There’s nothing like enjoying the fruits of consumerism to boost one’s spirits—even if those fruits add a few digits to the evil Zero Percent Interest Rate for One Year Credit Cards.
I absolutely adore my iPod and find myself mostly using it when I am driving. The Griffin iTrip (a wireless FM transmitter) has served me pretty well since my iPod first came into my life, but there is just way too much static and interference from other radio signals in New Jersey.
Crutchfield had a decent sale over Memorial Day weekend, so I bought the Alpine CDA-9830 car radio and the Alpine KCA-420i iPod Interface Adapter.
Installation was pretty easy. I do have to say—soldering a wiring harness can be surprisingly fun. Plus the sight of the Alpine logo booting up on my iPod’s LCD screen when I plugged it in gave me a satisfying sense of accomplishment. And everything fit neatly inside my dashboard.
The thing recharges the iPod via the dock connector, and you can see the song, artist, and album titles from the ID3 tags right on the faceplate. No support for foreign characters, though, so when a few of my favorite tracks come up (e.g. “傀儡謡_陽炎は黄泉に待たむと”) the display shows “NO SUPRT.”
After listening to it for a week, my verdict is that the sound quality is outstanding. I guess my expectations were pretty low after using the iTrip for so long, but the clarity of a clean signal and the broader frequency response (5-20,000 Hz versus 50-15,000 Hz for the iTrip) make a huge difference. This particular radio also has a feature called Media Xpander that’s supposed to correct information that was lost in digital compression, producing a more balanced sound. It does indeed make the MP3s sound better.
I discovered one disadvantage when using the control knob to scroll through 370 albums (or 3450 songs). It is s…l…o…w and always goes back to “A” when you return to the list after playing a song. Accelerated scrolling is such an amazing feature of the iPod’s click-wheel, and you really miss it when using another device to navigate through a long list of albums or songs. At least the Alpine interface recognizes playlists that have been pre-built in iTunes; it looks like I will be using that quite a bit more (and Shuffle Songs, of course).
Rock on.
You and I would be very dangerous were we ever to be in close proximity and I’m fairly certain my credit cards and bank account would never be the same. Of course, if I got a part time job at Fry’s or Best Buy or one of those places I’d not only have more money but an employee discount, too. Hmmm, perhaps I need to reconsider fiscal responsibility…
Fiscal responsibility? What’s that?
My credit cards and bank account never fully recovered from my extended period of unemployment. Before the fall of 2001, I almost never carried a credit card balance for more than a few months—now, the balance keeps growing and growing and growing…
I had a roommate my junior year who worked at Best Buy. It’s a good thing he was at school and on student loans because most of the money he earned never left the store. (It was nice having a large screen TV in our common room, though.)