new headunit, good decision? Options

[Toyoca]

Hey guys I was looking for a new headunit from BestBuy because I had a 100$ gift card. I decided on the Alpine CDE-9852 mostly because I want to play songs from my ipod. Is this a decent headunit? I hope so. Thanks guys.



EDIT: i just noticed the CDA-9856 is only 20$ more....should i just get that one instead?
I'll never be using satellite/hd radio though so should i just save that 20$?

This post has been edited by Toyoca: Apr 22, 2006 - 7:41 PM

[Niskyspy]

ok here's a thing about Alpine:
Overall they make really good deck's, but that is if you are not gonna be compeating or planing on a good system in the feature. The thing is that Alpine has pretty low watt RMS for the speakers, but you will get really good clean signal (way better then clarion, sony and others). Another bad thing about Alpine is that their pre-out voltage is low (2.5V) compare to something like I have which is Eclipse CD-8445 with 8V pre-out (but it costs way more).
So if you are not planing on some crazy setup in the feature and only gonna be useing the deck for daily driver listening and stuff in that nature then Alpine is the way to go.
In the past 8month I had 4 deck's in my car, Factory/clarion/alpine/panasonic and now Eclipse and in sound clarity alpine beats everything expet for the eclpise.