Taking your smartphone music 'in-car'

[slitchfield]

...In which I review the Proporta Wireless FM Stereo Transmitter, to let you play your smartphone's music tracks over your car radio. It's built down to a price and isn't unique in the gadget world, but it's small, stylish, works quite well and is unbeatable value.

Read on in the full article.

[dhevans_6]

The short range of frequencies seem fairly limiting - I can image a line of stationary motorway traffic where this limit of 4 frequencies might not be enough.
I've seen the more configurable ones, but I wasn't very impressed at the amount of increase in volume necessary to hear the music - the hiss coming out of my friends MP3 player at the time was pretty dire.

How much of an increase in volume was necessary to get a decent volume to hear, and how much hiss was there (and what bitrate is your music saved at?)

[slitchfield]

Hmm.... I wasn't being too critical about hiss, this was in a moving car, after all - I can't say it was intrusive. I certainly did have to crank the radio volume up to near maximum to get decent levels though.... This problem seems to be endemic to this type of accessory, though I've no idea why, you'd have thought a frequency-modulate signal was a frequency-modulate signal, etc. - it shouldn't matter where it's coming from. Wierd.

Steve

[jonnybruha]

Ugh, Steve, FM transmittors are the way of the past! I don't care if your car is 10 years old, there's always a better way!

The easiest way to connect is to use some time of 3rd party head unit which features a 3.5mm audio jack, so you can connect your N95 (or E90 with the adapter) directly to your car's speakers without losing any quality whatsoever.

My car doesn't even have the ability to use a 3rd party head unit, but there's still an adapter that allows me to hook up an audio connection box to the CD player to function the same way. I'm not familiar with what it's called since a buddy of mine grabbed it and installed it for me at a local Circuit City here in the States, but I'm sure there has to be something similar available across the pond?

[Jejoma]

I've never managed to get these gadgets to work at all satisfactorily. Maybe I'm just unfortunate in where I live but there are just too many radio stations cluttering up the airways leaving no clear frequencies for my FM transmitter.