Alpine IVA-D900

Overall Rating
 4 of 5

Value Rating
 5 of 5

Used product for
3 Months to 1 year

Visitors rate this review
3.20 of 5, 5.00 votes

Price Paid:  $1050.00 from eBay

Year / Model Reviewed:
2004 IVA-D900

Strengths:
Unbelieveable picture quality, Remote Control lights up with the touch of a button, Time Correction feature is great technology. The brain is large and it has every connection that you will ever need, Detachable face for security, 4 volt Pre-amp outputs, Monitor can take a beating from extremely rough roads and unexpected bumps without failure.

Weaknesses:
Slow start up time. Takes about 20 seconds to get to where you can start playing with it (the music will come on within 10 seconds but the only buttons you can use are the volume ones). DVD picture sound is lacking. You can listen to a normal CD at around 16 but you have to crank the receiver up to about 23 to get the same output if you really want to hear the movie ot the radio with the radio down. Plus when you turn it up that loud you can here interference (extra noise) I was told some filters can help this but flip up monitors were not made to have superior SQ. When changing screens it's like there is a delay like the head unit can't quite keep up if you try to throw to many commands at it at once.

Summary:
I bought this for the simple fact that I thought it was the best mobile video receiver that I could find. It has pretty much everything that some one could want in a head unit. Including deticated navigation and rear view camera output. 3 pre-amp out puts. And a couple of aux out puts for PS II, xbox or flipdown monitor. It is a great receiver and I feel that I got a great deal on this product. If I could do it all over again I would definetly purchase this product the only things that I would change are posted below in the weaknesses. E-mail me for questions popalock85@yahoo.com

Similar Products Used:
First flip up monitor purchased. I do my reaearch and have a firm grasp on the products capabilities that I purchase. Car audio is my passion!

Overall Rating
 2 of 5

Value Rating
 2 of 5

Used product for
3 Months to 1 year

Visitors rate this review
3.20 of 5, 10.00 votes

Price Paid:  $0.00

Strengths:
Reads every type of disc I've tried, including DVD+R. Excellent CD audio quality. Beautiful picture for video sources. Solid construction (motorized display doesn't feel cheap and flimsy). Rotary volume knob (I hate using buttons for volume). Lots of options for adjusting sound quality (bass, treble, HPF, media expander, etc). Wow-factor when the unitiated see your screen flip out for the first time. :-) There are also lots of connectors for connecting additional devices such as extra screens, video games, navigation, etc. You can play MP3s that are stored in folders on a disc, which gives you a way to store different categories of music on the same disc without getting everything mixed up.

Weaknesses:
255-song limit for MP3 discs. That means that although you can fill up a DVD+R disc with 4.7 gigs of MP3s, the D900 will "see" only the first 255 songs. Audio tone adjustments (bass, treble, etc) are not accessible when safety mechanism is active (when your parking brake is off). Even if it was, you have to go through too many slow-changing menus to get to the bass and treble settings. You can only skip MP3 tracks one song at a time. You need at least a +10 skip when you have hundreds of songs on a disc. SLOW transitions when switching any modes, i.e., from radio to cd, or from preset tune to manual tune. Forget about doing anything quickly on this system! There is even a lengthy delay (up to a couple of seconds) when skipping songs on CD or MP3. In fact the system can't keep up if you hit the skip button too many times quickly. The slow response makes the D900 feel like it's powered by an Intel 8088 processor, or worse, vaccuum tubes. It could also use more spectrum analyzers/animations to choose from--if you can't play video from the head unit while driving, you should at least have some really cool screen saver-type animations. Instead, there are only 3 lame choices of spectrum analyzers. Lastly, the mp3 decoding seems to sacrifice some quality on some types of music. It's hard to describe, but let me just say that I notice distortions, particularly at the higher frequencies, on the D900 that I don't notice at all with Winamp on a PC. My speakers and amp aren't at fault, because red-book audio CDs sound incredible in my D900. It's only on mp3s. It isn't all MP3s; most sound great, and none of them are horrible, but certain ones seem worse than others, regardless of the bit rate. For example, my Evanescence MP3s, which I encoded at 320 kb from my original CD, are too piercing at the higher frequencies, making me want to turn the treble way down (which you can't do while driving). However, my Sade Lovers Rock MP3s (again self-encoded) sound wonderful @ 160 kb.

Summary:
The screen is very nice, and the CD Audio quality is great. However, the MP3 quality and playback features could be better (and should be for the price). There are some serious limitations that make this unit not very user-friendly (see weaknesses). I haven't yet purchased the navigation option, or any other accessories for this unit, so no comment on those.