Focal Car Audio

Works just Ok, August 18, 2012

My boating friend and I both have Alpine marine stereos and the working distance is not great with either of our units. It is good for about 10 feet from the head unit. I have a MC20 remote mounted in the transom which I use most of the time.

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great HU, despite the market is evolving strangely, March 13, 2012

i had an alpine cde-9852 head unit since i bought my car in 2006. lining-in an ipod was as critical for me back then as it is now. once the primary select button on that ceased to work, i thought “ok…i guess it’s time to buy this year’s model. no problem.” so i start to poke around a little, and begin to see the landscape has changed. apparently gone are the days where a rear ipod input was commonly available. everything is now front-input only. i get the convenience, but what an inelegant solution! so i’m supposed to have idevice wires hanging around my console all the time? this setup would also necessitate me getting a mount for my idevice, lest i leave it in a cupholder or ashtray. i normally keep my ipod in a storage sleeve under the head unit, but i wouldn’t be able to close its door with it tethered to a cable. look…front usb is awesomely convenient, especially on the fly (say your passenger wants to get his own playlist going on a whim), but long-term and logistically, it’s got a lot of flaws. nonetheless…

i found the cde-123 as the last front and rear input solution in this price range by alpine. awesome. one problem: it’s last year’s model and there’s hardly any left on the market. great. i dug around everywhere, and finally landed one through a direct order with alpine (via something they call Shopatron). whatever…they located a local retailer who had one left. i thought this was the perfect ending to my quest to replace my head unit.

so i’ve had this thing installed for a few days now, and i’m noticing some oddities. the first glaring thing that another reviewer here referred to is that when it displays song information, it only shows one attribute at a time. you hit the View button, and it cycles through song timer, clock time, artist, album, and song info with each press of the button. however, unlike my cde-9852 which is 6 years old, it doesn’t cycle through artist/album/song info automatically (meaning, without the user having to hit the View button every time). so for example, if i’m listening to a track i’ve never heard (let’s say the song is called “Accordion”) and i’ve set the display to view song name, and i’ve even set the display to auto-scroll text, all i’ll see is the word “Accordion” incessantly flashing over and over and over again until the song is done. and let’s say i’m interested to see who the artist is or what album it was off of, i’d have to hit the View button several times to cycle through all the other information until i get to the info i’m looking for. once i get to the artist name, it will just flash “MF Doom” over and over again until the song is done. heck…if i leave it on artist, “MF Doom” will flash repeatedly until i stop listening to that artist.

i’m not sure how this feature regresses in the course of six years, or the rear input thing either. it reminds me of an article i read about home stereo tech remaining virtually unchanged since the ’80s, so all the manufacturers do is play with techy feature sets that have no real bearing on sound quality. i wonder if the same applies to the mobile stereo game, and if tweaking such inane features keeps consumers on their toes to buy the “latest” stuff. will rear ipod inputs and text that automatically scrolls between artist/album/song make miraculous comebacks in a couple of years and be touted as brand-new, must-have features?

why all this ranting on a 4-star rating? well, in trying to find answers to my puzzling problems, i found very little in the way of websites with dialogue on such things. maybe i wasn’t looking in the right places, but for a lot of product categories, there are authoritative sources for vast information that will be the 1st or 2nd hit on a google search. that being the case, i wanted to leave a lot of information that is only lightly touched upon around the internet. the flip-side to all this is that the sound quality output by this HU is quite nice, the quick search features are indeed evolutionary (in the way one would expect over the course of 6 years) from my 9852 which consisted of rigorous knob turning in order to find the artist or album of your fancy, and though the trend is front-only ipod integration, this particular unit has inputs on both ends. i might have gone with a differentiated play/pause button, as well as rewind/advance buttons, but i’m sure with time i’ll instinctively know the far-bottom-right button in the 6-button cluster is play/pause, and the middle-two buttons are rewind/advance. i also enjoy pandora being supported out of the box. this will undoubtedly entice me to use pandora more often. and i suppose if bluetooth and sirius radio are musts for you, optional upgrades for both are probably nice. so all in all, i would highly recommend this HU, despite the few head-scratchers which may be more industry-related than company.

one last thing: does anyone out there know why there’s an “F” flanked by two…

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