The landscape of car audio head units has undergone a significant transformation over the past decade. The era of double-DIN source units has given way to the dominance of large floating-face radios. Sony, a leader in audio technology, introduced the groundbreaking 10.1-inch floating face XAV-9500ES a few years ago, which left us in awe of its features and performance. To further expand the application of the coveted features of that unit to their product line, they unveiled the double-DIN XAV-9000ES. Let’s delve into its inner workings and take it for a spin to discover the technological marvel it truly is.
Physical Design of the Sony XAV-9000ES
Let’s start with the basics. The XAV-9000ES features a double-DIN chassis and a 6.75-inch high-definition capacitive-touch display. Like most Sony radios, there is no bezel or escutcheon around the perimeter of the screen, so it looks classy in your car or truck’s dash. The display has a 1280 by 720 pixel resolution and is impressively easy to see, thanks to the built-in anti-glare coating. A row of buttons for the main menu volume, track selection and voice activation are along the bottom of the display. These hard buttons, designed with your safety in mind, make it intuitive for you to use the radio without taking your eyes off the road.
If you’ve looked at any of the current-generation Sony multimedia receivers, the display of the XAV-9000ES should be familiar. You’ll see a clock display in the center and five source shortcut icons across the bottom of the screen. You can change which shortcuts are displayed easily, so adding something like the backup camera display button is simple. If your smartphone is connected, an Apple CarPlay or Android Auto icon will appear to the left of the clock.
Behind the touch panel is a single-DIN radio chassis. This short (~2 inches) and shallow (4.25 inches) design dramatically simplifies installation as it leaves room for modules and interfaces to be added. Your installer will genuinely appreciate the gesture!
Source Features
The XAV-9000ES is a digital media receiver, which means it doesn’t have a CD or DVD mechanism. This might have seemed challenging five years ago, but today, almost all new cars and modern radios share this digital source-only design.
The USB-C port on the back of the chassis allows you to connect a USB-C flash drive to play your digital media collection. You can load MP3, WMA, AAC, FLAC, ALAC, WAV, DSF and DSDIFF audio files, and WMV, AVI, MKV, and ASF MPEG-4 video files onto a Mass Storage Class (MSC) device. The radio allows up to 25,000 tracks at a maximum, which is a LOT! The radio will play high-resolution audio files up to 384 kHz in supporting formats but down-convert them to 192 kHz for processing.
Your smartphone is an equally likely source option. The XAV-9000ES includes wireless Apple CarPlay and both wired and wireless Android Auto. As such, you can ask the radio to play any tracks stored on your smartphone or music from a streaming service like Tidal, Pandora, Spotify, iHeartRadio or YouTube music.
If you want to connect a portable media player like a Sony NW-ZX707, you can stream high-resolution audio using Bluetooth LDAC. This codec supports audio resolution up to 40 kHz and dramatically improves the clarity of your music compared with AAC or the old SBC Bluetooth audio streaming standards. Of course, the latter are also supported on legacy devices.
An AM/FM receiver has been built in for terrestrial radio playback. The tuner includes an RDS information display, so you can see what artists and songs are playing if the radio station is broadcasting that information.
Finally, your installer can upgrade the radio with a SiriusXM satellite radio receiver to allow uninterrupted entertainment options from coast to coast. This radio supports advanced features from SiriusXM like station and artist art, lives scores, and starting at the beginning of the track when tuning to a new station.
Vehicle Integration Made Easy
As you may know, many factory-installed infotainment systems also include climate control settings or vehicle customization features. Thanks to support for the iDatalink Maestro SR, RR and RR2 interfaces, the Sony XAV-9000ES can replicate those functions. You can also access a dashboard display with vehicle speed, engine RPM, and more information. Some vehicles will display parking sensors, tire pressure information and more. Check with your authorized Sony car audio retailer for details about your application’s SR, RR or RR2 support.
If you don’t need something as fancy as Maestro, the XAV-9000ES supports various steering wheel control interfaces. Using the volume, source and track selection buttons with an aftermarket radio makes driving much safer. Some interfaces will allow for additional secondary commands when pressing and holding a steering wheel button. Once again, your installer can explain all the options.
The radio includes three dedicated camera inputs. A factory-installed or aftermarket rear-vision camera is a great way to avoid accidents while parking or maneuvering. The two additional inputs can also be used with side-mounting cameras for blind spot monitoring or a front-approach camera.
Audio Processing
Here’s where the Sony XAV-9000ES and its big brother, the XAV-9500ES, start to separate themselves from the rest of the market. Sony’s focus on support for high-resolution audio requires the radio to use high-quality audio components like a 32-bit ESS Sabre Series digital-to-analog converter and an Analog Devices SigmaDSP for processing. High-quality inductors and capacitors, combined with a chassis designed to minimize resonance and vibration, produce precise audio performance. We’ll see measurable examples once we get the radio on the test bench.
