Checking out Car Audio / iPod interfaces


I headed over to Best Buy and Circuit City today to see what my options were for hooking my iPod up in the car.

I used the Sony cassette adapter thing in my old car, but the car I have now only has CD/FM, so I've been using a Griffin iTrip. I'm not very happy with it. The high-range gets distorted and interference is always an issue. I wanted to see what was possible.

At Circuit City, the guys were pretty helpful, and they let me hook up my iPod to a Pioneer iPod converter / 7700 combo. Out the door it would probably run $350 to $400, since the converter is about $120, and the deck is $250 or so. The big plus is that the system keeps the iPod juiced and talks to the iPod with the same connection. It still has two cables though, which I thought looked dorky. The info from the iPod shown on the display wasn't very impressive. The non-scrolling size of the display is only 8 letters wide. The iPod's own interface is a hell of a lot better.

I walked next door to the Best Buy, and looked at their offerings too. Kenwood and Alpine also sell their own iPod converter/interfaces for their decks. The prices on those were around $100. None of the decks had anything going for them. I even looked for basic aux input jacks on the front of any of the decks. Only JVC and some other no name brand had that.

So, where does that leave me? I'm thinking of doing what these guys did:

http://www.mattgilbert.net/carstereoauxinput/

http://ipod.hackaday.com/entry/1234000220046664/

Charging the iPod will still be unsightly. I've got a cigarette lighter gizmo that charges the iPod for the long hauls, but for local trips, I don't need it.

Once again, I'm hoping Apple will look in to this and do it right. I know they've got VW, BMW, Volvo all working with them. They need to school the companies making these decks. Shoddy products, IMHO. Simplify!

Posted: Mon - June 20, 2005 at 02:56 PM      

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