Necvox HQ-2 Navigation

A single DIN head unit with, according to the manual, a non-motorised seven inch touch screen. In fact it is motorised! It has a DVD mechanism within that will play DVD, CD-DA and CD-R discs as well as the old far eastern VCD format. It features a mini SD card slot on the front and this is used to carry a navigation mapping set called PolNav from a company called PolStar that normally have their software used on PCs or else PDAs. The unit has  single USB interface so you can play from flash drives and an iPod although that will have to be operated as normal from the click wheel rather than any made-for-iPod stuff going on. The unit comes with a full size remote control rather than a card type and has a loom of RCA plugs to connect to the rear. This has inputs for an extra A/V device as well as two extra video outputs and a dedicated CCD input for the connection of a rear view or parking camera. The manual states that it has 4ch plus subwoofer outputs on speaker level but in fact it only has the regular four channel speaker output and no RCA signal outputs. There IS an amplifier remote lead from the loom and so you could use one of the legion of high level input amplifiers out there and still not need to get a special high-end signal sensing one. Also, despite the Dolby Digital 5.1 logo showing on the box (also the only place you get any clue as to on board power), what it does is to read a DVD sound track and down mix it to two sets of front and rear stereo. There is no removable panel on the front, so security may be an issue.
– 4 x 50w (MOSFET Power IC)
– 7.0 inch touch panel control with full graphic user interface (336,960 pixels)
– Motorised open/close with variable choice of slant angle
– 1 USB interface
– 1 RCA A/V In (via plug-in RCA loom)
– 2 RCA Video Out (via plug-in RCA loom)
– 1 RCA CCD Video Input for Rear View Camera (via plug-in RCA loom)
– Will control 10 or 6 disc DVD changers
– Telephone mute and power antenna switching output wires  as well as amp remote wire (blue)
– Playback of DVD Video, VCD, CD- DA,
– Integrated Bluetooth hands free
– Complete with GA001-10 GPS antenna on cable
– Complete with 44-button remote control
– Rear cooling fan mounted within panel
– Signal to Noise Ratio and Dynamic range not quoted
Review by Adam Rayner
With the magic trinity of seven inch touchscreen, DVD and navigation, with Bluetooth as the red cherry on the top, this �700 Taiwanese machine looks at first to offer nearly all of what with other top end Japanese makers will cost you around £1,300. Furthermore, with some brands, the navigation feature is only sold as an extra add-on by way of a solid state unit. This product has all of the functions within one very weighty unit of DIN size.
There are six buttons and one knob on the front of the unit so it looks like the remote will be a crucial part of the unit’s use throughout. I found the remote’s Infra Red emitter to be a bit of a dim torch in that it didn’t like to operate the machine in my office on the test bench unless I had closed the curtain. Too much daylight and it won’t work so the unit won’t do for standing outside the car during SPL competitions with rules-required remote control!
But that’s to miss the point as most cars have less light in them than houses. I confess I was deeply sceptical about the navigation software and how well it was likely to work but short of a full on install (and I have just the UK-crossing driver in mind, go Google ‘Ian Welch Angler’ and see who’happen!) it’s not possible to give a turn by turn review. However, it was connected to the GPS antenna (which was dumped on a window sill) and the speed with which it booted from brand new out of the box was actually breath-taking considering how little sky it could ‘see’! The graphics look good if not as year-on-year agonised over as the gorgeous efforts of Pioneer, Alpine and Kenwood and generally there is some evidence of the unit being a budget version of ‘all singing all dancing’. You can feel it in the rather hard pressure needed to get the touch screen to realise you are tickling it and the slightly reluctant way the screen comes in and out.
That said, the Halfords advert thing is in full effect for despite the manual stating baldly that the unit is not motorised, it actually is! It sticks a bit on my box-fresh example and on one test didn’t retract but that would ease as it runs-in with all its mechanical parts. The ruddy manual again lets you down if you wanted to ask ‘how many watts mate?’ but the box clearly shows a 4x50w MOSFET story and once connected to the test bench B&W LM1 near field monitors it bloody rocked! The SQ isn’t some paragon of beauty but again that’s to miss the point. It is as good as just about anything bar the really flash stuff and the signal in those speaker wires is plenty clean enough to use to feed the likes of a high level input amplifier. Also, as part of a parts-bin assembled product, the loom in the back does have both a separate telephone mute wire to kill any extra hands free system’s way to uninterrupted phone calls for you and also there’s both an antenna power-up wire and the de-rigueur blue switching wire for that high level input amp.
What you do get, although it is on a plug in loom, is a mass of extra input RCAs. The manual again completely ignores the little extra plug hole in the back near the built in fan used to power a rear view camera and also fails to let you know that there is an extra tiny loom to allow for reverse-gear CCD camera auto-selection but what I thought was another wire to connect to handbrake to allow the screen to show DVD images to play only when it was applied was just not the case as I wired it in, placed a DVD in the slot (which took quite a hard push to get the mech to eat it although it does work rapidly as any once triggered) and lo and behold, the images were there on the screen, grooving to Bass Mechanic! It’ll treat you like a grown-up fresh from the box. I have always thought the distraction issue was moot a recent RAC survey found ventilation controls just as risky as ice. The CD changer socket has to be the place a TV tuner gets connected and the graphics have their own section for a DVB-T tuner so it must auto sense on that front.
Yes, it is not from a ‘cool’ brand and you really can tell that there are some savings being made but it is DVD and it is CD and it is nav all in one box, with nothing more to connect than your DIN loom plugs as per an OEM radio and the GPS antenna to fix somewhere it can see the sky on the end of its generously long lead.
Tech support at Automotive styling is brilliant. A dealer (or this fat reviewer) calls as I did and in seconds the actual unit will be in the hands of the techy at the end of the phone who actually goes through the physicalities with you and also has a badass Skype phone hook-up to his suppliers in Taiwan. So while I may not even be able to order a beer in Taiwanese, the guys who sell the units for distribution by Automotive Styling are accessible and helpful.
Since the unit is likeliest to be dealer-installed, it might add cost to have the words in a row adjusted to be all Queen’s English. But I do have issues with the few blatant inaccuracies like the motorised/non-motorised thing as I had written the bones out from the specification and once checking the unit itself had to go back and correct stuff. And something as daft as whether or not the unit does the Halfords advert thing on Dave TV and motor in and out might actually put off the odd potential buyer who wants the full James Bond effect of motorisation and thinks he won’t get it.
Lastly, I plugged in some USB stuff. Bizarrely, it first started up showing images on .jpeg from the Zoombak USB stick, which I have never seen work on a USB car unit before! It read the WMA lossless toughie-files I like for the same album that the other units I have tried in the past can manage but with others kept just playing little snippets which was unusual. As I sit and type this it is trying to read my 4GB iPod, which is far from full up but finding it a problem. The screen says read USB but the ‘Pod just shows the no entry do not disconnect display which is a shame as I recall this unit in a staff car of the company happily playing iPod tunes on our TV tuner test run.
So as ever, there can be complex issues at play on the digital files front at the useless manual certainly won’t tell you what it’ll read apart from WMA but it looks like I may be wrong about the AAC abilities or have misremembered the unit is a competent item and has a serious slew of features and of course, above all, scores a whacking 10 for VFM. If you want it all bar easy plug-in amplification and want to pay less, this is the unit.
Sound Quality 8.0
Appearance/Display 8.0
Ease Of Use/HMI 9.0
Features 9.0
Value For Money 10.0
Overall rating 8.8