Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)At first glance these are pretty nice, the material is high quality and matched pretty well with the leather in my Volvo XC90. Installation was laborious, but that was due to the seat design in my Volvo. I paired this with the RHF-7.0B and a Sirius Backseat TV installation and embarked on an 11 hour road trip with 3 kids in the back.
Installation:
* These come with adjustable metal poles and plastic spacers to make sure you get a secure fit.
* Each post has one wire with a special bullet style connector on the end. You drop that down through the headrest holes and then connect the extension cable inside the seat. The lead connector is not long enough to make to the bottom of the seat, so you'll need to be able to get your hands up inside of the seat cover to make the connection. The connectors themselves are designed wall, they fit very securely and are notched to prevent misaligned connections.
* The power leads are just bare wires, so you'll need to get your own connectors. Also, they are not very long, unless you have a good power source under your seat, plan on obtaining some extension wire. I fortunately was also installing the Sirius Backseat TV which came with 15 feet of wire, so I just looped that wire to both seats and tapped the monitors into it before tapping it into my 12v outlet.
* Unless you enjoy high pitched sound effects when you accelerate and decelerate, you'll need to install these with a noise filter. I used the Pyramid NS12 12 Amp InLine Noise Suppressor and it silenced the video monitors very well.
First the good:
* Screen quality was pretty nice. Very low resolution, but the kids didn't mind and they were able to see it clearly day or night.
* Headrests didn't look as nice as the factory installed headrests, but didn't look ugly either, way nicer than plastic video screens strapped to the headrests.
* SD/USB inputs make it versatile, several video formats I tried worked pretty well.
Then the bad:
* Sound from the speakers was extremely quiet for both the AV input from the Sirius Backseat TV and the DVD player itself. Kids could not hear it at all even when turned up to max. We were able to run the Sirius TV audio through the car speakers to get around that problem, but for DVDs we had to rely on the built-in FM transmitter with it's horrible sound quality. For the return trip we bought some wireless IR headphones, which helped but at a substantial extra expense.
* AV signal kept going out. Kids would complain that the screens kept saying 'no signal' while watching the Sirius TV. Sirius has their own screen for lost satellite signal, so we know it was the monitors. Tapping lightly on the side of the headrest would bring the signal back in most cases, indicating a loose connection somewhere inside the unit. The installation involved a hardwired cable from the post connected to an extension via a custom and very secure fitting pin connector, so there were really no loose cables for me to check.
* DVD player quit working for the return trip. DVDs would spin and the screen would display 'loading', but then it would just say 'no disc'. Tried every DVD we had including DVDs that worked fine on the first trip.
* User interface was abysmal. The kids would want to switch from the Sirius TV to a movie and instead of just popping in a DVD and pressing play, I'd have to walk my older son through 4-6 button clicks to switch to the DVD. We also brought along some videos on a USB drive, and I pretty much had to pull over to get that working. I'd insert the USB drive, switch to the right mode, and then it would say 'DVD' instead of USB which is confusing, and then sometimes it would show a menu of the files and other times it would just start playing whatever file it wanted to play with no clear way to get back to the menu.
While these did help with our long road trip, I give all the credit to Sirius Backseat TV. The kids had to wear headphones (which my 2 yr old wouldn't keep on, so we had to give up the radio), and they learned to tap on the headrest every time the signal went out. After the DVD player completely quit working on the return trip I committed to returning these. It took 4 hours to install these and now it's going to take 4 more hours to get these pieces of junk out of my car and back in the box, and then another 4 hours to install a hopefully higher quality pair. Quite frustrating, but hopefully this review will help others save the time I wasted.
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7-Inch Headrest Monitor with DVD (Black)
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