This is an old post I did years ago and forgot about, but a recent email asking about it lead me to resurrect it from the dead. After all, car audio is something a lot of people are confused about. The guide has been updated slightly.

When you’ve been a blogger for a few years on several sites, things start to get mixed up and forgot. Between various forum threads, anythingbutipod articles, pocketables articles, my olg blog and this blog I have perhaps 3-400 non-news posts lying around and I don’t remember them all. That was also the case with this post, until a nice guy from Greece emailed me a couple of days ago asking about it. I remember I’d done a car audio guide somewhere, but couldn’t for the life of me find it – so I asked the guy for a link to my own post. Turns out it was a really old post from the days when I manually updated my captain-odegard site, which is several years ago now (having had this site and a wordpress based version of the old site in between). It’s a somewhat useful article, so I thought I might as well throw it up here and update it slightly.

Car audio guide

When it comes to car audio systems, people are normally far behind on technology compared to what their home or portable setup is. People with a top notch mp3 player might still use CD’s in their cars, simply because they don’t know how to implement their mp3 player in their car system. Here are a few tutorials on how to make it all work.

Video Setup

Portable DVD players are often bought by parents to make kids keep quiet during drives. Using such a player by default is easy, and doesn’t need any explaining. Many mp3 players however have the ability to output video through a TV out cable. Zune HD, Cowon S9/D2/A3/O2, iPod/iPhone etc are some examples of players with this feature. To hook these up to a screen in the car, you of course need a screen. Many(/most) portable DVD players have AV-in capabilities, and you can also buy standalone LCD monitors if you prefer so. You have to get a AV-out cable that work with your player, and in most cases there isn’t a standard cable that will work – you have to get one fpr your specific player. There are also different types of cables, most importantly component and composite cables. Component cables have 5 RCA connectors (3 for video, 2 for audio) and will only work on larger or more advanced monitors and not smaller ones such as portable DVD players. Composite cables have 3 RCA connectors and will work for portable DVD players.

Picture: Portable DVD player with included TV cable and Cowon D2 with its proprietary TV cable

It’s all in all pretty simple, colors kinda takes away the guessing game of what cable goes where
Note that you have to choose AV in on you DVD player and AV out on your video player, the method for doing so depends on what player you have. Normally it’s a hardware button on the DVD player and a menu option on the video player.

Power Setup

No fun with flat batteries… Unfortunately, a lot of players can’t charge and play at the same time. Either way, there’s basically two ways to charge your player in the car: Use a specially made car charger, or use a USB adapter. Which of the two you can use depend on whether the player supports USB chargers or not. Read more about USB charging in my USB charging guide on Anything but iPod.

Audio Setup

This is what most people want, and what surprisingly few people know how to do: Get an mp3 player to work in the car. There are basically 4 ways of doing this: You can buy a car integration system, a car stereo with USB or line-in, you can use a cassette adapter, or you can use a FM transmitter.

Car integration systems

This would be the rich iPod user’s best solution. As far as I know, few or no other players have this option – maybe with the exception of the US-only Zune. Basically it’s an expensive way of integrating your iPod into the car audio system. I think it’s a waste of money and not applicable to very many, but if you really have an iPod and a brand new car you can google it yourself and find out more.

USB/line-in Capable Car Stereo

This is by far the best solution, audio quality wise, but it requires that you buy a new stereo for your car (unless your current one has this option of course). A line-in capable car stereo is very cheap, for USB it’s slightly higher I believe, and of course it all depends on your country.

Line-in is basically a 3.5mm or 2.5mm female audio jack input. It’s normally located on the front panel of the car stereo, and is often referred to as “aux” (auxiliary input). All you need to connect to your player is a line-in cable. Many companies try to sell line-in cables marked for specific players, but it’s just the same 3.5mm male to male cable you can buy in pretty much any electronic store. If you have a 2.5mm input on your car stereo, you’ll need a 2.5mm male to 3.5mm male cable instead (the 3.5mm plug goes into your player), or a 2.5mm to 3.5mm adapter. With a player connected through line-in (remember to select aux input on the car stereo), you control the music on the player and not the car stereo. Some people use a wired remote with this method, and there are also kits (for iPod of course -.-* ) that are designed to be put on the steering wheel and allow you to operate the player that way.

With USB capable car stereos, you don’t control the music from the player. Instead, the car stereo uses the player as storage unit only, meaning you can just as well use a USB stick or a memory card if the unit has a memory card reader. For the USB method to work, the player must be UMS, meaning that it pops up on the computer as a removable drive. It must also be able to work without full USB power available – as a flash drive and not a charging-needy MP3 player, as most of these USB ports don’t provide that much power (voltage is of course the standard 5V of USB, but it might only provide 100-200ma vs 500ma on a computer. No this won’t break your device even if it doesn’t work). No software dependent crap (iPod or Zune, or MTP devices) will work with this, unless you assign a part of the player to work as a portable hard drive and copy music files on there, but that wastes space. To connect the player, you just plug the player into the USB port or USB cable converter that comes with the stereo, depending on what solution your stereo uses. When you’ve done that, there should be a USB mode somewhere on your stereo. Frankly, this is kidna useless as you might as well buy a cheap flash drive to use for your stereo. Connecting your player through line-in is much better since you then control everything on the player and you can use all the player’s features.

Cassette adapters

If you have a CD car stereo without USB or line-in, and want to use your mp3 player, you’re actually better off installing an old cassette car stereo. Cassette adapters don’t work as well as line-in, but they work a lot better than FM transmitters. Basically, a cassette adapter looks like an audio cassette with a 3.5mm audio cable attached. You put in the cassette, press play, and connect your mp3 player, and that’s it, no hocus pocus about it. Cassette adapters can be bought in a lot of electronic stores, or you can pay 1/5 the price and buy from China.

Bluetooth

Some newer car stereos have built in Bluetooth, allowing you to wirelessly connect to the car stereo with a Bluetooth capable player. Sound quality wise this is abou tthe same as cassette adapters as Bluetooth isn’t perfect, so if line-in is available that is the better solution. However, Bluetooth might allow you to use the car stereo as a hands free.

FM transmitters

The last, and worst sounding solution, is the almighty FM transmitter. What this does is basically transmit your music to the car radio on a specified FM frequency. All you do is plug it into the player, turn it on, select a frequency and tune to that on the radio. Sounds too good to be true? It is… First of all, interference is a MAJOR problem. If there are many radio channels nearby, finding an unused frequency might be hard enough, and on top of that pretty much everything seems to affect the signal. The closer the transmitter is to the radio antenna, the better signal you’ll get.

There are about as many FM transmitters as there are mp3 players. You have proprietary transmitters like for the iPod/iPhone, and you have universal ones with 3.5mm jacks. You can also get transmitters that are specifically built for cars – plugging directly into the cigarette connector, and even transmitters with remote control. The later actually function as mp3 players, and have a USB port or card reader as well as audio in. The way the USB and memory card function works is just the same as USB and memory cards on car stereo systems, they use the connected devices as memory only. The audio quality of these transmitter players isn’t top notch, but you loose so much quality when transmitting through FM anyways that it doesn’t really matter. Here are some from China.

Some new car stereo’s also have bluetooth capabilities, which means you can transfer music to the system if you have an A2DP capable music phone or player. However these players should also have line-in, which is a much better solution that anything wireless.