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- Alpine CDA 9853R
- Dr Crinkle's review
Have a picture of Alpine CDA 9853R?, please send it to us.
Picture courtesy of Ewis.
| Sound quality | 3.5/10   |
|---|---|
| Value for Money | 3.5/10 |
| Reviewer Rating | 2.5/10 |
| Overall Rating | 7.3/10 |
By Dr Crinkle
on 12th Jul 2005
| Sound quality | 7/10 |
|---|---|
| Value for money | 7/10 |
| Overall value | 5/10 |
 Dr Crinkle's recommendation | |
Sound quality
Connections
Sub Woofer Controls
User interface
Reliability
I previously had a Kenwood CD/MP3 player in my old car but when I got a new car I decided to upgrade to this relatively high level CD/Receiver.
The sound quality is great and the Alpine CDA 9853R has plenty of connections for amps and inputs which is why I bought it. The problem is that compared to the Kenwood I found the controls very difficult to learn and not at all intuitive. There is not an obvious way to any particular function, you need the book in one hand for even quite simple tasks.
The 'Glidetouch' feature works reasonably well but it is too easy to select a menu item when you are actually trying to 'glide' along it.
More moaning I'm afraid but the radio reception is poor compared to the Kenwood too. I've got a crappy internal aerial in my (superb) Volvo and the Kenwood works well with it but the Alpine keeps losing reception. Admittedly I live in the wilds of Wales and I haven't read the manual properly regarding reception so I may be able to improve it later.
The final insult is that two weeks after installing it the display started failing and would only come on once the thing was warmed up. It's gone back and I am currently waiting to hear from Car Audio Direct (who collected the broken one very quickly) what they are going to do about it. In the mean time I'm back on the Kenwood and it's working fine.
| Helpful | Unhelpful | Agree | Disagree |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Total Respect: +2
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