Well I will tell you this i just had an alpine cda9851 installed and what a difference over the factory system being amped. I have a set of mb quarts and a jl300/2 in the car and was running the factory head unit and thought it sounded good. What a difference it makes with an after market unit.

 

alpine

customer service is another story though

 

tell me about this headunit
u lose dash controls??
does it have mp3 HD capabilities??

 

you do lose your dash control but you can buy an adapter to gain it.
burn mp3 on cdw or cdrw and play.

 

I am assuming you are referring to mobile Hard drive, and not HD radio? Here the the sony I referred to in your original thread

MEX-1GP . It is the new Sony "Giga Panel" Head unit. YOu just remove the faceplate, and connect it to the PC via USB and it can store up to 1G of mp3's in its flash memory.

Here is the HU with the SD card capability: The JVC Arsenal series has them, and they start at around $330 US (MSRP).

JVC SD capable Head Units

There are a few units that have built in hard drives, but I think they are all DVD / Navigation head units.

John

 

Does the 9851 have an auxilary audio input?

 

just get the xm adapter so you can have satellite radio it will have rca input so you can throw on a ipod or something te adapter will also have a pass thru so you can put on alpines ipod adapter.

 

Yes. Its called Ai-Net input. You just need an adapter that will change the output of whatever you are trying to integrate to the Ai-Net input. This is an input only, I think, so the HU will not necessarily control whatever you are hooking up.

You can also run a 3.5mm jack input.

John