Alpine MRA-D 550

Advantages: Best sound quality in its price range
Disadvantages: Ugly as sin

...a little. From this you get a gorgeous reproduction with some hard hitting bass that sounds great. I'd be tempted to suggest its easy to get confused with the alpine units, and if you do fiddle with the set up it is very difficult to get a great sound, but if you are a complete music freak on a budget then its the unit for you. The only thing i found that made me change was the fact that it couldn't handle a 7v input through the aux in and the head unit fried :( I really miss the alpine, but have since moved on to much more expensive, better things, though to be fair value for money... the alpine was a quater the price what i got now and the difference was never worth that amount of money. Instruction manual will confuse you as much as the unit itself, but its handy to keep as a reference now and then. Installation of an alpine unit is very... Read review

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Advantages: Number of features, sound quality, radio reception
Disadvantages: Overkill

...I have owned an Alpine 7570R Cassette/Tuner since Christmas and I am fairly pleased with it. It was a replacement for a standard fit radio which had been playing up and I had hankered after an Alpine for a while. It has a huge number of features (most of the buttons have multiple functions) and it will take a good few evenings with the manual before you can do more than turn it on. It has all of the radio RDS features that you'd expect from Alpine: AutoSearch, traffic information, radio station messages and programme information. All of these features (except the radio info, which is just distracting if you want to see which station you are listening to) are useful and I like them. Other good features are the Programme Search function for tapes to allow skipping forward or back as many tracks as you choose. It also has a removable... Read review

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Advantages: High quality, well-priced, feature packed
Disadvantages: Annoying power off button - that's it!!

...I bought the Alpine CTA-1502R Commander Tuner/Controller to replace a rather old Alpine Tuner/Tape head unit with CD Changer. Having had a very good experience with my previous Alpine head unit, the replacement had to be an Alpine. Since adding a CD changer to my old head unit, I'd stopped using cassettes because the difference in quality was unbelievable. I therefore didn't want to play tapes on my new unit. That's why I went for the 1502, since all it has built in is a tuner and amplifier. Anything else can be added on, like the CD changer which I bought at the asme time. Since having the unit, about six months, it has worked perfectly. It has a very large display, since there are no openings for CDs, tapes etc. It uses the display for all of the usual info along with a spectrum analyser (flashing lights) which can be changed... Read review

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