TrombleyMay673

Alpine CDA 9856 - Fantastic Audio In Your Car

This is the 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 towards the stereo...much better than the awkw...ard fm transmitter dock I was utilizing. I was worried about the speed of the iPod controls on the deck. I had read a number of bad reviews of the Pioneer iPod interface adapter. The typical 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 be an issue. The sales associate at the shop assured me that scrolling via tunes could be quick and easy. I'm sooo glad I listened to him. Easy to use, great sound, happy customer! Read much more Much less

I just recently purchased and installed one of these bad boyz. The high quality is top notch, but it's a little as well much power for my Infinity Refference speakers. This alpine cda 9856 is best for someone who's planning on or currently has a subwoofer. It's a effective deck!

I'd suggest alpine even when you didnt want ipod connectivity because it's such a good 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 business that offers complete speed ipod control (no lag through an external ipod adapter, which can cost 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 method to just shuffle all the songs on the ipod. The ID3 tag information is displayed on the display as well.

The only thing i could recomend besides 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 additional $150 just for that (that's, indeed, the only difference). The single line display does just fine.