Few radios have as much signal processing as this. Starting with the crossovers, you have your choice of a dual two-way system design with high-pass crossovers on the front channels and low-pass filtering on the subwoofer output or a three-way design with high-pass, band-pass and low-pass if you want to use a component speaker system and a subwoofer. The crossovers are adjustable for frequency, slope up to -48db/octave and polarity.
Regarding equalization, the radio includes a global 14-band equalizer with two presets. More importantly, there are five eight-band parametric equalizers – one assigned to each output, including the ability to create a mono EQ for the subwoofer.
As you’d expect from a premium source unit, there is also a signal delay menu. Your installer can add a delay to each output channel to align the sound arrival time for each speaker in the vehicle. The result is a system with impressive imaging and staging performance. The delay settings are made in 0.1 or 1-centimeter increments. Sony includes delay presets for different vehicle sizes, and equalizer presets for different genres of music. This is one of the most complete signal processing solutions in an aftermarket source unit.
Listening Evaluation
It can be tricky to pick between different source units. Thankfully, the lab is set up to allow me to switch quickly between multiple audio input sources. I set the Sony up and loaded a selection of well-known tracks onto a USB stick. For comparison, I have an older audiophile-grade car audio CD player. It has served me well, and I still buy or burn CDs for product listening evaluations. I also added an older consumer-grade multimedia receiver to the mix to see how the Sony compares to the “everyday” modern car radio. We’ll keep the audition simple and use my set of bookshelf speakers with a high-bias Class AB 300-watts-per-channel amplifier.
I listened to “Spanish Grease” by Willie Bobo and “Chocolate Chip Trip” by Tool for the audition. Spatially, the Sony performed quite well compared with the CD player. There was great width and a good sense of depth. Compared with the older multimedia receiver, there was a better sense of isolation between each sound, with the instruments and voices in clearer focus on the soundstage. Some people might describe this as having more space between the instruments. However you perceive it, it’s a very noticeable improvement in accuracy.
Tonally, the XAV-9000ES was a touch brighter in higher frequencies than the CD player. It wasn’t to the point of being sibilant, but cymbals stood out a bit more, and guitars and voices had more upper harmonic content. If this isn’t your thing, a few taps on the built-in 14-band EQ will squash it. It’s pretty subtle, though, so you’re unlikely to notice the difference unless you directly compare two source units.
The most significant difference was in the clarity of the Sony compared to the older multimedia receiver. It’s an old and over-used analogy, but it was like a layer of fuzz was removed from the presentation. Every sound through the Sony was clearer and more defined. The bass seemed more accurate and realistic. Voices sounded more lifelike, and high-frequency information was better defined. From a scientific perspective, all of this can be attributed to the impressive low-distortion performance of the radio. Nevertheless, it’s awesome to hear it back-to-back with a lesser radio.
If aren’t sure that a high-end radio is a worthwhile investment, I can tell you without any hesitation that it 100% is! The Sony XAV-9000ES and its big brother, the XAV-9500ES, deliver an audible upgrade in sound quality over typical consumer-grade sources.
Bench Testing the Sony Mobile ES XAV-9000ES
When it comes to bench testing, source units are the most difficult to evaluate. Devices like amplifiers, speakers and signal processors are simple because I have complete control over the signals we send to them. For example, if I feed a 1-kHz tone into an amp, I can directly analyze the amplitude and frequency content of the output. The same goes for a speaker. On the other hand, a source unit requires that I play a track from a USB stick and then work to capture and analyze the output. For frequency-specific measurements like the 1-kHz tone you’ll see below, that’s not too difficult. For frequency response measurements, timing makes things much more difficult. It took some time, but I have some reasonably good data from the Sony XAV-9000ES, so let’s check it out.
Sony states that this radio will play audio files with sampling rates up to 384 kHz and then down-convert them to 192 kHz to pass to the digital signal processor. If accurate, the radio should provide audio output up to 96 kHz. I created a frequency sweep file with a 24-bit resolution and 192-kHz sampling rate and captured the sweep with my QuantAsylum QA403. The results are in the chart below.
Because of how the sweep file works, you can detect some oscillation of the source material shown by the 0.05 dB bump at 10 Hz and the 0.05 dB dip at 17 Hz. Those can be ignored. However, even if you want to leave them in the observation, the radio’s output is flat, with -1 dB tolerances from a mind-boggling 1.4 hertz to over 90 kHz. It’s flat within 0.1 dB from 20 Hz to 30 kHz, if you want to be picky. As a benchmark, this is amazing.
