djcwardog

This is for any of you who know the MOST audio programming fairly well. My car is a 2007 550i that does NOT have Logic7. It now has sat radio and OEM ipod kits dealer-installed. Wanting to add HD radio, I have obtained the IBOC (HD) radio tuner module with antenna splitter and required brackets to install it in left rear of trunk. I did not find any extra fiber optic drops or power/antenna drops back there once the sat radio kit was installed - car had sat radio prep. So...do you know if HD radio can be a "retrofit" for my car? For MY 2007 it was a separate option you could order and not appraently tied to requiring that you also get Logic7. For MY 2008 the option order sheets seem to indicate that you had to choose Logic7 to order HD radio... I have the brochures for both years. Aayway, it would be cool to have HD radio in my car...

Rudy

I'm not too sure about all of this but one thing I'll mention is that I think if you have HD radio, you lose the "all stations" feature of the radio. I assume that's not a big deal to most but I thought it might be important to know this because it may point to some sort of difference in the hardware (dual-tuner vs. single-tuner radio, etc.)

Hopefully, some of the audio and programming gurus will jump in here and help out...

pukka

Not sure what you mean - but wouldn't disabling the HD radio function in iDrive give you this feature?

Rudy

I don't think so. The "all stations" feature is an improved version of "autostore". In order to have "alll stations", there needs to be two tuners -- one that you can listen to and the other one to constantly seek out and remember any stations that are able to be received. (As you drive, the second tuner will constantly remove any stations that became too weak and add new stations that weren't available before.) Autostore, on the other hand, uses only one tuner -- when you activate autostore, you can't listen to the radio while it's seeking out all the available stations. Once it's finished, the radio is available again.

My 2004 car (no HD radio) had "all stations" but my LCI (2008) car, with HD radio, only has the "autostore" feature. If I turn off the HD radio function, I still have "autostore", not "all stations". I always assumed that adding the HD radio tuner forced BMW to eliminate the second [non-HD] tuner for technical reasons but I have no real proof at this point...