My friend has an alpine 7894 in his integra and we tried to figure out if regular cds sounded better or mp3 format. We burned one of his metallica cds onto a regular cd-r, then onto a mp3 cd-r. We listened to both a bunch of times and they sounded EXACTLY the same. I couldn't tell ANY difference and my doctor says i have exceptional hearing these days. Maybe alpine Media Expander thing really does work but all i know is if they both sound like that, we're going with mp3.