Next, I wanted to quantify the radio’s distortion characteristics. I created a 1-kHz test tone in Adobe Audition and saved it as a 192-kHz, 24-bit audio file. After playing it back, I connected one of the radio’s front preamp outputs to the input of the QA403 for analysis. The results are below.
Let’s start with the data presented by the QA403. We see a THD+N specification of -86.79 dB, which is equal to an impressive 0.00458%. That’s better than most source units on the market. However, that’s not the whole story. If you look at the information provided, the noise floor at frequencies below 1 kHz is up at about -108 dB. Above 1 kHz, the noise floor is in the -118 dB range. I was curious about this performance, so I looked at the test signal in Adobe Audition. Sure enough, it had noise at -80 dB below 1 kHz. Further, there is a lot of unwanted audio content on either side of the test tone, giving it a bell shape rather than a pure spike at a single frequency. You can see this in the image below.
As you can expect, the radio can’t perform better than the information we provide. So, to calculate an accurate harmonic distortion specification, I used the label feature in the QA403 software to capture the amplitude of the harmonics at 2, 3, 4 and 5 kHz. With some math in a spreadsheet, these sum to -98.913 dB relative to the signal’s peak at 8.63 dBV. This equates to a THD specification of 0.00115%. Once again, mind-boggling. So, what does this mean? The XAV-9000ES is better than most of the source material you’ll find.
Taking that last statement further, I played a 1-kHz test tone saved in a 44.1-kHz, 16-bit format. This is equal to what you’d experience with a compact disc. The results of the measurement are below:
Given the sampling rate of 44.1 kHz, the test track contains no audio content above 22.05 kHz. Looking closely at the measurement, you can see a step down in the noise floor of a few decibels at about 40 kHz. This indicates that the radio is quieter than the level of absolute silence as recorded in the test file. Again, this represents a stellar performance.
The subsequent measurement I took was to measure the maximum preamp voltage. Playing a 0 dB 1-kHz test track, the radio produced 5.365 volts of output with the volume at full. Unless you add some boost to the track you’re playing, the radio won’t clip the outputs with the volume cranked.
The last audio-related measurement was to examine the built-in amplifier’s capabilities. Near the clipping point, very minute level adjustments result in dramatic changes in distortion. A difference of 0.2 dB can be the difference between a clean signal and one with 5% distortion from clipping. After working with different volume settings and test signal recording levels, I measured 17.6 watts per channel with a distortion level of 1.5% THD+N. In terms of power output, this is pretty much the standard for amplification built into a radio.
The last bench observations I made were timing measurements. If you’ve read any of our radio buying guides here at BestCarAudio.com, you know that the responsiveness of the radio interface is a crucial factor in picking a radio. This extends to how fast a radio wakes up and starts playing. The first measurement was wake-up time. This is measured from when a 12-volt signal is applied to the red accessory wire to when sound is produced. Playing a radio station, the XAV-9000ES took 9.5 seconds to wake up. Playing an audio file from a USB flash drive, that time lengthened slightly to 10.3 seconds. Both numbers are good. The second test is the sleep wake-up time. This tests how long it takes for the radio to start playing music from when it’s powered off by holding the Home button. For the tuner, it took 2.2 seconds, and that extended to 2.5 seconds when playing from USB. These are great numbers.
The last measurement is the time the radio requires to display the backup camera from when the vehicle turns on. I hard-wired the reverse trigger input wire to a 12-volt source and applied 12 volts to the red accessory wire. The backup camera image was displayed in only 1.7 seconds – that’s fast!
Conclusions about the Sony XAV-9000ES
There are a lot of source units on the market these days. If you’re shopping for something with important features like wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, that list shrinks significantly. Add a high-resolution display, and the list will get downright short. Support for high-resolution audio playback, flexible electronic crossovers and a high-performance DAC decreases the list to less than ten units. From the standpoint of including an intuitive interface, support for the iDatalink Maestro SR, RR and RR2 interface, signal delay and dedicated equalization for each output, you end up with the Sony XAV-9000ES and XAV-9500ES. It’s just that simple.
We’ve praised the responsiveness of Sony’s multimedia receivers before, and the Mobile ES units remain a benchmark in that perspective. The measured audio performance is world-class, and the signal processing features are impressive. We’ll call this a home run in all regards.
Drop by a local authorized Sony Mobile ES retailer today and check out the XAV-9000ES. It sounds great and is easy to use. You can find a retailer using Sony’s locator tool. Be sure to follow Sony on Facebook and Instagram to stay on top of the latest product releases and coverage from the events they’ve attended.
