It’s a pleasant surprise to find a high-end Alpine deck not right at the top of the price pile in this test. As ever with the firm’s units, we liked the pulse-touch controls on the screen, which felt like mechanical buttons when pressed. A £20 lead adds full-speed iPod control, and the set-up was happy playing CDs encoded with WMA/MP3 and WAV files. The list of plug-in extras is impressive, but there’s no remote control or USB input, so it trailed the best systems here.