Car FM Adapter

**napalm1773** · 04-25-2010, 06:12 AM

Hey guys I was wondering if anyone knows a good car adapter that plays music from a 2nd Gen iPhone. I was looking for a Wired FM transmitter or anything that offers better sound quality than a Wireless FM transmitter. Also I'm not interested in paying over $40.

**Appzalien** · 04-25-2010, 04:00 PM

They still make those cassette tape inserts with the stereo plug that comes out the front. If your car stereo is old enough to have a cassette you could try that. I've had one for years and it comes in handy, I even used it in a portable cassete player that had an equilizer on the front to record with volume boost (out the headphones) and equalization and it worked great.

Code:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16855999602&cm_re=cassette_adapter-_-55-999-602-_-Product

or

Code:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16855991079&cm_re=cassette_adapter-_-55-991-079-_-Product

you might find one at Radio Shack or your local Best Buy as well if you don't want to wait.

**Detale** · 04-25-2010, 04:07 PM

LOL "code" tags. haven't seen those in quite some time

Where do you live napalm? I'm in NYC so basically they still have them in any radio shack, or even chain pharmacy. Admittedly I still use one. I never upgraded the cassette player that came in my dodge durango and I got mine locally for something like $10

**tesco** · 04-25-2010, 04:10 PM

Also depending on what car/stereo you have you might be able to either plug a wire into the back (line in) or buy an attachment to add that capability.
For example in my mazda6 the stereo accepts XM, tape, and midi attachments, but some people were able to reverse engineer the connection for these components to make devices for iPod plugin, or just plain line-in, usb ports, etc.

http://www.therpmstore.com/product_i...roducts_id=672 A little expensive but was worth it in my opinion. Perfect sound, allows control from my car stereo or the steering wheel so the iPod is hidden in the glove box, and displays the song name in the stereo display as well...

Those casette tapes work fine as well. The FM transmitters have very poor sound quality, I tried a couple of them and couldn't stand it.

**Detale** · 04-25-2010, 04:29 PM

Great link Ross, I think I may look into this myself. I also tried about 4 different FM transmitters and they all sucked bigtime.

**napalm1773** · 04-26-2010, 03:06 AM

Originally Posted by Appzalien

They still make those cassette tape inserts with the stereo plug that comes out the front. If your car stereo is old enough to have a cassette you could try that. I've had one for years and it comes in handy, I even used it in a portable cassete player that had an equilizer on the front to record with volume boost (out the headphones) and equalization and it worked great.

My stereo actually has a cassette player so I think i'm going to stick with a cassette adapter mainly because their around $15-20. But my main concern is whether they actually make noticeable noise and how good the sound quality is.

Originally Posted by tesco

Also depending on what car/stereo you have you might be able to either plug a wire into the back (line in) or buy an attachment to add that capability.

I'm actually not looking to spend a lot of money into this so I think I'm probably going to stick with the cassette adapter.

Originally Posted by Detale

Where do you live napalm? I'm in NYC so basically they still have them in any radio shack, or even chain pharmacy. Admittedly I still use one. I never upgraded the cassette player that came in my dodge durango and I got mine locally for something like $10

I live in Vegas, so buying it locally or anything like that shouldn't be an issue. I'm more concerned with the overall quality of cassette adapters.

Although cassette adapters do sound like the ideal thing to buy, I was also concerned whether their iPhone compatible. I know they work fine with iPod and such but I have seen certain adapters that say iPod compatible but not iPhone.

**Detale** · 04-26-2010, 03:28 AM

From what i've seen from the iphone is is a standard 3.5mm jack but the plastic around the jack just needs to be shaved down a bit to fit into the iphone. A friend of mine did it to play his iphone music over my Dewalt work radio where I have my MP3 player usually using a 3.5mm to 3.5mm cable.

**napalm1773** · 04-26-2010, 03:46 AM

Originally Posted by Detale

From what i've seen from the iphone is is a standard 3.5mm jack but the plastic around the jack just needs to be shaved down a bit to fit into the iphone. A friend of mine did it to play his iphone music over my Dewalt work radio where I have my MP3 player usually using a 3.5mm to 3.5mm cable.

Well its not really an issue for me to trim the wire to fit into the headphone jack it's more of a compatibility issue. For example if you look at this cassette adapter that Appzalien linked you can see that it only says iPod. So my question is if I plug in my iPhone will it play music? First Generation iPhone by the way.

**Appzalien** · 04-26-2010, 03:12 PM

The quality limitation is similar to a tape, because the fake cassette has a little transmit head that transmits to the tape players play head. Because of this you don't get a clean connection as being talked about above. If you can create or find a connector to use with a straight stereo to stereo plug, you'd be much better off quality wise.