Alpine CDA-9857 - Radio / CD / MP3 player - Full-DIN - in-dash - 50 Watts x 4

 (13 customer reviews)

I originally bought the CDA-9856 and exchanged it for this CDA-9857 model. Why? I have a 30 Gig IPod and it's difficult to dial through all of my 100's of albums/artists/playlists, let alone songs, with the slow rotary dial while I'm driving. The 9857's "Percentage Search" skip ahead feature makes selecting/playing music from the IPod a real pleasure. The 9856 doesn't have this feature. Also when searching albums, the 9857 displays 3 albums at a time, whereas the 9856 only displays 1. Both head units, however, only display 13 characters of the album/song title. This makes it very difficult to select the correct album if you have several with the same name for the first 13 characters, or perhaps multiple discs of the same album, but easier with the 9857 because it shows 3 albums at once. The 9857 is also a digital display, rather than analog as with the 9856, and the digital interface really speeds up the menu item selection and seems to make the IPod interface more "stable" (I had a...Read more

I use this with an iPod interface cable and an XM-direct receiver, both do just about exactly what you would want them to. They should implement the iPod fast scroll interface rather than using the station buttons to move through the lists 1/6th at a time. But that's a small gripe, it is still reasonably easy to find any artist or album out of my 8,000 or so tracks split over more than 400 albums and 200 artists. One thing most people won't care about, the RCA pre-out pigtails have been replaced with sockets on the unit, for my VW installation this considerably reduced the amount of wiring I had to find somewhere to conceal. The display is very clear but they removed the motorized tilt that was often useful for improving visibility on the older model.

I seldom use the FM or AM radio though when I do it seems to work about as well as any outdated technology, sensitivity is probably better than the older unit, either thar or they improved the local FM transmitters...Read more

After looking for months for a head unit that would handle satellite radio (XM or Sirius) as well as AM/FM, CDs, and iPod, I finally located this remarkable little device. The iPod link is everything you could expect short of a clickwheel (or multi-touch, as on the iPhone announced a few days ago): you can search by artist, album, song, and playlist, as well as do second-order searches (songs within albums, etc.). Or you can use the Direct Search function, in which each of the six preset buttons takes you through 1/6 of your music library -- push 1 and you go 17% of the way through, 2 = 34%, etc. Very convenient. The display software is sensible and flexible, so you can customize the readout for all functions. Hint: if you want whole titles of songs instead of a limited-character readout, redefault the song-title display to scrolling right to left. The sound, even with factory speakers, is just great, again for all functions including the iPod. You can't do half as well with...Read more