FYI, Kenwood also makes marine head units that are silver also. However, I am not sure that the Kenwoods are as up to date feature wise as the Alpines. The Alpine marines posted above, seem to be exactly like their "auto" versions whereas the kenwoods I saw do not look like their top end "auto" head units. I could be wrong though.

Just a rant.....Why cant they make more affordable (under $350) head units that diplay 3 lines of text and more than 8-10 characters in length. If you're playing MP3s, this info would be helpful.

While my Alpine 9885 auto version (looks the same as the 9886m as posted above) shows 2 lines of text and a decent number of characters ( 16 maybe ), it only shows around 10 when doing searches. I had to change the artist name on my entire Zeppelin collection so that I could search properly. BTW, the Alpine is in my truck, not the Crossfire.

Old Artist name "Led Zeppelin 1975"
New Artist name "Zeppelin 75"

Why not just use Led Zeppelin as the Artist? Well, when you have nearly 60 gig of live zeppelin MP3s, it makes searching through hundreds of "Led Zeppelin" albums pretty tough. To make organizing and searching easier, I put the year of the tour in the Artist name. Another advantage is that the albums that remain under "Led Zeppelin" are only the official studio releases.

Sorry for the rant, but for those looking to play MP3s, the text display capabilities should be high on the list of "must haves" for your new Head unit. Also, research the ipod controls. Some navigate your ipod really slow. Not good while driving and very frustrating. In fact, I have an Alpine 9883 in my 94 olds that is so slow, I unplug it from the head unit to change albums then plug it back in. When I bought it 4 years ago, it was near the state of the art.