OK. Never mind the dancing lovelies, let's get back to Alpine and the current state of affairs with regards to car audio. I think car audio sound hit its zenith when we had great (or really good, well maintained) analog FM stations and very high quality cassette decks. The absolute worst sounding source for your car is 'music' sourced from satellite radio. Heavily compressed digital audio that would give MP3s a run for their money.just makes your car stereo sound like junk. FM radio blows now too because it's mainly digital. Give me a Nakamichi head unit with a cassette deck built into it, some decent amps and speakers, and some high quality cassette tapes that I recorded LPs to and you will have a system that sounds great in your car and it will rock as much as car audio can rock. I have a 2011 Ford Edge Limited AWD that I custom ordered from the factory with every option available except the roof rack and the DVD player. It has the custom Sony stereo system and it totally blows.
It is not just Alpine all car audio is not to my taste FM DVD Cassette what ever a car sucks as a place for music . A noise box turned into a boom box their is no up from that. Right now I have the once a year concert set up across the river from me 3 days and nights of techno none stop swearing DJ with millions of watts of power . Like one critic said about Emerson Lake and Palmer a total waste of time talent Electricity and money. But I am getting techno any way I got lucky it poured rain for a few hours that made them stop the lightning was nice I just could not get it to hit the speakers or DJ.
I only mentioned Alpine because that's who the dancing girls were hired by apparently. Alpine used to make decent head units. And yes, cars with 50dB to 60dB of ambient noise levels at speeds of 50+ mph isn't exactly a hospitable home for high quality audio. However, my point is that car audio used to sound much better pre-digital and pre-satellite radio (which is also digital of course).
As far as the critic of ELP goes, I don't agree. I don't like everything ELP ever did, but I sure like a lot of it. Their first LP is killer if you get the right version (Cotillion not Atlantic).