Wow, wow, and wow! This deck is AMAZING! I absolutely love Alpine's CDA-9835!
It reads CDs incredibly quick, and you can even search MP3 folders while the music is playing! The search feature is very easy to navigate, and you can jump to any folder or file you want on the fly!
The sound quality is incredible, which is expected of Alpine. Very clean. The MMX technology seems to make the sound more full too.
The V-Drive amp is quite powerful (26 Watts RMS x 4) to power the factory Pioneer speakers in my Lexus ES300. It is plenty of power for what I need. The deck has a fairly large heat sink on the back and a cooling fan to keep this puppy cool
Although the BioLite display is black and white, it is very sleek looking. You have the choice of 5 different animations. The buttons on the deck can even even matched so that the lighting matching the lighting of my climate control. You can fine tune the colour with 512 diffenent colours.
The motorized face is also really cool, but it is nothing new to me since my old Alpine deck also has this feature.
The only problem that I had was trying to cram this thing into my dash (because it is deeper than my last deck due to the larger heat sink). However, it only took a little bit of playing around to get a nice, clean install.
There are so many features, that I have only looked at 1/3 of them and am already in awe!
Now I can't wait until my 10" DVC Type R and M301 Alpine amp arrive. I should be getting them tomorrow, and then I will have a really nice full sound (although not booming, but plenty of boom for me). I could have bought a link so that I could control the gain and other amp settings from my new head unit, but I opted not to pay the $100 for this feature that I would probably never use anyways.
Overall, this is one sweet deck and I highly recommend it. Go to an audio shop and play around with one of these . . . it will be love at first sight :P
I am still new to the MP3 deck, so that alone already feels like a CD Changer to me. I couldn't imagine having 6 full MP3 CDs in the trunk . . . Yikes!
XM charges a monthly fee for service, so I probably won't be doing that any time soon :P
