through the left A-pillar, and under the dash. It was just long enough to reach the blue box, and none of the wiring is visible. * The controller, which I put on the center console below the temperature controls. There is a little bit of wiring visible here, since I just opened up one of the nearby covers (left of the center console) and ran it under there. As shipped, the wire from the MK6000 controller comes out at the bottom, but if you are willing to drill a hole in your dash, it is also possible to route it through the backside instead. (To do that, you gotta be damn confident that you are going to keep this thing installed... I was not).Once installed, the unit powered on with my car as expected, and everything appeared to be working fine. The first thing that happened was that it muted my car stereo for a second, while commanding me to "Please pair your phone" (or somesuch). I obliged, and my phone (a Nokia N95-4) paired without any problems. It then proceeded to transfer all my phone contacts. So far so good.I tried out a few things to test the unit. I called my voice mail to record a message and play it back - no problem. The car stereo was muted during the call, as expected. I did however run into a couple of serious problems with audio (A2DP) streaming: If you make or take a call while streaming, then hang up, the unit does too. (Although my phone kept streaming, no sound would come through the speakers, and none of the music controls would work). Also, anytime you pause and resume music playback, it stutters (1 second on, 2 seconds off...). The only way to get out of these situations is to turn off and on the ignition - clearly not an option if you are driving. Pretty bad, right? Well, fret not, patient reader: A firmware upgrade fixes these issues. As shipped, version 1.00 was installed, but version 1.03 is available at parrot.com.That brings me to the upgrade process. You must have a computer with both bluetooth hardware and an internet connection located within about 10m (bluetooth reach) of your car. It must be running Windows. Running Windows inside a VM (such as Parallels or VMWare) will not work, since it needs direct access to your bluetooth hardware. It must have a NVIDIA graphics card, and screen resolution must be 1280x960@24bpp. OK, just kidding about that last one - but you get the idea. (Should anyone from Parrot listen, I would have a few nonprintable choice words for them...). Oh, and if you do want voice synthesis (to select contacts in the MK6000 itself), you need the English-only firmware, not the multilingual one.All set up and working, and with a whole 2 days worth of use under my belt, I now proclaim myself an expert on the device and its little quirks. First, what works well:* As a handsfree unit, this thing is the best there is. Since it powers on and connects to your phone when you start your car, there is no fuss - just push the green button to mute the car stereo and make or take a call, precisely as if you had a factory or aftermarket stereo with built-in bluetooth support. Where I was most impressed, though, was with the voice pickup/sound quality. Driving at about 50mph and talking to my wife, she reported just clear voice, no noise. She was also able to hear my 3-year old in the back seat, talking softly to her, as if she were in the car with us. It certainly beats some of the other handsfree units I tried, even the otherwise decent Motorola T505. (I still doubt it would measure up to a regular wired headset, but I have not done that comparison yet).* Audio streaming from my cell phone (e.g. music player, internet radio application, etc) works as expected: The car audio mutes. This was to me the biggest selling point of this device over a bluetooth-enabled stereo unit, since I could start streaming from my cell phone without having to manually switch inputs first, and since - I thought - I could then keep listening to the car radio while using the GPS features (voice navigation) on my cell phone, and automatically interrupt the stereo whenever an instruction was given. In retrospect, manually switching the input would probably have been better - see below.* Handsfree volume and audio streaming volume are independently controlled. Also, each is separate from the phone's own volume control; they are cumulative.* Your phonebook is synchronized with this unit each time you start your car. This allows you to use the MK6000 to scroll through your contacts using the center wheel: The first push gives you the phonebook, a confirmational second push reads out the letter "A", and a third push reads out your first contact whose name starts with "A". At each step, you can rotate the wheel for the remaining choices. There is also a voice recognition feature in this unit, but I have not familiarized myself with that, as I just invoke my phone's voice command prompt by pressing the green (call) button.Now I promised you some quirks, didn't I? I often find that to be the most useful part of user reviews. Here goes:* There is a 1-2 second delay from when the phone initiates audio streaming over A2DP and the MK6000 mutes the stereo until the sound is heard through the speakers. While this may not be noticable when playing music or streaming general audio, it is actually quite annoying for me: I also use my phone as my GPS navigation unit (by way of Nokia Maps), and the result of this quirk is that the beginning of each instruction is chopped off. I tried pushing the play/pause button twice as a workaround (to play, then pause the music player, to keep the MK6000 switched to the bluetooth input), but after the following instruction, the MK6000 switches back to the car stereo nonetheless. My other workaround is to simply push the "4" key on my phone keypad to repeat the instruction if I really need it, and/or to just look at the display.* There is also a 1-2 second delay after streaming has ended until the MK6000 switches back to the car stereo. Normally this should not be an issue - but the result is that any time a notification is displayed on my phone (e.g. when I dock it in my Brodit cradle and it starts charging, or when the battery is full, etc), the car stereo is muted for a couple of seconds. And since I mostly listen to NPR, this mostly happens while they are making an interesting point about something... :-(* Likewise, there is a 2-3 second timeout while the MK6000 plays some silly fanfare once it has connected to your cell phone, about 10-15 seconds after starting your car.* Since the MK6000 controls its own volume, none of the steering wheel controls do anything. (I find myself trying to use those to raise/lower music or call volume, which of course just works on the car stereo instead). Oh well, as I said, I've had it installed for 2 days - I'll get used to it.* Similarly, you cannot adjust other audio settings (bass/treble/equalizer, balance, fade...), and quite frankly, the MK6000 frequency response is a little "cave"-like. (I usually turn treble to full and bass a little higher than medium to compensate for such an effect).FWIW, I also looked at the Motorola T605 briefly before buying this one, believing that they had similar feature sets. Not so: For the T605 to stream audio over your car speakers, it requires an auxillary input and a mute line in your stereo head unit, and as such, is not going to automatically mute most factory units.However, since I am still within my return period, I am contemplating replacing this unit with an aftermarket stereo. Part of the challenge is to find someting that (a) has decent handsfree quality/voice pickup (i.e. microphone NOT integrated into the deck itself, which rules out Sony), (b) has decent mapping to the Toyota steering wheel controls (either directly or with adapters such as the SWI line from Pacific Audio), and (c) does not look too gaudy with oversaturated colors, blinking lights, animations, etc.. That narrows the field considerably. My short list includes the Pioneer DEH-P7000BT (though with the SWI-PS adapter, my up/down buttons would probably seek in tuner mode, not select previous/next preset), and any of several Kenwood head units with the KCA-BT200 bluetooth module (though reviews have the handsfree voice quality at "so, so"). So in the end, despite the quirks, it looks like I'll be keeping the MK6000... :)
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