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Sunday, July 13, 2008

How to Connect an iPod or Other Digital Music Player to Your Car Stereo

I recently "sold out" and bought myself an iPod. Here's a pro's guide to hooking it up to your head unit!

But first...

Unless you've been living in a cave for the past few years, you have heard of the iPod; Apple's wonderfully designed portable music player. The iPod allows you to carry the music of hundreds or thousands of CDs in a small box that fits easily in your pocket or bag. It is capable of much more, but the focus of this article is on the music. Because of the extreme portability of the iPod, many people want to bring it with them in the car. This is a problem because most cars don't offer iPod connectivity, with few exceptions. Fortunately, there are solutions for people who want to use their iPod in the car.

Direct connection:

Pros: Control iPod with stereo and remote controls, automatically charges iPod, perfect sound quality, easy to install, cheap Cons: None that I know of!

This option is only available to owners of radios that support a direct connection to the iPod. Basically, all you need is a cable that connects to your iPod, then to the radio. Alpine is one brand I know that offers this feature. Some new vehicles also offer a direct connection to the iPod.

How to connect via an interface:

Pros: Control iPod with stereo and remote controls, automatically charges iPod, perfect sound quality Cons: Expensive, more complicated to install

This option is available to owners of more up-to-date aftermarket radios and some newer factory radios.

Aftermarket radios:

You'll need a brand specific ipod interface. For example, if you have an Alpine head unit, you'll need to get an Alpine ipod interface. Usually, this interface is a small box that has an output to your radio, and an input that connects to to your ipod. Basically, you'll need to find an appropriate mounting location for the box. From there, find a good place to route the ipod cable. Some good locations are inside the glove box, or if you have a pocket in your dash, route it through there.

Factory radios:

You'll need a vehicle specific ipod interface. The one company I know of that manufactures these interfaces is Peripheral. Check out their website to see if your vehicle is supported. If yes, you're set! Hook up the interface similar to how you would above.

How to connect via a phono to RCA cable.

Pros: Excellent sound quality, easy installation, super cheap Cons: Can't control ipod with stereo, ipod won't automatically charge

You will need a head unit that has an auxillary input for this to work. If your head unit does not have an aux in, you're probably better off looking for another alternative.

How to connect an iPod through FM modulation:

Pros: Very easy to setup and install, device is widely available, most devices charge the iPod Cons: Not the cheapest, poorer sound quality, ipod can't be controlled by radio

This is the easiest way to hook up an iPod to your radio. Basically, your ipod connects to a device that broadcasts the music to a radio station frequency. Tune your radio to that frequency, and your music will play through the radio. There are a variety of products available that do this.

Other digital music solutions:

Kenwood makes a "music keg", which is basically a portable hard drive that interfaces with the Kenwood receiver. This is a great alternative to bringing an iPod with you in the car. Just load up the music keg, and your songs are good to go.

Alpine makes a digital music player. This device contains a hard drive that you can load up with your songs. It works very similarly to a CD changer in that it is controled by the head unit.

A brief word about other digital music players:

The iPod is not the only digital music player available. Creative Labs has the Zen, and Microsoft just released the Zune. There are many other devices available as well. If you have one of these other digital music players, you can still use some of these techniques to connect your player to your head unit.

Unfortunately, the iPod has been embraced much more than its competitors, so as far as I know, there are no interfacing options available for the other digital music players. You can still connect the device to your head unit through a mini phono to RCA cable. You can also find FM modulators that are not iPod specific which will allow you to connect to your head unit through the radio.

A brief word about digital music formats, compression, and sound quality:

So, back in the ice ages, like 10 years ago, a new digital format known as MP3 began to take the internet by storm. Basically, it allowed a full CD of music to take up minimum space on a person's hard drive. Before MP3, the main format available to most people was PCM (aka WAV). PCM is basically an exact replica of the information stored on CDs. Anyway, MP3 changed that. It was now possible to compress the music to a significantly smaller file size. In general, you could fit 10x the data in the same space. Where a typical WAV file of a song might take up 50 Mb, an MP3 file of the same song might take up 5 Mb, without a severe loss of sound quality. The songs could now be transferred very easily between people. This of course resulted in a whole lot of controversy...Remember the original Napster?

