Get the Music on the Road
Here are five ways to play MP3s in your car
April 7, 2003
| PHOTO COURTESY OF KENWOOD |
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After slaving away amassing an enormous collection of MP3 files, it's no fun to find out that you can't play them in your car. But if you have a portable MP3 player or plan on getting a new car stereo, here are five ways to get your digital music playing on the road.
1. FM Transmitter
Many next-generation MP3 players are boasting built-in FM transmitters, which send music directly to an open channel on your car's FM radio. If you're happy with your current player, there are already affordable add-ons: the $30 irock! wireless FM transmitter (myirock.com; also known as Kima Link-It) runs on two AAA batteries and plugs into the headphone jack of any MP3 or CD player. Sound quality isn't the greatest, and you may have to play around a bit until the transmitter provides a static-free signal, but it is the least messy solution available.
2. Cassette Adapter
The cheap and dirty way to take your MP3s mobile. Provided your car has a cassette deck (surprisingly many still do), you can get an adapter that plugs into your player's headphone jack. The going rate is $20, although some come free with the purchase of MP3 players, and the same adapters you may have had in the late 1980s for use with portable CD players will work with newer devices. Just be aware that not all cassette adapters are guaranteed to perform in all tape decks — in fact, the rate of failure is fairly high — and the delivered sound quality has a tendency to vary as well.
3. Auxiliary Inputs
At home, your boombox or audio receiver has red-and-white RCA inputs for auxiliary devices like VCRs and MP3 players. Today, most car stereos have their own type of auxiliary inputs, but they're not always visible. The jacks are often in the back, and require adapters for connecting portable devices like MP3 players. The good news is, adapters are fairly cheap, and the procedure to connect the adapter is simple. Of course, you might need some technical help and you may have to live with a wire sticking out from behind your car stereo.
4. CD Head Unit or Changer
An increasing number of CD players now feature the ability to read MP3 and/or WMA tracks burned onto CD-R or CD-RW, and this trend is perhaps most prevalent in car audio. If you're in the process of upgrading your car stereo, or recently purchased a car or new audio system, find out what it's capable of decoding. As far as sound quality goes, this is as good as it gets: since the tracks are coming straight from the CD system, any quality deficiency would be on the part of the MP3s themselves. Remember, the hotter your sound system, the more clearly you'll hear the digital compression of your MP3s.
5. Car-based Hard Drive Systems
The final frontier for MP3 junkies is, of course, a hard drive installed in your car. One way to do it is a hard-drive head unit, like those built by Sony and Pioneer. They cost in the $1,200 to $1,500 range and feature a CD slot where albums are identified, then saved to the internal drive. The other design is a removable hard drive system. The PhatBox, created by PhatNoise, uses 10GB, 20GB and now 40GB cartridges that can be loaded with tracks at your PC, then inserted, Atari-style, into a changer mounted in your car. Also marketed as Kenwood's Music Keg, the PhatBox is priced anywhere from $500 to $1,000. This summer, Alpine will introduce its own removable 16GB hard-drive system, the HDA-5460.
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