HadenVuong955

Alpine CDA 9856 - Fantastic Sounds In Your Car

This really is the best stereo I've ever had. The sound quality is excellent (even using the factory speakers in my Civic). The best feature is the fact that I had a wire run into my glove compartent so my iPod hooks straight to the stereo...much better than the awkw...ard fm transmitter dock I was using. I was worried about the speed of the iPod controls on the deck. I had read a number of bad critiques of the Pioneer iPod interface adapter. The typical complaint was that controlling the iPod from the cd deck was painfully slow. Since I've 45 GB of music in my iPod, I didn't want scrolling via music to be a problem. The sales associate in the shop assured me that scrolling via tunes would be fast and simple. I'm sooo glad I listened to him. Easy to use, great sound, pleased consumer! Read much more Much less

I just lately bought and installed one of these poor boyz. The high quality is top notch, but it is a little too much power for my Infinity Refference speakers. This alpine cda 9856 is best for someone who's preparing on or already features a subwoofer. It is a powerful deck!

I'd suggest alpine even if you didnt want ipod connectivity simply because it is such a good brand. I've used JVC, Sony, Pioneer in the past and alpine sounds much better than all of them.

The ipod interface is unmatched by any other vehicle audio company, period. it's the only business that offers full speed ipod manage (no lag through an external ipod adapter, which can price up to $100) and an extreemly simple to use interface.

The ipod controls are almost exactly what you see on your ipod screen (which is replaced by an "///ALPINE" Logo when plugged in and tucked away in a glove box) except there's only one line of text. You are able to do artist searches, playlist searches, song searches all withot lag. And yes, there is a way to just shuffle all of the songs on the ipod. The ID3 tag information is displayed on the display as well.

The only thing i could recomend apart from this head unit, will be the CDA 9857 simply because it features a 2 line display (a dot-matrix style display) but i couldnt justify spending an additional $150 just for that (that's, indeed, the only distinction). The single line display does just fine.