YAY! No ugly controller

Author's Rating:

Pros: Works with your factory stereo

Cons: Wasn't included with the car

The Bottom Line: 
If your car has built in changer controls on the radio, but no changer, you NEED this.

Author's Review
We bought a Honda Odyssey, and ended up with a cassette deck that had built in CD-changer controls, but no changer. Honda gets $350+ for their players, starting with a single CD player attachment.

That wasn't the route I wanted to go, but I was adamant about not adding one of those little control panels to the dash of the new car. We have one in another car, and the displays are hard to read, the wires stick out, and they just aren't "right".

Enter Circuit City. They showed me this Alpine player. With an adapter, the factory stereo will control it. $350 later (199.00 player, 20.00 adapter, 80.00 install, 20.00 for a player glove) and we have a CD-changer tucked away, and a clean, like new dash and radio.

And tucked away it is. The player is so tiny, they screwed it to the bottom of the drivers seat, and there is still a couple of inches of clearance under the player, for a CD wallet or maps.

The changer is fairly quick. Magazine type players tend to be quite slow as the original disk is unloaded, the mechanism moves, loads the new disk, and moves back to playing position. Of the three changers I have, this is the quickest.

It is a bit loud - I can hear the mechanism moving, as it stored directly beneath the drivers seat, and the other two are behind the back seat in a four door truck, or in the cargo compartment of a station wagon.

The sound is good. There is no skipping over bumps. The caveat to sound quality is it is coming through factory speakers with no amp. Those will probably be changed eventually, but the sound quality is the same as the FM radio.

These points all pale in comparison to the lack of the little wired remote controller, however. The dash is clean, and the stereo controls all the functions from disk change to song skip to shuffle/repeat. We constantly get comments about buying the factory changer (big $$), and people are amazed that someone finally made a changer that works with the factory radio.

The cost is middle of the road for a changer - we paid $200.00, I've seen them as little as $100 (Koss on sale) to over $300.

All that considered, give this Alpine a 5-star rating, but not until you run out and grab one for your car.