Alpine CDA-9855 Versus Kenwood Excelon KD

welp, as a person who made that choice...

the glide touch looks really appealing. but.. =) did you try it out? after a while it became more annoying than helpful, starts skipping and eventually  seems problematic.

i have an alpine 7840 right now i've used for years. and replaced with a kenwood mp828 (similar to the excelon, not as long on the warranty) but this unit is VERY, VERY impressive from where kenwood stood in my eyes before. Again. price is the deciding factor for anyone buying alpine/kenwood/sony/pioneer. and i'll vote that the gentlemen who mentioned eclipse being a step above.. right on. same with nakamichi and denon. just all around better units. but not as feature friendly or as attractive (w/ naka & denon) anyways. I'd have to vote personally on the kenwood in the long run, easy to operate and tons of fun features.

kenwood excelon, hands down.  this year's excelon is much better than any kenwood you've ever experienced.  as mentioned before the 24 bit burrbrown (all 4 of 'em!) dac's are very nice (although not as nice as those in the f#1 product).  and i'll tell ya, they sound great.   i'm not sure on the alpine preout impedance but the kenwood are  5 volt/ 80 ohm. (you really need to analyze votage and impedance togethor to know the equipment's capabilities!). also not mentioned is the fact that the excelon has non-volatile memory options so you don't have to setup the dsp everytime your battery dies.  you've also got 3 lines of displayable text to go along with your compressed media and satellite radio.

i may be reading this wrong, but it seems as if noone here knows that kenwood also has an ipod adapter.  even more so, everyone complains about how the control features are set up w/ all of the manufacturer's control devices.  why not use the built in auxilliary input and use the ipod itself for control.

or better yet, leave your headphones plugged into your ipod and rip 20+gigs of music to your kenwood musickeg.  this is a harddrive designed specifically for the mobile environment and overcomes a lot of the issues people have w/ their ipod controllers.

although well built, and dependable, alpine is not necessarily the top-performer these days.