CaudillPalmquist687

Alpine CDA 9856 - Great Audio In Your Car

This is the very best stereo I've ever had. The sound quality is excellent (even with the factory speakers in my Civic). The best feature is that I had a wire run into my glove compartent so my iPod hooks directly to the stereo...a lot much better than the awkw...ard fm transmitter dock I was utilizing. I was worried concerning the speed of the iPod controls on the deck. I had read a number of bad reviews of the Pioneer iPod interface adapter. The common complaint was that controlling the iPod from the cd deck was painfully slow. Since I've 45 GB of music in my iPod, I did not want scrolling via music to be an issue. The sales associate in the shop assured me that scrolling through tunes would be quick and simple. I am sooo glad I listened to him. Easy to use, great sound, pleased customer! Read more Less

I just lately purchased and installed one of those bad boyz. The quality is leading notch, but it's a bit as well much energy for my Infinity Refference speakers. This alpine cda 9856 is best for somebody who is 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 great brand. I've used JVC, Sony, Pioneer in the past and alpine sounds better than all of them.

The ipod interface is unmatched by any other vehicle audio company, period. it is the only company that offers complete speed ipod manage (no lag via an external ipod adapter, which can cost up to $100) and an extreemly easy to use interface.

The ipod controls are almost precisely 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 also.

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