> And here I am driving a 2003 Golf with a tape deck (and CD player).
That sounds wonderful.
There was a brief, magical moment in history when cars would come with AM/FM radio, a tape deck, a CD player, and an aux port so that you could plug in audio from every other device that humanity would invent for the rest of time.
It feels like the most fleeting of moments, and it was so long ago. Maybe it was just one summer afternoon in the early 2000s.
Anyway, I think we've largely been going downhill since then. For whatever reason, humanity achieved a lovely little peak of engineering, and then we immediately abandoned it for worse options.
Don't forget the adapters that plugged into the 1/8" jack on your Sony WalkMan with a cassette shaped adapter that went into the tape deck. There are also those weird devices that plugged into the 1/8" jack with a low power radio transmitter to tune your in dash receiver to hear. (A local station I listen is on the low end where these devices operate. The station is lower powered college station with the transmitter located where I'm pretty close to the edge of its range. From time to time at stop lights, a stronger signal will come in to interrupt and disappears after the green and cars separate. I'm guessing one of these is being used)
Perhaps coincidentally, it was also around the same brief beautiful moment in time where one could talk with all of one's friends using a single messaging client, possibly even over federated XMPP.
I had a car with just a tape deck. This turns out to be all you want.
I went through two phases:
1. I ordered some type of Walkman-like car kit that came with a portable CD player, glue strips to adhere the CD player to your dashboard, and a cassette tape adapter that plugged into an aux port (on the CD player) and inserted into the tape deck. I'd burn CDs to play in the car that way.
2. I got a Zen Stone, a tiny mp3 player with no screen that was easy to operate by feel. I stored mp3s on it... and plugged the cassette adapter that I still had into it. That was as good as in-car music can get without being voice operated.
When I was buying my last car, I was searching for something with a CD player option. Turns out there are no new cars with CD players and the last manufacturer to offer one was Lexus in 2022.
I ripped my collection to my phone and I use CarPlay and it works well enough. But still if I could, I'd buy a car with a CD player.
My next car might be a Slate truck because they supposedly support single or double DIN radios and there has to be an aftermarket option that would work.
If you could go back in time and show your younger self Spotify streamed wirelessly from a phone via AA/AC, now that would be magical. Pretty much endless amount of music delivered instantly.
My younger self wouldn't be interested in endless music any more than my current self is. It's pretty rare that I discover a new band I want to listen to; otherwise I listen to the same music I already like and have.
> > And here I am driving a 2003 Golf with a tape deck (and CD player).
> That sounds wonderful.
I don't know if people are really serious but there seems to be a good market interest in car's that's not just equipped with touchscreens and Apple CarPlay. It's interesting (and perhaps understandable) how no car manufacturing is interested in tapping into such a niche segment.
I remember being blown away seeing one of those tape-deck to aux cable players for the first time. Plugging my late 2000’s era iPod into my early 90’s car was magical.
"For whatever reason, humanity achieved a lovely little peak of engineering, and then we immediately abandoned it for worse options." <=> "I donno Bluetooth is pretty universal now"
Your comment does not disagree with GP's in the way you think it does
I guess what I'm saying is 27 different media players duct taped together does not seem like the peak of engineering. A single wireless protocol seems pretty good.
Some time after the Thunderbolt 3 MacBooks were released I had to get data off of a FireWire 400 drive. Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2, Thunderbolt 2 to FireWire 800, FireWire 800 to FireWire 400. Everything mounted up just fine.
It's been over 20 years, and Bluetooth audio still usually sounds bad, still evades troubleshooting when it is working suboptimally, and increasingly drops out in some areas as interference increases.
I've never had any of those issues with a short piece of wire operating at audio frequencies.
My car reads USB sticks with MP3s on them (I was telling a Gen-Z colleague this and felt old...). There are external BluRay drives that connect via USB, but then to he able to play audio CDs, either the car needs to understand CDDA, or the drive needs to understand CDDA and pretend to be a FAT32 filesystem of some MP3s (or... WAVs?) to the car.
Huh I also have Subsonic on my home NAS and Symfonium on my phone (connectable via Android Auto). Another Rube Goldberg invention would be to put the audio CD in the drive connected to the NAS, have a driver that pretends to be a filesystem of MP3s but actually encodes the CD tracks (on the fly on every playback, of course!), stream it over the Internet to my phone, that's connected to Android Auto. That's how to play a CD on a modern car!
There was a short period where CD players with Bluetooth and FM transmitters were made. Pairing is weird and may not work with every vehicle, but FM fallback is, well, as bad as it always has been.
I really like CDs and enjoy buying them second hand when on road trips. It was fun to put in something new while traveling, but now it requires an extra device on the off chance that a CD is found.
> ... stream it over the Internet to my phone, that's connected to Android Auto. That's how to play a CD on a modern car!
