CD Players and Electronics

I installed this radio in my 2000 Celica. I love it. This has the most powerful high quality built in amp of any radio i have used to date. To bad i am not using the built in amp. Right now I have a Soundstream Reference 200 running the stock front speakers (MB Quarts are on the way) and an alpine 200w digital mono amp running an Anthony Gallos 10” subwoofer. The sound quality of this radio is amazing. Well worth the $100 over the 9884. The D to A is the best i have heard in any car radio under $1000. This radio makes MP3s and 4s sound like CDs. The Ipod adapter works great but i use the usb and store my music on Compact flash (sounds a little better than the thumb drives).

Very easy to operate the basic features.

What i don’t like: The blue lights (what happened to alpine green) you only get green lights on the top and the bottom of the line alpine singal din radios. I refuse to spend $100 more for green lights. I had to change my consol lights to blue not easy.

Everything is $200 extra bluetooth, xm and so on.

This is far and away the best car cd player I have owned. When I put in a CD in it blows me away. Any CD. If you can work your way threw the menus. Defeat the tone controls it sounds better. Black out the display it sounds better. When using an external amp turn of the internal amp and it still sounds even better.

A real high end peace. Someone at Alpine is listening.

Franklin

Rating: 5 / 5

Fundamentally, the sound quality is great. I like the 4 volt pre-outs because I’m using a separate crossover and two amps. Overall the sound is excellent. But the menus–ugh, not at all intuitive. I have three major gripes: 1)No mid EQ–WTF? Both of my former Blaupunkts had treble, bass, AND mid EQ and for less money. With this thing, you need to buy the extra “imprint” system for lots more $ just to have a mid tweak. I always prefer a slight cut in certain harsh mid frequencies and now I can’t. 2)Ipod navigation can be brutal on a big collection–for instance if you know the name of the song but not anything else, you can go to percentage search with the numbered (radio station preset) buttons and narrow it down to a section of the alphabet, which can be a pretty broad section, say A-G. But now you have to scroll through all the A to G titles one at a time with the dial, which seems endless. Who has that much patience? Couldn’t they find a way to let you go to a LETTER? Also if you’re down the hierarchy of folders, say, from artist to album but want to go back up to artist, you have to start all over again from the beginning of search mode–no way to just “go up one level” (left) as on ipod navigation itself and as on my last blaupunkt. 3)Most frustrating: If you are navigating and hesitate a bit too long, it times out and you have to go BACK to the beginning of the whole process. Grrrrgh! In short, I didn’t buy another blaupunkt because I had two of them die an early death but they definitely had the more intuitive and functional menu nav. All things considered, I’d rather just have an aux in (which this lacks–it just offers the high speed ipod connect and a USB cable, no aux jack) and just use the ipod itself to navigate.
Rating: 3 / 5