dglozic

I am a new owner of 2020 Acura RDX Platinum Elite (my door says it was built in Sept 2019). Here are my impressions of the infotainment stack after a few days of usage:

Reliability
I had zero problems with the car overall and the infotainment in the week I owned the car. Everything just works. I understand this is not the case for everybody, just saying :-). YMMV.

FM Radio
Works as expected. One quirk I found is that some stations are HD Radio capable. This sounds like an improvement, except that HD Radio uses compressed audio. I turned off HD Radio 'automatic mode' and some Toronto stations (like Indie 88) sound better via analog FM than HD Radio. YMMV - play with your settings.

Apple CarPlay
Works as expected - Spotify is, well, spotless and sounds great (I am a paying user and use 320kb streaming). I kind of hate that CarPlay is not using absolute positioning - Acura is definitely on to something as scrolling in CarPlay is not as easy as in native Acura apps. But again, first world problems - I can manage and don't really care as much.

I am not a fan of Cisco WebEx implementation in CarPlay, it is rudimentary. If you use WebEx Meetings for work, you may end up mounting your phone on a mount and use Bluetooth to project the sound to the car system instead.

USB Audio
I am beating a dead horse here but Acura missed an opportunity to really knock it out the park by including 2 audio USB ports. Switching between USB Audio and phone cables is not ideal.

I bought a 1 foot extension cable and 256 SanDisk 3.1 flash drive, formatted with exFAT and copied 130GB worth of FLAC uncompressed 2 channel files ripped from my CD collection. I also have some m4a files bought from itunes (no DRM) that are 256kbs. ELS 3D is absolutely amazing with these files. I need to add that I am super happy I splurged for Platinum Elite (Advance in the US), as the extra sound deadening, acoustic side glass and thicker carpeting pays off by lowering the noise floor in the car. That, coupled with less noisy 19' Continentals results in a wonderfully quiet cabin that lends itself to first class audiophile experience. From jazz to rock to classical, ELS 3D is absolutely amazing with uncompressed FLAC.

Searching
I am not a super fan of the touchpad speed, it is not very fast and searching for things is kind of slow. I will experiment with voice commands, making the touchpad more sensitive etc. However, I am not unhappy either - I can find an album I am looking for relatively quickly (by zeroing on the artist or the name - often just a few characters are enough to narrow the list down sufficiently so that I can pick it out). After that, it is 30+ minutes of bliss.

Overall, after reading the first year problems, I was really apprehensive about RDX, but it looks like the combination of Sept 2019 build and the latest update worked well in my car.

dglozic

Forgot to add that I absolutely adore the large screen - small screen split, and the fact I can swap the content. I love being able to swap between navigation and music so that I can fiddle with either in the larger screen area. One of the best features of the system and works flawlessly for the week I owned the car.