Adventures with car stereos
First a disclaimer: I’m no audiophile. I’m a gadget geek who can tell the difference between an MP3 Encoded at 196kbs and… 32kbps? Or between a reporter talking over a telephone line and one talking live. I can make out the extra channels in a surround sound system, and other basic things like this. I’m in no way a connoisseur of audio fidelity.
Moving on, I’ve been trying to set something up so that I could listen to music or audio books in my car on my daily commute without a lot of fuss. Years ago I bought a fairly expensive head unit that gave me a CD player, but not long after that it was stolen. That was the last time I bought something after-market. Until a month ago that is.
The car that I owned for the last five years was in a fended bender in the spring that totaled it. I know that sounds ridiculous, but that’s what my insurance company told me. I was lucky in that a friend was selling one of his cars at around the same amount as the check I was getting from my insurance company. I love the car, which is a Honda Civic, but the one thing I grew to hate about it was the stereo, a pioneer CD player with a non-detachable head. This thing was impossible to figure out how to operate. I could change the channel and the volume, but that’s about it. Even turning it on and off was a pain, and so I ended up just lowering and raising the volume instead most of the time. I could never get the clock to change, despite spending probably a total of an hour (spread out on different occasions). This coming from someone who has a fair degree of familiarity and stubbornness when it comes to figuring out functionality of electronics.
I had been toying in the back of my mind about getting a new car stereo installed almost from the day I took possession of the car, but for some reason I didn’t start to seriously consider it until August. I was using the iTrip FM transmitter to transmit the signal from my iPod to the car stereo. While the iTrip is generally viewed as the best FM transmitter for the iPod, it still can be not the most optimal thing to use. I live in the DC area which has lots of stations and reception changes as you drive through different parts of the area. This means that if I set a frequency at home, by the time I get halfway to work, that frequency may start getting a lot of interference. Changing the frequency, while not terribly difficult, does take a little practice, and is not something one can do easily (or more importantly safely) while driving. Aside from this, the sound quality is not spectacular. It’s probably fine most of the time for audio books, but for music, especially softer stuff where quality matters like acoustical performances, classical, etc., you will definitely be able to tell a difference between it and a CD. Comparing it to a radio station, though, one may come away detecting no real difference in quality.
More than anything else, though, I probably just wanted to get the damn Pionieer out of my car. Actually it is still there as I write this, but in the trunk, where it can’t hurt anyone else. So, I started looking for car stereos to replace it in August, as I mentioned. Really I could have cared less about the CD player. I’ve converted all my CD’s to MP3 and they all sit on my iPod, so unless I want to hear a CD that I buy on the way back from the store – and this tends to be something that happens maybe once or twice a year these days – the CD player is pretty much useless to me. I do, however, listen to the radio fairly often. Seeing as all car stereo head units that I knew of at least had a radio, this wasn’t really an issue. But, as I found out, one can’t buy a unit with ONLY a radio. Sure, maybe they exist somewhere, but not at any major chain store. Next I decided to look for one with a radio-cassette combination, since I thought it would be cheaper than a radio-CD player. But it looks like the cassette really has been completely and utterly crushed by the CD. I was able to find maybe one or at most two cassette players being sold, compared to what, maybe 30 or 40 different CD players?
What I was really looking for, though, was a unit that an “Aux In” or “Auxiliary In” which is just a fancy/audiophile term for a input port in the stereo unit into which you can plug external devices and then hear them through the car stereo. Really, this means any device which has a headphone jack can be plugged in, even including, say, a cell phone. Anyway, what I found was that this “Aux In” feature is not as popular as one would guess, or at least the manufacturers of these stereo units don’t believe so. It also doesn’t seem as it would be the most expensive part of the unit, as it seems it might just be a little more pricey to set up the laser and all the other components in a CD player than what amounts to some metal and wires. Yet, almost all of the units that sported this feature were at least $300, and this in a category where at least half of the units were under this price. Luckily, one manufacturer seems to have bucked the trend, AIWA. This is so even though AIWA is owned by Sony who, as most others, don’t sell anything with Aux In for under $300. The AIWA CDC-X144, their lowest end radio-CD head unit, does have this input. It was being sold by a local Circuit City for the low cost of $100. The reviews on Circuit City’s web page were not stunning, but I thought for $100, how can you go wrong? Plus, anything could be better than the Pioneer that was causing me daily frustration, right?
Right. The actual cost came to around $180 with installation and tax, so it may not be as dirt cheap as I initially made it out, but it still won’t break the bank for most people, especially considering that iPods go for $300-400, and not too long ago up to $500. I’m sure getting your BMW or Volkswagon iPodized or whatever the term is, isn’t cheap either. Anyway, I now simply plug stuff (mainly my iPod) into the Aux In and get sound as if I'm listening with headphones, or listening to a CD for that matter. I don't have to deal with the sub-par FM reception or sound quality, nor do I have to deal with how the stereo on my old car would cause my cassette adapters (I tried a few) to start to click after things got too hot, which was maybe an hour in Winter, but about 30 seconds during summer.
I don’t know why I waited so long to buy this, but I’m sure glad I did, and I hope this provides people in the same boat some insight that might help them to make the jump sooner rather than later if indeed it makes sense for them to do so.