gottleib's Full Review: Alpine CDA-9813 Car CD/ MP3 Player
The pros:
Very powerful at 27 watts RMS per channel. So much power that it has its own tiny cooling fan. One slight installation note: this is a very high-draw unit which is recommended to have its own power wire rather than being connected to the factory wire. I ran mine from the factory wire at first and didn't notice any problems, but eventually I went ahead and ran a dedicated wire for it just to be on the safe side.
The back side of this stereo is absolutely awesome! It has a number of connections for expansion such as 2 pairs of 4 volt preamp outs, subwoofer, and cd changer. It is also set up for XM radio, if you are interested in that sort of thing.
So far, the playback has been perfect. I am recovering from a bad relationship with a Jensen MP3310 which had terrible playback issues with mp3 discs. The Alpine has not missed a single beat yet. It loads and reads mp3 discs very fast, even when they contain as many as 14 albums.
This product does just about everything you would expect a good mp3 player to do. This includes random playback both of an entire disc or of just one album on a disc, soft volume recovery when resuming from pause or mute, excellent FM reception, and one my personal favorites - an actual volume knob instead of buttons. The installation and operation instructions are well written, and the remote control is of good quality.
The cons:
The ten character display is lackluster. On a mid to high-end unit such as this one I took it for granted that there would be a display large enough to give me at least the complete title of a song at a glance. This one scrolls once then stops with only the first ten characters showing. There is enough room for a multi-line display, but unfortunately it is taken up by useless icons and indicators. It also bothers me that the clock is not always displayed. These problems are common to every mp3 disc player I have looked at.
While I am thankful for the rotary volume knob instead of the ever-popular push-buttons, it only protrudes about a quarter of an inch which makes it a little difficult to get hold of while driving.
Many people have complained about the brightness of the display, even to the point of being distracting while driving at night. I have not been distracted at all by mine, but once again, I would expect a cd player of this quality to be connected to my vehicle's dimmer circuit. It is a very bright display and only dims slightly when the headlights are turned on. There is a built-in dimming feature that simply blacks out a small part of the display. This, however, is entirely useless.
Switching between song title, artist, track number, time, and so on is a little confusing, and having to cycle through many options to get to a particular display setting is a little confusing.
The remote control will turn the unit off immediately with the press of a button. The 'source' button on the face of the player will turn it off only after being pressed for several seconds.
Overall, the minor nitpicks I have with the Alpine 9813 are far outweighed by the positive attributes. This is a wonderful product and I would highly recommend it to anyone who is ready to invest in a very good and expandable head unit.
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