Automobile News

The Alpine CDE-9874 is your typical Alpine product that features an intuitive and colourful faceplate design. Its main rotary volume control dial is flanked by two coloured button clusters, which are responsible for controlling separate functions. The high point of the unit happens to be its abundance of high-end features and the flexibility with which you can access them.

The unit in addition to a standard AM/FM tuner is competent enough to handle a wide range of disc formats including MP3, WMA, and AAC-encoded discs facilitated by a single disc slot. Drivers are provided with the ability to use the car radio’s dedicated View button to cycle through CD Text, ID3, or WMA tags on folder, file, track, artist, and album, while playing the latter option. Then there is a search option as well that allows you to navigate files on an MP3 disc by searching through either a list of files or folders.

You will have little difficulty in choosing a song, especially since the chosen song is shown on a display. Like its more expensive counterpart, the CDE-9874 also has the provision of “quick search” which will do away with prolonged search headaches. The feature also enables you skip to a specific track, if you know happen to know its folder/file designation. The device, in addition, allows you to navigate to different song options without interrupting the currently playing track.

Other impressive trait of the gadget is that it transforms into a full fledged iPod interface supported by the company’s own iPod cable feature. The data and logic control of the player meanwhile are transferred to the stereo faceplate.