In Car iPod

Mona and I have been investigating how to plug our iPods into our car stereos. Neither of us have a cassette and both the iRock and iTrip FM transmitters we have sound terrible. I suggested she take hers apart (as the CD player is bust anyway), find the output from the CD player and solder on a connection to make an AUX input. The picture on the right demonstrates that this proved more difficult than planned. I was more fortunate however… Update: Apple always has to do one better… now it seems you can iPod your BMW. Full control of the iPod from the steering wheel and track names appear on the stereo’s LCD… mine was probably slightly cheaper!…as our Clarion DRX6375 has the capability to connect a CD changer. The 13 pin CE-NET port on the back thew me for a while and I presumed the audio cables were line out. For the hell of it I connected the iPod to RCA connector and behold there was sound. A bit of cable slicing and patching later and we now have 4 speaker sound. The cable also slips nicely through at the back into the glove compartment for tidy storage.

How it works is still a mystery as it seems to bypass the amplifier since the tone and volume controls have no effect. It must be that the CD changer unit signals the head unit to switch inputs and I am bypassing this. The upshot is that if you turn the unit to radio and set the volume to 1 (mute still works so the amp can’t be bypassed completely) you can’t hear the radio but you can hear the iPod very well. Volume is then controlled by the iPod. Nifty.