For most of my life I have endeavoured to be continuously immersed in music. In recent years that has been sliding a bit, but there are still times when I insist on it, such as when I am driving alone in a car. It makes commuting almost tolerable. I do vary this sometimes with spoken-word stuff--I've gone through a lot of Goon Show, Frantics, I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue, and Welcome To Night Vale.
But it's often a challenge to actually get music of my choice in a car. Radio, that's easy, but it's hardly ever suitable. Still, for a long time most of my music was on cassette, and car tape decks are easy to get, right? Well, I don't tend to have good luck with them. Sometimes it just wasn't in the budget. I recall some trips with a battery-powered ghettoblaster on the passenger seat, including a particular night-drive from Edmonton to Grande Prairie where I really gave Tori Amos's "Little Earthquakes" its first good listen.
My first car with an actual tape deck lasted less than a year before I got into an accident, and the body shop wouldn't give me the tape deck unless I could replace it with the car's original stereo system. I actually bought a tape deck for my next car, eventually, but after a few years it became very spotty, and it might take ten minutes or longer before it would connect to the speakers and actually start making sound. And then there was the Jeep Cherokee I got from my mother, which had a lovely tape deck, but it was already hard-used and rusted out after a couple of years.
After that, the next vehicle had a CD player, but I was never satisfied with those--they skipped, and had trouble with the 80-minute CD-R's I was burning at the time. Then I got my first knockoff MP3 player, but I didn't have speakers for it, and I didn't want to actually wear headphones while driving--it seemed like a bad safety idea.
But then I found out that you could get these little mini radio-transmitter things that you plugged in to the car lighter. That's been my mainstay for the last few years, but they have their frustrations too. The transmission isn't that clean, there's often static, particularly near certain places, and once or twice I've driven close to someone who's obviously using the same frequency, which can be annoying. The cable hookups are flaky, too--often they end up fraying right at the base of the plug, and sometimes replacement cables are hard to find. I have one which is in perfectly good shape, but I had trouble finding a cable that went from my iPod Touch to mini-USB, and after I did find one which was crap, I gave up.
At the moment I'm switching back and forth between two less-than-ideal arrangements. I have a Bluetooth speaker which is not too bad, but a couple of months ago the Bluetooth volume dropped out on it, so it was nearly inaudible; it still has a headphone-jack to micro-USB cable, so it's still usable, but it's a bit less convenient. I also got a second-hand iPod radio adapter from a friend, but it's a huge awkward white plastic thing that has trouble wedging in behind my emergency brake handle, and it's still got the radio transmission problems. I tend to switch from one to the other based on which one annoys me most--the speaker by running out of battery power (it does give a five-second warning before dying, at least), or the transmitter because of the things I already said.
Some of you are probably shaking your head, wondering why I don't just get one of those modern car audio systems that has USB ports right in them. Well, one of these days I might, but, you know, budget. I don't think I've ever bought a car younger than five years old, but maybe the next one will ascend to that level of technology finally. I have tried it out in a few rentals, and it's nice. One day...
One day I'll probably have a chip implanted directly in my head that contains every terabyte of my music collection, mentally controlled and transmitting sound directly into my brain because I'll have lost my hearing by then. Or not--brain surgery gives me the willies a little bit. Maybe a Bluetooth hearing aid?
Art or demolition?
10/2 '14
