I bought the CDA-9827 recently. The player sounds very nice except
for some annoyances, and here are my opinions on this player for
anyone that may be interested.
First the bad,
1) The blue lights are too bright in the night time and there is no
option to turn it off. The dimmer that they claim (dimming when
you turn on the headlights) is almost useless - it dims only the
blue buttons by a very small amount still leaving it very bright
enough to be annoying on a long highway night ride (and moreover
it does not work with blackout enabled)
The blackout display is a good option, but having no choice but
to always have these blinding (in the night only) lights on is
pathetic engineering.
IF ANYONE KNOWS ANY METHOD (EVEN DESTROY/ CUT THE CIRCUIT TO THE
BULBS INSIDE) PLEASE LET ME KNOW.
2) Controls are needlessly complicated and the manual does a lousy
job of explaining them (some of the functions that show up on the
display are not even explained properly, like the INT, CD-DA/MP3
functions...). To adjust bass/treble, you have to go through
a handful of center frequencies/bandwidths...which may be good
(if you have your car parked and you are really experimenting
to find out which setting sounds best for that song) but is not
what one wants to go through when he quickly wants to set the
bass/treble... a simple (additional) control like a basic player
could be useful...,
And this center frequency thing is quite confusing at times,
believe me I am an electrical engineer with a Masters graduate
degree //content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/frown.gif.a3531fa0534503350665a1e957861287.gif, not sure what happens to the setting on one center
frequency (say f1) when you move to another freq (say f2) and
adjust the new one, because when you come back to the original
f1 it shows the new setting for f2... hope I made some sense.
Now the goodies!
+ Sounds really better than my stock (acura integra) player even
with stock speakers.
+ Browsing the files/folders is pretty neat though you are limited
to a 8 character display. Dont get it wrong, the display does
scroll when you select a song and you can read the entire ID3
tag...
Other comments:
* A black color head unit will be desirable as it will integrate
with the look of the dash better. Being silver it stands out
a little in a black dash seeming to say "Steal me!".
* Remote works only when directed towards the player... so cant
mount it anywhere you like...
* The MediaExpander (that they claim to compensate for the loss
in sound quality due to the compressed nature of mp3 files) is
not really all that useful, it makes the music sound worse in
many cases.
* File/folder browsing using remote would have been cool...(you
kind of tend to hide the display with your own hands while
using the rotary knob to browse... not a big deal at all...)
