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Bluetooth and Black Boxes

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Who's in charge here? When it comes to entertainment and communication, the balance of power has shifted from the automaker to the driver. For decades, your entertainment choices were seriously limited to what they wanted to offer you. Even today, some car radios are so tightly integrated that if you removed it, you might also lose your air conditioning functionality.

And with cell phones, you could buy a three-year-old technology with a car cradle for about three times what it cost you in the phone store in order to be able to use the press-to-talk button on the steering wheel.

An increasing number of automakers offer Bluetooth as a low-cost option, sometimes free, in their cars: 17 automakers as of 2005, says the Telematics Research Group of Minneapolis. Then if you have a Bluetooth phone or PDA phone (Bluetooth models are prevalent except for Verizon, which has only a couple), you can associate it with your car's Bluetooth dashboard. Presto: Your address book shows up in the instrument panel and you can scroll to select, start and end calls all from the steering wheel buttons, and use the microphone and speakers built into the cars, too – no need for a wired headset in states with hands-free-calling rules. Check out "The Bluetooth Car" for more information.

Automakers actually like Bluetooth because even at the rates makers charge for certified phones – $500 to $1,000 – they aren't making much money. Bluetooth also works outside the car, but only from about 30 feet away. Best of all, Bluetooth is democratic: It's on a lot of low-cost cars you can afford, not just the expensive sports sedans you lust after.

On the entertainment side, little black boxes are democratizing entertainment. Satellite radio has opened up your entertainment choices compared with FM radio, but what about when you want to listen to your own music?

You've probably been through the cassette adapters that link your music player's headphone jack to a module that slides into your cassette player – assuming you still have a cassette, not CD, player. The option that still works is the FM modulator, a $30 device that broadcasts a short-range radio signal to an unused FM frequency, but quality can be scratchy.

Enter the black box. It's a small device costing $50 to $100 that plugs into the factory radio's CD-input jack and makes the car radio think your iPod is actually a zillion-disc CD changer. The simplest are line-in devices, meaning all they do is a) trick the car radio and b) pass along the music signal. (About a dozen 2005 car models come standard with line-in jacks.)

Fancier ones pass along track and title information for Apple iPods (the one music player with enough market share) and for trunk-mount satellite radio receivers. Earlier black boxes tricked your car into thinking a third-party CD changer that cost $300 was really the dealer's $600 changer.

They still exist for people still buying changers. The leading vendors, in the order I recommend them, are Soundgate, Blitzsafe, Monster Cable and PIE. Most car stereo installers know about the devices, and the two questions you should ask before going ahead are, "Have you installed these before? In my make of car?" The answer you want is "Yes" and "Yes". There's more information about these black boxes "The Ultimate Music Machine".

What if you have a iPod? If you've got an external music player, this is how you get the best sound coming out of the speakers:

1. Direct line-in connection or black box line-in adapter

2. Cassette adapter

3. FM modulator wired to the antenna (have an installer do it)

4. FM wireless modulator

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Source: https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/75288-bluetooth-and-black-boxes

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