Complaint Review: Kenwood

In April 2018 I purchased a Kenwood DDX-9905S radio for my Jeep Grand Cherokee. The salesman at Innovative Concepts told me this was the best possible choice to replace the horrendous factory system in my car. The installation and training provided by Nick at Innovative Concepts was amazing. My car was cleaner when I picked it up and Nick patiently showed me all the superb features of my new radio. I was thrilled and looking forward to the improved sound as well as the other great features. Please refer to the invoice attached as Appendix-A.

On my way home, we decided that the sound would be better if we shifted the fader so more sound could be heard from the much bigger rear speakers and it proved to be a huge sound and fidelity improvement. Again, I was thrilled.

The next morning, I noticed that the sound had reverted to the front tweeters (as it was when I picked up the car from Innovative Concepts) so I checked the fader. Sure enough it was back to center. I adjusted it and continued. When I returned home, I pulled out the manual provided and went back out to the car and carefully followed the instructions in the Kenwood Manual to save/memorize the fader control settings (see Appendix-B). Now I was all set – or so I thought.

For the next few days I tried a few different variations of the instructions in the manual and finally contacted Nick at Innovative Concepts. He walked me through the memory setup and it was then that we realized this was not working properly. Nick assured me that he would notify Kenwood. A few days later, Nick contacted me and said Kenwood was releasing a patch to the radio firmware and he hoped it would solve the problem he had reported to Kenwood. I installed the firmware update successfully and was disappointed that the problem had not been resolved.

For the next several months, Nick asked Kenwood to fix this issue. I contacted Kenwood repeatedly over these months and the only response from Kenwood was that there was no update planned for my radio.