The audio is nice, as it does give min call outs and altitude call outs when approaching. It’s a male voice that kind of yells at you. The first time he announced “altitude” I kind of jumped a little, but the flip side is that’s good because it gets your attention. For this feature be sure to have you radio shop add the wire between your Aspen and audio panel.
My unit was about 7yrs old and even though it never gave me any problems, I have 2 friends that had issues with theirs and the warranty saved them an expensive bill. When Aspen announced the Max upgrade I jumped on it basically because of the age of my unit, and the fact that an extended warranty is 2K, and the upgrade was initially $3k (I think they have increased it to $5k now). There is kind of a long story that involves some miscommunication with Aspen in terms of when these were available, but the end result was I had to put a $2500 deposit down to “save” a slot when they were finally certified. Then when my slot came up, which was August 1st, my radio shop had to ship mine in and i was given a 7-10 turn around. Although I don’t think this is good business practice (just my opinion) and they should have sent a new unit out to minimize downtime with the airplane (my understanding is they pretty much replace everything on your old unit anyway, so why not just send out new/refurbished units instead of grounding the airplane that long?), I will say they had mine turned around pretty quickly and I was back flying again before the 10th of August (I was going to be out of town on business for 2 weeks so we did ship mine in early, around July 25th).
Anyway, if you decide to do it, I think you will be happy. Again its not free, but if you are having issues with yours, upgrading it is cheaper than buying a new unit.
