Alpine CDA-7894 Car CD / MP3 Player

I have been using the Alpine CDA-7894 Deck for about a month now - enough time to become very familiar with all its extensive features and attributes. I have to say, that I am very pleased with my purchase.

I have this deck installed in my 97 Integra GS-R. With the use of a scorche install kit, it was a perfect fit and installation was a breeze. One thing different about the install on this deck is that it recommends a power wire run straight from the deck to the battery. They say this is to support its "V-Drive" buiilt in amplifiers touted as being 60x4 Watts. In reality, the amp tested out at 27 watts per channel rms, which, if you are just running "deck power" is nice. I am using the deck power only to run my rear fill speakers (Polk 602A's) and they do a more than adequate job for that purpose. The deck comes with three 4 Volt Preouts which is a nice touch (you can never have to many high voltage preouts). I ran RCA Cables back to two amplifiers, one powering my front speakers, and the other amp powering my 12 inch sub.

First of all, the deck is extremely aesthetically pleasing to look at. It includes a rotary knob - I love decks with a rotary knob, so much easier to adjust volume than up and down arrow buttons. There is a nice row of buttons below the display which makes it easy to tune in one touch radio stations (I suppose I'm a bit of a traditionalist). The deck has another nice feature - a motorized faceplate, which allows the user to tilt the faceplate in three different angles. My favorite is the first angle, which allows very easy access to the viewing of the deck, as well as fingertip reach of all the buttons. It is a detachable faceplate which , of course comes with a protective case for storage.

Ok now the use. Alpine has designed numerous features into this deck allowing the tweaking of the sound. I have to say first of all, that right out of the box, with all of the settings on flat, this deck sound fantastic. Having said that, it has the ability to adjust Bass or Treble from a setting of 0 to +15. Further to the bass or treble settings, you can pick a frequency in bass and or treble that you want to accentuate say (60 HZ Bass) and the music will be accentuated at that frequency response. On top of this feature, you can narrow or widen that particular frequency you have chosen by a setting of 0 to +3.

You know that sometimes, if you have subs installed in your car, a song just seems to boomy or perhaps not enough of that deep base? Well by pushing the rotary knob once, you can access the Alpine units Subwoofer control which can be set from 0 to +15. This is a great feature, allowing very quick control of the subwoofer base level.

Advanced features include a High and Low Pass crossover, and even a Time correction feature which allows one to tune each speaker in the car in milliseconds depending of the distance of the particular speaker to the drivers ears. With this feature you can really fine tune the sound stage in the vehicle to create that perfect listening "sweet spot".

The display is very well lit and is no trouble seeing during the day, particularly with the faceplate angle adjustment feature. At night, the display is very well lit and in my opinion, very nice to look at. You can even change the keys to an amber color to match your cars interior.

Mp3 play on this deck is excellent. You can easily toggle between folders and the seek time on individual tracks is about 1 second. In my opinion, it seeks MP3 tracks every bit as fast as cd tracks. Mp3's also sound very crisp and clean on this deck, as does for that matter cd's pr even FM radio.
Nothing like having a cd with over 100 songs on it and being able to not have to change the disc for an entire road trip.

If there is any weakness of this deck at all, I have found that the shiny plastic faceplate is a little susceptible to scratching. I have been very careful not to touch the faceplate or "wipe it down" as to not scratch it, but have still managed to acquire a couple of small scratches on the shiny clear plastic. Not a big deal, but perhaps in the future, Alpine can take lessons from Motorola. I think of the abuse my V60G telephone takes and still shows no sign of scratching on the clear front plastic lens.

All in all, this is a very full featured deck with excellent build quality and great sound. And after all the bells and whistles have been spoken about, the bottom line is always "how does it sound?". In this category, This Alpine unit really shines.