i actually compared the alpine 7894 and the pioneer 8400, the higher end one with the dual silver faceplates, at circuit city. the load time between tracks for the alpine was like 3 secs while the pioneer was 5 sec. at first i thought those times were a lot, but its actually not too much. but the pioneer is still noticeably slower tho. my question now is, will the 7400 take as much time as the 8400 or even slower since its cheaper?

 

yea I have the Pioneers deh p7400mp and the lag in between MP3 tracks is noticeable and annoying, Its not horrible but its no where near as smooth as regular audio. Another thing i dont like about it is how the screen switches colors from bright to dark every minute or whatever it is. Other than that its a nice deck

 

Hmm... the only MP3 player ive been exposed to is the SlimX and it preloads the next track so theres no transition time if your going from one song to the next. Your saying none of the in dash mp3 players do this?

 

Can't you shut it off so that it won't do that? I have the Premier version of yours(740mp) and I can shut off that feature. All you do is turn the key to the on position(radio must be off first) and press '5' I think? I don't recall I have to look in the manual again. That made it stop. But yeah, this is with the Premier, I don't know about the regular Pioneer ones.