magplaid's Full Review: Alpine CDA-9887 Car CD/ MP3 Player
This is the top level Alpine deck from the 2007 product line and it's packed full of features. Alpine has been around for years in the car stereo business and they know how to put out a quality product. This deck has so many features it is just really a lot to say it's more of a deck that you have to play around with for a while if your not already an Alpine user.
Specifications
The outside of the deck has a nice array of blue and silver along with a nice sized screen. The buttons are arranged in a way that makes it easy to flip to the next track or adjust the volume or balance controls while driving and makes it easier for the user who is not familiar with these decks. It has an internal amp inside that can power 18w to each of your speakers if you aren't running external amplifiers. If you are it comes with 3 sets of rca outputs with 4v outputs, this is something that has been left out of the last few top end Alpine decks as they have been coming with 2v preouts. When you first turn on the deck you will notice the nice looking display deemed Biolight which shows the Alpine logo quite nicely, it's a monocolor display but it works nicely with all these features.
When you first hook up the deck you are going to want to run setup to make sure your deck is configured correctly. You can run stereo subwoofer settings, setup a user customized equalizer or crossover, you can even customize the color of the buttons on the front between 256 color choices. The deck also has Alpines featured MX feature which I like to leave off. It's supposed to add more clarity on devices with poor sound quality such as a mp3 player or fm radio but to me it sounds like it just boosts the bass and treble and kills the midrange which makes it sound really muddy. You can also add a satalite radio adapter and get sirius or xm satalite radio stations with it. The best feature to me and the reason I got it was because you can hook an ipod up to it and it will display everything on the screen and it's easy to navigate with the deck instead of the ipod. All you need to add is an Alpine Full Speed ipod cable for this and you can leave your Ipod in the trunk until you want to upload some different songs into it because you won't need it by your side anymore. It makes the deck act like the ipod is a cd changer easily allowing you to change between the artists, song titles, playlists or whatever else you have loaded on the ipod. The deck can also use HD radio but I haven't tested it yet, it requires you to purchase an additional adapter box for $200, for high quality audio from local radio sations.
Conclusion
This deck is my no means cheap I spent $300 on it but for the features it really packs a lot into one deck. I wish Alpine would have incorporated some of the addon boxes that you need into the deck such as built in satalite radio or hd radio if you have those it could make it cost quite a bit. I haven't been able to test all the features on this deck because I simply don't need half of them but the book has a lot of good information on crossover settings in relation to how wide your car is and equalizer settings for your specific setup. I say if your looking for a deck definately give a look at this one it's worth the price for the features. If you can't afford it, try for one of Alpines lower models they are also quite nice.
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