mkidd's Full Review: Alpine CDA-9811 Car CD/ MP3 Player
I'm very pleased with the basic features of this product. The sound is great and there is plenty of power (I've never even turned the volume knob all the way up). It has never skipped and is working great one year after purchase. The display is very bright and readable. Also the off angle vertical brightness is also good, an important consideration for an Acura RSX where the stereo slot is forty five degree off vertical. When I purchased the unit I was concerned about the reliability of the flip down panel, but in practice the motorized mechanism seems very solidly constructed with lots of metal rather than plastic.
There are some niceties that I've come to appreciate: the volume knob, the -20 db "mute", and the ability to fast forward or backward in MP3s, a feature that many players only support for CDs.
One minor drawback in the lack of an external audio-in, for example for use with a memory based MP3 player.
My biggest gripe is the user interface (UI), which being a flip down cover would have plenty of space if it were not wasted by gimmicks. When playing MP3s, it is a real pain to check what time it is. One has to cycle through nine(!) items by repeatedly pressing the Title button: trk# and time, folder name, filename, title, artist, bitrate and freq, trk and trk time, folder# and trk#. I'd much rather have separate buttons called Time and Info, where Time toggled between the time and the current type of information, and Info cycled through the eight MP3 related information choices. Perhaps the extra button could go where the useless "Media Xpander" button (see below) currently is.
The worst UI issue is the wasted display real estate, which has only eight characters. This means I'm always trying to decipher something like "KING CRI". The same sized display could have eleven or twelve characters if nonessential items were removed, abbreviated, or better placed. For example, there are separate display icons for Folder, Filename, Title, and Artist that light up to indicate the currently display information. These icons are useless since I can almost always guess what is being displayed and have memorized the cycle of items displayed by the Title button. Then there is an icon wasted for Media Xpander. The large upper left corner of the display mode (MP-3, WMA, FM-1, FM-2, etc) could be made smaller or abbreviated (MP, WM, XM, F1, F2, etc) to save space. Even the volume bar at the top wastes real estate because although it is make to look like 40 separate vertical bars that accurately represent the volume, in reality it is only four segments with 10 vertical bars each that only crudely represents the volume.
The CDA-9811 has good search functionality where the volume knob plays a key role in rapidly flipping through the folders on an MP3 disks or the tracks within a folder. Although the system takes some getting used to, it is much better than most products and would be a really nice feature *IF* the display had twelve characters instead of eight so you could decipher the names quickly while hurling down the freeway. But the display's marketing gimmicks get in the way...
Finally, there is the so called "Media Xpander" gimmick. I can't find any technical information about what it does, just hype like, "Media Xpander uses music processing algorithms to rebuild what was lost in the compression process." But what could it do? Compression tosses out information by definition, information that can't be recreated out of thin air. Oh sure one can make a few adjustments to make the music sound better, but it would be somewhat akin to boosting the contrast of a crappy image scan and applying a little filtering; the result might look a bit better but still much worse than starting with a good scan in the first place. If you want good sound, forget about 128 bit/sec MP3s and Media Xpander. Download a solid program like CDex (http://www.cdex.n3.net/) and set the encoding options to -r3mix, a variable bit rate (VBR) encoding scheme. The output will typically average to 160-192 bits/sec. You will only get 9-10 hours on a 700 Mb CD, but the difference in quality will be worth it.
The irritating thing about all the gimmicks is that the product would stand up quite well without them and is actually hindered by some of them. Alpine is solid on the fundamentals and just needs to make a few tweaks to have an outstanding product.
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