Some people were asking whether or not the lagtime seen on the Soundgate BMW/Alpine CD Changer adapter was unique and whether or not the Blitzsafe adapter had the same problem. Well, my home slice arnolds came over this weekend and brought his Blitzsafe BMW/ALP DMXV.1 CD changer adapter so we could compare it to the Soundgate ABMW35V4 adapter.
(For background, this all related to connecting an Alpine MP3/CD changer up, which you can read about
here.
As an electrical engineer I gotta say that the Soundgate box seems to be a better design than the Blitzsafe. They both make use of small microcontrollers which (I assume) are used to translate the serial protocol of M-Bus to I-Bus.
In terms of actual operation, the Blitzsafe's lagtime is in fact *worse* than the Soundgate's. It also took a lot longer for the player to start working upon swapping a changer magazine with the Blitzsafe than with the Soundgate.
In the end, neither solution is great but between the two, I think the Soundgate is the better choice.
Andrew