Alpine CDA-9830 Car CD / MP3 Player

So, here's the story. I bought a Pioneer 4600MP first, didn't like it, was missing a lot of features I wanted (sub control, quality remote, equalizer adjustment). Well, lucky for me I decided to change brands to Alpine. I asked the salesman at the audio store which brand is their best seller, and he responded with "Kenwood". I looked at them at first, and decided against them. My attention was then caught by the recognizable green buttons on the Alpine units. I saw that this CD Player does everything I wanted, sub controls, remote (wow, actually works well), equalizer, MP3/WMA. It even had some more cool features I liked, motorized/tilting face, blackout mode (sort of, the lights just turn off on the LED), and the option of having the title on a song scroll ON ITS OWN... The Pioneer would only scroll if you held down the display button, so basically you were stuck with looking at the first 8 or so letters of a song, and had to press buttons to see the rest. Yeah, maybe I'm a little lazy, but when you're driving it's just a lot more comforting to just look and see what you want to see without touching it. This CD Player has 4 bands to set on the equalizer, as well as many other settings for a subwoofer. The most surprising thing is the remote, it takes two AAA batteries (included), while the Pioneer 4600 took 1 CR2032 battery (explains it's weak signal, and occasional breakdown of not working at all.) It works great, doesn't feel like I'm gonna break it when I touch it (the card remotes feel so fragile to me). And has all the options I need (volume, track change, power, mute, play/pause, source change, and even an option to tilt the face to your desired position) Now for the downsides to this unit (you didn't think it was PERFECT did ya?).

Well, really if you hate to read and want to take full advantage of this unit, you had better have plenty of experience with Alpines. This thing has a lot of options, but all of them are sort of complicated to someone that hasn't ever seen and used them before. For example, there are options that require you to HOLD the menu button to get to them, and then other options that you just press the menu button to get to, then you have to go scroll through them with the track change buttons, and cycle through attributes with the rotary knob. But it's not like this in every menu, some are controlled differently. Not really a big deal if you have patience to read the manual a bit and figure it all out, but still can be a little annoying when you forget the last of 8 steps on saving your settings. Then you're stuck going back and setting them again like I did. But once it's setup the way you want it, you'll be very happy. I highly recommend this to people who want to have a great system with cool features and awesome sound.