Alpine CDA 9856 - Fantastic Sound In Your Vehicle

This really is the best stereo I've ever had. The sound high quality is excellent (even with the factory speakers in my Civic). The very best feature is that I had a wire run into my glove compartent so my iPod hooks directly towards the stereo...a lot 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 several bad reviews of the Pioneer iPod interface adapter. The common complaint was that controlling the iPod from the cd deck was painfully slow. Because I've 45 GB of music in my iPod, I didn't want scrolling via music to become a problem. The sales associate at the shop assured me that scrolling through tunes would be fast and simple. I'm sooo glad I listened to him. Simple to use, fantastic sound, pleased customer! Read more Less

I just recently purchased and installed one of those poor boyz. The quality is leading notch, but it's a bit too much energy for my Infinity Refference speakers. This alpine cda 9856 is best for somebody who's preparing on or currently has a subwoofer. It is a powerful deck!

I'd suggest alpine even when you didnt want ipod connectivity 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 car audio business, period. it is the only company that offers full speed ipod manage (no lag via an external ipod adapter, which can cost as much as $100) and an extreemly simple to use interface.

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

The only factor 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 additional $150 just for that (that's, indeed, the only difference). The single line display does just fine.