After wasting money on an Alpine 9883, 9884, and a 9886 that mostly seemed the same except for price, rca voltage ratings, and ipod cable included or not, I have stepped up to a Pioneer Premier DEH 980BT. Basically I got tired of Alpine's 'a-la-carte' style orientation of their new lineup, where they removed SQ features from most head units to make more people buy the 150$$$ IMPRINT package which has had mixed results. Pretty much everything below the 400$$$ 9887 is little more than a CD player with bass and treble controls until you pay more money for bluetooth and for the IMPRINT processing feature. I decided I wanted something that would offer the most possible in terms of gadgetry AND tunability in one package that could be controlled and adjusted on the fly from the dash.
For anyone that's interested, I think this Pioneer is the closest HU Ive found to having everything I could want built in and ready to go. Built in bluetooth, Ipod compatable with add on module, 16 band graphic EQ, time alignment, separate front, rear, and sub crossover controls, Pre-set eq curves that can be tweaked, and a few other 'DSP' -related features whose usefulness is open to interpretation but they're there. Even has an auto-time alignment/auto eq feature like imprint with an included microphone and the rest of the software built into the head unit and you can adjust its settings on your own unlike IMPRINT where I hear adjusting anything kills the auto-settings. Also has 5 volt preouts with low impedance.
If you're strictly SQ, not interested in bluetooth or IPOD and want a true 100% dedicated SQ head unit the 880 or 800 PRS can't be beat but if you want just much better than average tunability along with the add-on gadgets everyone likes in a HU nowadays all self contained in one package, this thing is hard to beat. I was shopping for an add-on EQ, now that I have this thing I really don't feel I need a separate sound processor. Just using the 'natural' pre-set on the 16 band graphic and the factory time alignment settings has made a world of difference and I haven't really tweaked any of it to cater to my specific truck's interior yet.
And none of the infamous Pioneer engine whine either.
My Alpines were high in quality but IMHO Pioneer and Eclipse offer more for the money and I'll be sticking to those two for the forseeable future.
For anyone that's interested, I think this Pioneer is the closest HU Ive found to having everything I could want built in and ready to go. Built in bluetooth, Ipod compatable with add on module, 16 band graphic EQ, time alignment, separate front, rear, and sub crossover controls, Pre-set eq curves that can be tweaked, and a few other 'DSP' -related features whose usefulness is open to interpretation but they're there. Even has an auto-time alignment/auto eq feature like imprint with an included microphone and the rest of the software built into the head unit and you can adjust its settings on your own unlike IMPRINT where I hear adjusting anything kills the auto-settings. Also has 5 volt preouts with low impedance.
If you're strictly SQ, not interested in bluetooth or IPOD and want a true 100% dedicated SQ head unit the 880 or 800 PRS can't be beat but if you want just much better than average tunability along with the add-on gadgets everyone likes in a HU nowadays all self contained in one package, this thing is hard to beat. I was shopping for an add-on EQ, now that I have this thing I really don't feel I need a separate sound processor. Just using the 'natural' pre-set on the 16 band graphic and the factory time alignment settings has made a world of difference and I haven't really tweaked any of it to cater to my specific truck's interior yet.
And none of the infamous Pioneer engine whine either.
My Alpines were high in quality but IMHO Pioneer and Eclipse offer more for the money and I'll be sticking to those two for the forseeable future.
