ReneSwarey125

Alpine CDA 9856 - Great Sounds In Your Vehicle

This is the very best stereo I've ever had. The sound quality is superb (even with the factory speakers in my Civic). The very best feature is the fact that I had a wire run into my glove compartent so my iPod hooks straight towards the stereo...much better than the awkw...ard fm transmitter dock I was using. I was worried concerning the speed of the iPod controls on the deck. I had read several bad critiques of the Pioneer iPod interface adapter. The common complaint was that controlling the iPod from the cd deck was painfully slow. Because I have 45 GB of music in my iPod, I did not want scrolling via music to become an issue. The sales associate at the shop assured me that scrolling through tunes would be fast and simple. I am sooo glad I listened to him. Simple to use, great sound, happy consumer! Read more Much less

I just lately bought and installed one of those bad boyz. The quality is leading notch, but it is a bit too much power for my Infinity Refference speakers. This alpine cda 9856 is greatest for someone who's preparing on or already has a subwoofer. It's a powerful deck!

I'd suggest alpine even when you didnt want ipod connectivity simply because it's 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 car audio company, period. it is the only business that provides full speed ipod control (no lag through an external ipod adapter, which can price as much as $100) and an extreemly simple 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 the songs on the ipod. The ID3 tag information is displayed on the display also.

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