Tune Time: Audio Impaired

Jocelyn Bassler

My first car came equipped with a radio. No CD player. No tape deck. Just crappy radio stations that played the same five songs every hour on the hour.

I drove out of town for a weekend with my pal Stacy, and the biggest part of our preparations included busting out an old-school boombox and a bunch of our cassettes for the road. Oh, and the batteries. We had to hunt down those monster D batteries to ensure a smooth ride of 1990s grunge and showtunes (yes, we were versatile). Poor Stacy coddled that heavy bad boy in her lap the entire trip, changing cassettes so we wouldn't be at the mercy of the radio. The things we endured for good tunes!

This was just the first of many cars that had sub-par audio equipment, by the way. An ancient truck I drove actually had an 8-track. Another car had the worst, skippiest CD player you ever heard. Needless to say I've become accustomed to MacGyvering my audio hookup, but nothing has been quite as challenging as my iPod connection.

The first attempt at this was a jack I plugged into my car's lighter. It worked through radio frequency, which only worked if there was an available radio frequency. Here, with the crowded L.A. airwaves, it became a nuisance, and fast. So I bought a tape-deck hookup. At first it worked well, but over time I could only hear out of one speaker unless I pulled the cord just so. I would solicit the help of my passengers to hold on while I taped down the cord in increasingly bizarre positions just so we could hear a barely discernible whisper, and only from the passenger side.

Thank god for H. He finally solved my audio woes this past Christmas by installing a stereo with a direct iPod plug-in. Most days I still tinker with the sound, wondering if I can get it to be even better, but I should always remind myself that it could be a lot worse. I could be holding a boombox in my lap.

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