Summary: This is a great deck at the price point, which has a great many features. The Glide-Touch feature is a bit tricky at first, but once you learn to use it it can be great. It comes down to personal preference with that feature, as some hate it and some, like myself, love it.
This Head Unit is capable of going fully active, meaning you need not use external crossovers if you so desire, which is great for those of us who have an extensive setup including component speakers, subs etc. There is a switch on the bottom which lets you go 2-way or 3-way also, for those of us with 2-way or 3-way components.
There is a 5-band parametric, and 7-band graphic equalizer also built into this deck, which fully allows you to control the sound from your deck. For those who don't know anything about equalizers and all that fancy stuff, there are also a good number of preset equalizer settings, such as rock, hip hop, easy listening, country, etc., plus a setting called MX, which adds a bit of punch to your music, for those looking for that.
The crossovers are great, and offer a good range of settings to choose from, and aren't as restictive as some I have seen in the past. As I stated earlier, you have the option to set them using the 2-way setting, which basically gives you high pass filters for front and rear, and low pass for your subs, if you go 3-way, you get a fuller range of settings for three way component speakers. There is a switch on the bottom of the unit to switch from 2 to 3-way.
One of my favorite features on this unit is the Time-Correction feature, which lets you adjust the sound coming from your speakers according to their distance from your ears, which makes the sound from all of them get to you at precisely the same time, and makes for a much better sounding system.
One of the things I required when I was searching for a new head unit was the ability to control serius satalite radio from the deck, and this unit not only has that, but also the ability to run xm, which is great if I decide I want XM instead at a later date.
I personally like the glidetouch feature, although some don't, but there is one thing that kind of bothered me about the unit, and that is it's lack of a pre-out higher than 2-volts. I don't know why, but it seems Alpine is going backwards in this respect, and looking at the new decks for 2006, they seem to be going backwards in many respects. I won't go into this in this review, because the review is about the CDA-9853, and I do love it, but all I will say on the subject is, Alpine, what are you thinking? You should be inovating, not going backwards in features as years pass.
For the price, this is one great deck, and I am very happy with my purchase.
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