fbgh2o

I have an excellent Alpine CDA-9884 installed in my car and it provides great quality sound. I bought it because of the iPod compatibility.

However, I find the display and buttons (either red or blue) quite bright at night, even in dimmed mode, and the actual text display is white. I am wondering (other than a Nakamichi head unit) if anyone has any experience with very good quality head units that have amber / orange displays and button illumination and also offer built-in iPod connectivity (and control)

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

BlackOp

I am buying one of these next week. Solid black face and 30,000 color options. You can also program the left buttons/ wheel separate from the LCD screen...which can be either negative or positive (black background or colored).

http://www.sonicelectronix.com/pictures.php?id=17638

I used to have a BMW and it matched the orange lights perfectly...

Wipeout

I've heard about Becker head units matching the interior of our cars pretty well.

theedge

Have you wired in the dimming wire?

BlackOp

What do you mean...I know you can control the brightness of the LCD.

guardsred944s

I've never used sonic before, but they seem to have a good selection even when compared to crutchfield.... did you order from them/ have a good experience?

Thanks, Pat

jpk

I'm pretty happy with my JVC arsenal. I think all of those models have the display color option. I've got the internal HD tuner as well which is pretty cool.

Arominus

Check out the top end kenwood headunits, the kdc-693 or 993 (they are the same unit but the 993 has built in bluetooth) They can be set to be a lot of colors and are not as retina scorching as the alpines. They have USB control of Ipods and require nothing more than a standard Ipod cable to hookup. They also have a built in crossover.

I'm seriously looking at the 993 or a JVC dvd headunit (that would give me 5.1 w/ the early dash!) to replace my old alpine 9813..

fbgh2o

Yes

944obscene

I'm going with Nakamichi. The LCD colors aren't my favorite, but the units look factory for the most part and are built to excellent quality, with amazing sound.

fbgh2o

Would love to, but no iPod support appears available.

alxdgr8

I've got the same cd player and have the color set to red. It is bright, if it's ever a problem then I just flip the head unit down (like to open a cd). Alpine has the best ipod interface by far of anyone.

pontifex4

That excessive-brightness-even-when-dimmed problem really offends me. I've actually disassembled brand new decks to paint over the LEDs with (non-metallic) model paint to get around it, but it's glaringly (sorry) obvious to me that the manufacturers design those decks to stand out on a display wall at Best Buy.

I also suspect that some people just don't mind the level of brightness these decks kick out, even when driving on the highway at night. I do. I also really dislike how cheap, shiny, chrome and flashy so many of them look.

I'm actually rewiring an old Blaupunkt deck to support external amps and ipod/aux input/ipod charging now but I don't think I'll bother with deck control, this time.

guardsred944s brought this company up in another thread: http://soundmove.com/secretaudio.htm. Not particularly elegant if you want to control everything with the deck, but it's another possibility.

dillon410021

mine are great. its an alpine with the screen for dvd's.
It is nice and dim and the gauges are perfect.
most of the buttons light up red and some light up blue