What You Need to Know About the 2006 Audi A4 Symphony Radio
The Symphony unit in the 2006 Audi A4 is Audi's base-level in-dash stereo. It handles AM/FM radio, a single CD slot, and it can support a rear-mounted six-disc changer if your car had the option. No navigation, no Bluetooth, no aux input. That's it. Simple enough, but the interface design from that era isn't exactly intuitive, and finding a clear walkthrough for it is harder than it should be. If you're searching for the official manual, Audi published a PDF that covers this unit specifically. You can usually find it on sites like manualsonline.com or audiworld.com forums. Search for "Audi A4 B7 Symphony radio manual" and you'll land on it. The PDF runs about 40 pages and covers everything from basic tuning to equalizer settings and disc switching. That said, the manual itself is sparse on practical advice. It tells you what buttons do, not why things behave the way they do. Here's what it won't tell you.
The rotary dial around the display does double duty. Press it to confirm selections. Turn it to scroll through menus, adjust volume, or change frequency. That's standard. But the button below the dial — the one marked "MENU" — is where most people get stuck. It doesn't open a full menu system like newer Audi radios. It cycles through five modes: Radio, Disc, Tape, Phone, and Service. If your car doesn't have a phone kit or CD changer, those options will either be grayed out or show nothing. Don't waste time pressing them repeatedly. Just use MENU to skip past the dead options until you're back at Radio or Disc. Another thing the manual doesn't emphasize: the radio stores only six preset stations per band. That's per band — AM and FM each get six. Not 36 total. If you want more, you need to switch bands and re-preset. It's a limitation of the head unit's memory architecture. I learned that the hard way after spending an afternoon trying to figure out where my other presets went. When it comes to the CD function, the single slot accepts standard CDs. It does not accept CD-RW discs reliably — I had a batch of burned test discs that the player would spin up, pause for three seconds, then spit back out. Switched to pressed CDs and it worked fine every time. If you're playing burned audio discs, use ISO 9660 level 1 format, not Joliet. The Symphony's reader chip is finicky about encoding.
Equalizer settings are accessible by holding the MENU button until you hit the Service screen, then navigating to the EQ option. There are five presets: Pop, Rock, Jazz, Classical, and Flat. The Flat setting is actually not neutral — it rolls off bass and treble slightly. If you want a true flat response, you need to manually adjust each band. You can access individual bands by turning the rotary dial after selecting EQ. Six frequency bands are adjustable, ranging from 60 Hz to 16 kHz. I found that setting the 60 Hz band to +2 and the 16 kHz band to -2 made a noticeable difference in clarity without muddying the mids. Stock speakers in the A4 are mediocre; this adjustment is about the best you can do without an upgrade. The clock setting is another thing buried in the Service menu. Hold the tuning knob while turning the ignition to accessory mode. The display will flash the hour digits. Turn the knob to adjust, press it to confirm, then the minutes will flash. Same process. It sounds ridiculous that this isn't in the main radio interface, but that's how Audi wired it. If your Symphony unit isn't powering on at all, check the fuse first. It's fuse 19 in the dashboard fuse panel, 10-amp. I've replaced head units only to discover the fuse was blown. Takes two minutes to check and saves you from pulling the entire dash apart looking for a power issue.
Get the Full Details
For the full technical reference, the official document is titled "Operating and Service Instructions for the Radio Unit Symphony" and it covers the RNS-D model as well as the Symphony. You'll find it archived on various Audi enthusiast sites. Some links rot over time, so if one doesn't work, try audi-bbs.com or the technical section of audizine.com.
