On which new cars can Minidisc players be specified as a factory option?
Dave
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I know BMW do it, I think Audi and Mercedes might also. Realistically though, if you want to make your own compilation 'tapes' an aftermarket in car MP3 player is cheap enough and will probably give better quality than the standard head unit. Plus you can have one CD with 10 hours' worth so it's kind of like an autochanger as well :-)
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Thanks for your incredibly fast response, Dave!
What do MP3 players play? i.e. if it's not a CD, tape or MD what is it???
Dave
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MP3 players play CD's but the data on the CD is compressed so a special kind of reader is needed to unencode it. these, IMO are the way forward in Car Audio.
Almost all after market stereos (with the exception of perhaps Volvo, Lexus and Aston Martin!) are better than the standard original equipment ones. It is often much cheaper to get the bog standard HU with the car and use the money saved to buy a quality after market device which will have improved flexibility and sound quality.
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"MP3 players play CD's but the data on the CD is compressed so a special kind of reader is needed to unencode it"
Does this compression affect the sound quality?
Dave
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Not really
The point of mp3 is that it slices off the 'ends' of the music, ie the part that you cannot hear (high and low frequencies). This dramatically reduces the size of the files, which is in effect the compression.
See www.howstuffworks.com/mp3.htm for more info.
Jonathan
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Does this compression affect the sound quality
Yes it does a bit, as described the response is flattened by chopping off the extreme bits, and by coding nothing for silences. On a good home Hi Fi MP3 files lack the same quality as a good CD and player.
However for the car, with its appaling accoustics and external noise then MP3 is fine. Plus you can stuff loads of albums on one MP3 coded disk, 6 MP3 CD's will keep you entertained for months
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Any kind of compression will affect sound quality but in a car with standard speakers and a high bitrate compression, the effects will be hard to hear. However in a car with expensive speakers, external amplifiers and subwoofers these factors become more apparent, especially parasite frequencies, which often affect the subbass region of sound thus normal car speakers dont pick it up.
However if encoded at a high bitrate, even through decent speakers, the quality is so good it is not an issue and you can still fit hours of music onto one CD. Excellent!
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Can anyone recommend a good 'budget' in-car Radio/MP3 player?
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Sorry for my ignorance but how do you record stuff onto a CD in MP3 format? ie How do I put my album collection onto them? What do I need to do this?
Ta
Baz
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You need the following:
1 PC
Software to do the conversion (www.cdex.n3.net)
Software to burn the MP3s (Roxio Easy CD Creator, Nero Burnign Rom)
MP3 Tag editor
Blank CD-R
My Kenwood unit specifies that the MP3 should be recorded at 128kbps and the CD recorded using ISO 9660 format (not the usual Joliett). Unfortunately, ISO9660 only supports 8 character file names, so I use the data which is tagged to each MP3 file.
Andy
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Errr
You also need a fairly modern PC with a CD Burner!
And if you want to record your big black shiny records onto CD, you need a cable from the record deck to the sound card on the PC
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There was an earlier thread regarding the use of a portable Minidisc player in the car - my son has a Sony recorder/player which has excellent sound quality and I also wondered if there was a way of having some wiring attached to allow connection. I had a Xantia which had an input socket on the facia of the stereo that I used to put my CD player through and the sound quality was much better than those cassette based adapters. Most head units will take an external cd multichanger so they have an input socket available so would it be possible to get a lead made up?
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The ideal solution is the Car Rock product made by micro boss www.microboss.de/mp3/mp3_english/default_e.htm Micro boss are based in Germany so you may be subject to import duty on any purchase.
I would be very interested if anybody knows of a uk supplier of this product or a similar device.
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Just to get this clear for everybody...
Anything from within the EU is NOT subject to import duty. When buying mail order, you pay local VAT (16%) and the UK treasury gets nothing. Nada. Zilch. Zip.
Only if you are buying outside the EU (I think in fact the EEA) from countries such as the US, Australia, Japan do you have to pay any import duty.
Postage and packing may be higher of course, and some companies just don't have the systems in place to deal with orders from outside their home country.
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Oh and that is very cheap, but of course you need a separate MP3 player in addition to the FM modulator. It means you don't have to replace the head unit and can use it in two vehicles, of course.
If you don't already have an MP3 player (and you can get portable CD based ones from about £50) then you might find that an MP3 head unit is a more convenient solution.
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The above points about sound quality are all very true and equally valid, but there are a few more things to consider:
* MP3s don't just chop off the high and low bits - they take advantage of lulls in the 'busyness' of the piece to lower the bandwidth required to play it back, they even out parts of such complexity that the average listener wouldn't notice, and they use many other subtle and intesely mathematical ways of cropping your music file down to around a tenth of its original size on average.
* The type of music you encode to MP3 will drastically influence the quality of playback, all other things being equal. You might find that very sparse techno comes across just fine, whereas classical recording can lose clarity and the sense of 'space'.
* In some cases, the quality of certain instruments may decrease - cymbals can become murkier, highly overdriven guitars may sound less defined - just because a frequency is outside the range of human hearing, it doesn't mean that it has no effect on the frequencies you *can* hear - soundwaves are very complex things, and removing or altering any part can have surprising knock-on effects
* I find that the optimum encoding rate is 192bit, as it mainatins a fair copy of the CD original without sacrificing too much of the original feel. Many encoderS allow you to choose a 'variable bit rate' setting which constantly changes the compression ratio to take advantage of bits of the music that are more simplistic and so require less hard work to decompress. Opinions are still divided over this one, but good encoders seem to do the job just fine and it does reduce the size of the final files.
* Make sure you pick an MP3 player with the most flexibility - if it can playback multiple bitrates including VBR, and can play files from folders under different CD formats with no filename length limitation, you're doing well. Always approach a decent ICE specialist rather than going to somewhere like Dixons, as most of the high street folk really don't have a clue about the subleties of theie products.
* You do have to bear in mind that the quality of the original recording will directly affect the quality of your MP3 - its the old 'garbage in, garbage out' adage again :)
* Despite the above, don't worry too much about the idea of compressing music - minidiscs use compression and digital recording techniques of any kind sacrifice some of the original sound. Every single disc in your CD collection is playing back less than was originally present when the musicians were recording the session, but the techniques are so snazzy that you can only tell if you have a very good ear, and listen to the original master tapes side by side with the final recording
* Always remember that while the MP3 standard is legal, much of what is done with it isn't - any licensed piece of music you rip to MP3 is an illegal copy, despite you owning the original.
Even with all that in mind, the MP3 format is fantastic - it opens up the music world in ways we've never had before. There are other standards (such as Ogg Vorbis) which give arguably better quality playback than a similar MP3, and take less space to do so. The future is looking good...
Have fun! :)
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