Hiya - I really really want a personal audio device for my car so I can pull songs from MJ8 into my car (sadly 3G networking is not ubiquitous yet - nor are the onboard receivers in car stereos with MJ clients
I'll assume you're already working on this JimH)
I don't care to much about features. Ideally the device is encoding independent (or allows APE, or at least WAV).
Here's the nasty bit... I don't have a decent input into my car stereo.
There is a coax digital input in the trunk which I can wire to easily if need be but as far as I can tell no PADs have digital outputs (yet). This would've been ideal - or close.
Next I've looked at tape adapters. Tape adaptors don't work well for my car b/c the tape deck is hidden behind the GPS display [I can hear the worlds smallest violin player warming up for a big round of "we all feel so bad for you" :]. This means that the wire that goes from the PAD to the tape adaptor will be very unhappy when the GPS display whirrs back into place [cue violin]. I've had reasonable success with tape adaptors in the past [ie before I could afford a CD player for my car]. They're ok - they do not do the CD justice, but much better than a tape which I've played 50 times and store in the car.
Next I've looked at FM adapters. These seem to have great potential. Seem to. Potential. I've found two basic types - those with a wide frequency range and those with precise settings. I live in the SF bay area - there is a radio station pretty much on every single .frequency {89.1, 89.3, 89.5......). This means that depending on where I am in a 15 mile radios - I must be using a different channel. The wide range ones allow me to change frequencies fairly easily, but never have great sound. The precise settings one have 4-6 settings (89.1, 89.3, 89.5, 89.7) but this won't always work (though when it does, the sound is decent).
I can't really replace the a/v device in the car as it is a factory job that is tightly integrated physically and electrically with the car.
Got any ideas here?
The best I can think of right now is to get a better FM transmitter (more powerful but still precise).