…why can’t car radios keep the tunes going while the key is being turned?
I just got gas, a good tune just started on the radio, but starting the car ruined the flow.
Because your starter needs all the amperage it can get from the battery.
It’s deliberate.
When the starter is being cranked, 100% of the power goes to it.
But what percentage is going to the radio? I doubt it’s much. And the interior lights don’t turn off. This seems like a holdover from the 1950s.
The starter motor draws a lot of current from the battery, which drops the voltage. The stereo needs a stable voltage to drive the amplifiers, so to avoid poor performance and/or possible damage, the design cuts the power while the starter is turning. It may take a second or two once you release the starter switch to re-energize the power capacitors (depending on your stereo).
They could put the stereo on an isolated circuit with its own battery to avoid this, but I doubt there would be enough demand to outweigh the costs.
What an awful second that must have been. :eek:
The horror. The horror.
Yes, it was. 
But I have always been particular about music playback. When my wife and I were first together, she found it eccentric that I asked her not to just suddenly pause/stop songs, or skip to another track in the middle of a song, if I was in earshot. I prefer the song be faded down before stopping/skipping it (just as I learned when working as a DJ at a 100,000 watt radio station). At first she was just humoring me, but she has come to develop the same preference. It’s kind of a feng shui type thing, or at least my mangled Western understanding of that concept.
They could start in luxury cars and then often those features eventually trickle down to mid-line models.
They do. At least,did. In the BMW 7-series of the 2000-2002 timeframe, they had a separate battery just for starting and the rest of the electrics were run off of a second battery. The starting battery was isolated so that it could only start the vehicle, but both would be charged with the engine running.
My understanding of the system (I never have seen one, only pictures) is that it was intended to allow the driver to use the accessories without draining the starting battery. You could sit there with the engine off, enjoying your music, heated cabin and butt-warmers, drinking your Latte made with the on-board Espresso machine, enjoying the scones heated in the microwave while laughing at the Hoi Palloi who had to make do with their crappy Cadillacs and Mercedes, all the time knowing you could start your car and get out of there if class envy got too bad.
What I am not sure is whether they changed the switching so that the radio kept playing while you were using the starter. The lesser models did not have this second battery, nor did the earlier sevens. Also, I don’t think there was any trickle-down. Isn’t listening to the car radio kind of old-fashioned anyway? Aren’t the cool kids all listening to their iPods?
You must have loved eight-track tapes.
You could still lower the volume gradually then switch tracks then raise the volume.
It would be simple to have the radio bypass this (in design, not talking about retrofitting), but the voltage drop during starting may be detrimental to the life of the sound system (which could also be designed to accept this)
Wouldn’t it be simple to have a small rechargeable battery built in to the radio?
I don’t think it is a medical issue worth addressing. Most healthy people can tolerate a one- or two-second interruption. If one’s respiration and pulse are habitually synched to the beat of the music, they will re-kick-start as soon as the engine fires and the ignition switch is turned off. One mustn’t forget to turn it up loud enough when going in the convenience store to buy Red Bull and jerky, so it continues to fire the brainwave synapses from a distance.
One of my mother’s cars - I think it was a 1988 Honda Concerto - somehow had its radio wired directly to the battery, and was not affected by the position of the ignition key. You could turn it on or off whether or not the key was in the accessory or running position or even if the key wasn’t inserted. As far as I can recall it was the factory radio so I never understood how that happened.
Initially, sure. But rechargeable batteries have a fairly short lifespan and I doubt people would be happy about having to disassemble a dashboard to replace an expired radio battery.
A supercapacitor would probably do it. They have a much longer lifespan.
It’s wasteful and borderline useless to do anything that keeps that radio on while the starter is engaged.
Of course it can be done. It’s just why? It’s an extra cost that 99.9% of drivers (I would guess) would not even notice. It’s certainly never occurred to me to be bothered by this (but, then again, I very very rarely have the radio on before I turn the ignition.)
You need to run the Amp, too. That’s going to take one big-ass supercap.
Oh man, my parents had an old eight track deck when I was a kid. They had some classic albums for at that weren’t bad, but yes: it was extremely annoying that it would switch tracks during a song. Couldn’t they figure out how to only have it switch between songs? That was so lame.
I am an Apple Music subscriber and carry an ever-changing assortment of playlists with me wherever I go. But I also like to listen to college radio.
As for the broader culture, the hip new Donald Glover series “Atlanta” makes it out to be a big deal when the main character’s cousin gets his record played on the radio, to the point of portraying payola as a commonplace occurrence.
This supercap should do it…