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Radio and Car Audio
By Jacob Cohen | December 19, 2003
The more I listen to radio stations, the more I begin to consider adding something like XM or Sirius satellite radio to my car. You can only go so far with a CD changer, and it’s nice to hear new music, but it’s irritating to hear egomaniac disk jockeys who like to talk all over the beginning and end of songs. In San Diego, you can typically escape this by listening to FM 94.9, but they can only handle so much of the demand for good, interruption-free music. I could go into a whole rant about people who call in and request top 40 songs that are already on the playlist rotation, but I won’t. Honestly, the song is played several times a day already and they feel the need to call in and request it. Good going, you zombie, now we get to hear it 4 times today instead of 3. Ok, that was a mini-rant.
As I was listening to these radio stations, I began to think that it should be easier to add something like XM or Sirius satellite radio to any car. As it stands, you have to have a stereo that is capable of accepting input from an auxiliary source, and that source can’t already be in use for another device.
For most people, this means that if you’ve hooked up a CD changer to your car, you can’t also add a satellite radio module. (There are products that allow you to broadcast the output of the satellite radio module to your car’s FM tuner, but why anyone would take a high quality digital source like a CD or satellite radio and rebroadcast it through FM is beyond me).
There seems to be an effort going on to create a standard auto multimedia interface, and I’m all for it. The Automotive Multimedia Interface Collaboration looks promising, but I have to wonder why no one has made this easier until now. This technologoy has been around for a while. Why make proprietary interconnects and protocols such that you artificially limit the number of devices a car stereo can interact with and control? Why can’t we have digital devices connected through a common bus like USB or firewire? Want more devices? Just add a hub.
I suppose it is a sort of chicken and egg problem, similar to bluetooth support. No one wants to take on the expense of adding bluetooth to their products because no one else is doing it, and so it wouldn’t have anything to talk to. Honestly though, it can’t be that hard. I should be able to get into my car and have the car stereo become a speakerphone for my bluetooth cell phone. No more of these built-in cell phones in luxury cars that require a seperate phone number and service plan. Every car should be able to have a cell phone that operates through its stereo system, using open standards such as bluetooth.
Back to the car audio topic, I’d like to see a similar level of support for interchangeable devices there as well. If I want to have a car stereo that plays CDs, DVD-Audio, MP3s off a hard drive unit, XM or Sirius satellite radio, or any number of other audio sources, I should be able to do it. As it stands, you cannot achieve this without rigging up some sort of custom audio source selection and control system by hand.
Topics: Tech |