Yeah, yeah. Who cares?

Here's why it matters. In order to fit a lot of data in a small space, you have to take some stuff out. In other words, you lose sound quality. MP3 files allow for higher or lower amounts of compression, and usually this is expressed by bit rate. Basically, the higher the bit rate, the higher the sound quality.

Yeah, yeah. Who cares?

When playing music in the car, especially LOUD, sound quality matters a great deal. So, you'll want to be sure that when you play MP3s (or other digital music formats) in your vehicle, you use higher quality sound files. If you use poorly encoded music files, you'll definitely regret it!

Poorly encoded files tend to sound "tinny", or like they are being played through a can. Also, high frequency sounds such as cymbals and voice (especially when vocalists use words that contain the letter "S") sound "swishy". Bass tends to sound muddy and sloppy. When you play this stuff loud, it gets very annoying.

Anyway, if you plan to play digital music in your vehicle, be sure you are using high quality sound files. For MP3, the files should ALWAYS by 44.1 kHz. The bit rate should be at least 160, but preferably higher. I personally encode all of my files at 256.

Anyway, now you know about digital music in the vehicle!

Alan Bayer is an entrepreneur and car audio enthusiast. He runs an eBay store selling car stereo install supplies:

http://stores.ebay.com/honest-aebs-autosound/

He also has a GREAT website with car audio articles (such as the one from above). Also on the website, learn about car audio equipment, how to find the best equipment, how to install it, and save big bucks in the process!

http://www.honestaebs-caraudio.com/

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What a Broadband Phone Really Is

You may have heard the terms broadband phones,internet phones, or even voice over internet protocol, but do you really know what they mean or how they work? With the gaining popularity of these on line communication tools, you should understand exactly what these things really are and how they do what they do.

Broadband phone actually uses voice over internet protocol (VoIP) to carry phone calls through the internet. This is an alternative way to transmit the call to the traditional telephony network. To say it another way, the calls go through the internet instead of traveling through traditional phone lines.

How does it work, though? The VoIP, when you place a broadband phone call, converst your voice into what can be best described as tiny digital packages. These packages are fired over the internet and then changed back to the signals necessary for the receiver to transmit them in language that you understand as the voice on the other end.

To get a broadband phone, you do have some options. A hardware broadband telephone uses an adapter. You connect this hardware to the router on your network or to your PC directly. Another option is software. The broadband software is a program that makes broadband calls.

This technology is being called the future of communications. Such hype is sending communications companies into a frenzy as they race to offer it so as not to get left in the dust as more and more of the public drops traditional phone service for broadband phones. Companies that fail to get in on the broadband call business risk going the way of the dodo. With that in mind, many of the companies are already offering VoIP technology, and every day more are joining in.

The reason the broadbad phone companies are so popular is that they can be done cheaper than traditional phone services. You see, because the calls bypass regulary Telco tolls, the companies using broadband can offer much lower rates. This is particularly true on long distance calls, making them similar to cell phones in that sense. While currently the broadband phone services may not offer quite as much reliability and quality as traditional phone lines, the technology is improving almost constantly and wont be far behind. For the money, though, the internet is already showing itself as the way to go to save on phone service.

If you decide that going with one of the many broadband phone companies is the way you want to go, then you will need to make sure you have a couple of things so that your transition to cheaper phone calls will be smooth. First, you will need to make sure you have a good reliable broadband internet service in your home. You will next need a telephony adapter installed. You will be plugging your home phone into the telephony adapter which will then plug into your cable or DSL modem with a network cable. Since internet connections are reliant on the modem which is powered by electricity, you will lose your phone service if you lose power. One thing you may want to consider, since you wont lose your cables function with an electricity loss, is to get some sort of power source you can plug into the modem in case of a power outage. Get all of that together, call the company of your chose, and you will be using the internet to make your phone calls before you know it.

Christopher M. Luck has over 13 years experience in dealing with broadband phones and is now offering his free professional broadband phone advice to the public. If you are at all interested in Christopher's professional broadband advice, tips, or secrets, you can visit his broadband blog

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