Alpine CDA-9885

Pros: Well equipped. Beautiful styling. Good screen. Plays discs. three 4volt preouts and built in crossovers. Display Blackout feature

Cons: No always visible time display. Clunky ipod search. Very fast volume fade in at start. Not refined overall.

Summary: I bought this deck almost a year ago for to fulfill two objectives: to enable me to play my Ipod in my car and to control two separate amps, one for a subwoofer and one for my door speakers. This unit performs these tasks well but it is not as refined as I expect an Alpine deck to be. I upgraded from a pretty low-end Alpine MP3 deck to this unit. Alpine definitely took a few steps backward. What is up with that fellows? I was so happy with my first Alpine that I was sure I would be blown away by their new line up. I miss my always-on clock. When this unit is off there is no time display. Also, my old deck would ramp up the volume to the level you left it at before you started the car. This one does too, but so quickly that it is already at full-volume before the radio or Ipod can establish connection. This is ridiculous. Only if I am playing a CD can I take advantage of this feature. Needless to say, I quickly became re-accustomed to turning my volume down before I turn the car off. Call me a whiner but I miss this feature. With this deck, I had to alter my habits and compromise on things that I had with a much lower end and older Alpine unit and on some very rudimentary features. Alpine, I am disappointed.

On the upside, at the time when I bought this deck, the Ipod searching was head and shoulders above anything in the 1-din category. However, it wasn't as good as they could've done, I'm sure. I understand that to have the memory feature of the xda-001, there is a big leap in technology, but, when I am searching for music, the titles don't even scroll during the search. Well, if you have an MP3 that has a long filename or maybe is named with the artist in front of the song title, the search ain't gonna do anything for you. Something else I felt Alpine could have put into this deck is a function to move 10 at a time through artists or titles. You have to use the scroll wheel to scroll through titles one at a time, there is no accelerated pace when you quickly move the scroll wheel. I had 40gigs of music to start with and I quickly cut my library down to 1/3 of it's size to make it more accessible.
You must very cleverly use playlists to make your library accessible.