Car Audio Central - Ultimate Car Audio Forum and Community

Here's the deal. My Alpine CDA-7897 is a very nice deck... But, it doesn't handle the cold weather very well and the Fantomface thing isn't worken properly anymore. Thus, I'm going to burn my warranty get a refurbished one back and sell the sucker on E-bay. I'm not gonna just refund it cuz I bought it on a boxing day sale for 250$ Canadian, 280$ cheaper then what they were selling em for. I'm hopen to draw like 400-450$ from it off of E-bay.

The question here is, I will be once again in the market for a new deck. Price range of 400-500$ Canadian (350-390$US). The features I really enjoyed about the Alpine were it's Time Correction (this did wonders for sound quality), and I really liked how it's equalizer was setup. I'm not partial to any brand name in any way, once I get send the deck away it will take 2 weeks to go there and back apparently.. So I def have time to shop around.

P.S. Don't worry, I won't be totally without tunes, I have a, described by the car salesman, SUPER good stereo system in my new Sentra... A 7 Speaker 180 watt system . Clarion speakers in rear, 10" RF sub, RF deck, dunno what brand tweeters in the upper door, and some more Clarion speakers in the lower door. lol. god help me

go eclipse!! get the 8455, its probably on clearance at a local shop to make way for the new models. i got my 8445 for 300, and im sure they are even cheaper if there are any new ones left.

by the way, that stereo you got sounds f'in SUPER!! you gonna sell that stuff? lol

oh my, i just paid $450 for an 8445 in hicksville. I must say that it has a nice time alignment system and 7 band PEQ. Im lovin it. Tried to get the 8455 but they said they cant get them anymore.

Not real clear why the balance control doesnt work in Adv. mode while the PEQ is operating. Guess they figure you would rather use the time alignment system.

I like the Adv, mode but miss being able to adjust balance, bass, mid and treble on the fly without having to choose another EQ preset.

All in all a great sounding unit though.

Not sure about the newest ones, but on my 8454 when in Pro mode I can cut the level of all drivers through the time alignment option, in steps of 1db. Easy mode has a balance control and 13 band graphic EQ instead of the parametric.

any high end 8*** eclipse deck will do what that alpine did but better. im a huge fan of eclipse. i paid 425 for my 8443 3yrs ago and have fixed it twice sofar and its still worth the 160 each time.

Alpines decks have had a lot of reliability issues lately, especially the ones with the Glidetouch feature.

I just want somebody to make a simple head unit that looks like a factory head unit. No flipdown faces, just a CD slot, tuner, high quality CD player with some K-grade 24 bit DACs, volume control and balance/fade adjustments. From there, a single preout pair that provides a 16V balanced signal. Simple electronic display that shows the time and the station you're tuned to or track you're listening to. From there, just let it lead to processor that can do the rest, maybe with a wireless palm device to control it like the new RF symmetry processors that are coming out.