I recently purchased a portable MP3 player with a nice backlit display/remote control.
I’d like to hook it up to my stock car stereo and wondered if any dopers had advice or recommendations.
My car is a 2001 Nissan Sentra SE with the single CD “premium sound” package. I think the head unit was manufactured by Clarion. There is the option to connect a factory 6 disc changer but I don’t have one installed.
I’m looking at two options:
Attach a mini headphone jack directly to the head unit - by connecting the wires to the correct connections that the 6 disc CD player would typically connect to.
There is a flat, proprietary 6 pin connectro on the back of the stereo but I have no idea what does what. Any info on this would be fantastic, or a safe, easy way to trial and error my way to determining the correct hookup.
Use an FM modulator to hook up the MP3 player. I don’t think this will be too tough, but I’d like to hear people’s experiences with FM modulators - good brands? problems and things to avoid? quality of audio?
There is also a device that looks like a cassette with a cord coming from it. The cord goes in the headphone jack of your portable CD player and can be inserted into a car-stereos cassette deck. I assume it would work the same with mp3 player.
Thinkgeek.com has an FM transmitter for portable media players on their site, and they tend to choose quality products.
Interestingly, the web is full of sites selling interfaces that allow you to use the changer of one manufacturer with the head unit of another, but nothing that culminates in a simple headphone jack. There are, however, quite a few enquiries similar to yours.
Might be a money spinner once you’ve figured out how to do it. Good luck!
I have an Audiovox FM modulator that I use to hook my iPod into my car’s stereo.
It sounds ok, if maybe a bit flat. About the same as FM radio, since it does modulate to the FM band. The flatness can be overcame by using the iPod/iTunes EQ feature.
I’ve heard bad things about the Jensen FM modulator. Mainly that it supposed to automatically turn itself on and off and it does a very bad job of this.
I have the transmitter that ThinkGeek sells (though I got it at Fry’s).
It has much better sound than the tape adapter thing. When I run it through my stereo, I can notice a slight difference between the transmitted and hardwired sound, but not much. The difference isn’t big enough to detect when in the car on the road.
The one thing that I do hate about it is that it doesn’t turn on and off automatically (or at least I haven’t been able to get it to) which means that if I forget it the battery (AAA) is dead the next day. I wish I had gotten one that has auto on/off features, or ran off car power.
On the other hand it’s small enough that it fits in the headphone pocket on my iPod’s case, so it’s always handy.
It seems like the biggest problem with manually wiring the hookup is fooling the cd player into thinking there is a changer attached. The 16 or 20 pin connections in the links above happened to have an option to override the data connection with a line jumper. However, with only six pins, you could be out of luck. The changer and head unit might only rely on a verified serial data stream to switch the input on the head unit to “line”. This is almost impossible to mimic.
It would be easier, although slightly more expensive, to find a badly skipping or otherwise torn up (but still functioning) changer and override its output stage.
FM transmitter should work fine. Thinkgeeks does sound better than a radio station.
Sidenote: These are actually very easy to build, I made one in high school with an extra beefy transmitter that would override any car radio for half a mile. I’ve been playing with the idea of building seven or eight more, tuning them to all the popular stations and designating an “all hamster dance all the time” region on the freeway.
I got a transmitter called the “iRock” from Radio Shack. I’m too lazy to check the links, so I don’t know if it’s been mentioned yet or not. It works fine for me, even with some fairly strong stations being played over all the available frequencies.
I got one at Best Buy that’s $10 cheaper than the ones sold at thinkgeek or amazon. It works great; it takes a bit of trial-and-error to figure out how to mesh it well with a clear station, but once you have it, you have it. It’s a quick-and-dirty solution that I’m quite happy with.