Sadly when you stream music over Bluetooth there is lossy compression taking place.
People can bitch all they want about "320 kbps mp3 using a modern encoder being indistinguishable from the lossless source", the fact is: mp3 were nice 30 years ago in the Napster day (when I had my ADSL Internet connection).
It's 2026 and I play lossless music, including FLAC files I bit-perfectly ripped from my own CD collection (and the rips have been verified online with a DB of rips, so I now they're bit-perfect) and including lossless music from proper music streaming platform (I pay a Qobuz subscription: amazing quality, huge offering, but shittiest music discovery platform ever btw).
Really: it's 2026 and if people like to listen to lossy music, more power to them. I don't, and hence I don't stream audio over Bluetooth.
My car both takes CDs, memory sticks (mp3 and WAV, no FLAC) and has got its own memory. I've got a few hundred songs stored in the car: they go losslessly to the car's DAC.
High-end luxury car and it's the type of car where people who've never been in one say: "I never knew music could sound that good in a car" (which btw is funny to witness when some car youtubers try a car with an amazing soundsystem).
Now of course it's still a car. Don't get me started on home stereo because I've got that too (and when you know what you're doing you can get amazing audio for a really very reasonable price: for example I won't put 30 K in a McIntosh amp where a Yamaha amp costing 1/30th of the price will do).
Call me an audiofool and... Enjoy your lossy Bluetooth streaming adding a layer of lossyness on your already lossy mp3 on your car stereo system which sounds like crap anyway.
The layering of compression really does get you. I've noticed (both in "Plexamp in my car" and "playing music on Twitch" contexts) that using a FLAC source makes an audible difference, even compared to a high-bitrate MP3 source.
This might seem pretty obvious, but I wasn't expecting it to matter as much since the end result was compressed again (and yet again on my car's Bluetooth) using a different codec.
This isn't on anything close to audiophile gear either. My car stereo is thoroughly mediocre and my home stereo is speakers I literally found in the trash.
Now I'm (belatedly) rebuilding my music collection in FLAC...
> Nothing could sell a phone with a jack, but then you don't need to pay 300$ for some crappy Bluetooth headphones
Have you looked at the price of actually mediocre Bluetooth headphones recently? They’re like… $20 for a distinct fine set of true wireless headphones, including the case, even from a real brand. Certainly comparable to $20 wired headphones.
Either your standards are much higher than mine or you haven’t been exposed to current gen Bluetooth gear. Decent picks sound perfectly fine even in the sub $100 category. Anker, Nothing, or even Sony have some decent stuff in that price range.
You can start getting decent bluetooth headphones from $60 to $80 if you are picky about the brand. Anker has had several winners in that range over the last 10 years.
$20 BT would get you a proper BT phonecall experience but they wouldn't give you a remotely good music playback at all. BT have a lot of codecs but a $20 headset including tax and markup would not include all the fancy ones by the cost alone.
> BT have a lot of codecs but a $20 headset including tax and markup would not include all the fancy ones by the cost alone.
What do you mean by this? AAC or SBC is perfectly fine for $20 headphones. Definitely for that quality of headphone. LDAC or Apt-X are pointless for a headphone in that price bracket.
Alas convenience wins for most people. They will take a loss in quality if it makes it a little easier.
I'm one of those people who cannot tell until the bit rate gets stupidly low or the encoder cannot handle the symbols on drums but that is no universal.
Even then I stick to headphone jacks when possible. If it is a low quality podcast, occasionally my $20 bluetooth buds come out but that is a reasonable trade off.
Nearly every automobile MP3 player (USB-based or CD-based) I've used was defective in some way. Usually something stupid like only playing tracks in alphabetical order, or inserting audible gaps between tracks that are meant to flow into one another, or not supporting tags correctly, or not handling UTF-8 text... Car companies don't know how to do consumer software.
The system in my car (2018 Ford Fiesta) will play mp3s from a usb stick but, as with your experience, it has only a basic understanding of ID3. It completely ignores the "position in media set" tag, for example, meaning that it plays the 1st track from each cd in a set, then all the second tracks, etc.
I wrote [1] to post-process my (slightly obsessively) neatly tagged mp3 collection for use in my car.
This is what I do with my 18 minivan that has a 6 disc player. That's a lot of mp3s and it's fun to guess what's next (my rando mp3 discs tend to always be in alphabetical order
That sounds wonderful.
There was a brief, magical moment in history when cars would come with AM/FM radio, a tape deck, a CD player, and an aux port so that you could plug in audio from every other device that humanity would invent for the rest of time.
It feels like the most fleeting of moments, and it was so long ago. Maybe it was just one summer afternoon in the early 2000s.
Anyway, I think we've largely been going downhill since then. For whatever reason, humanity achieved a lovely little peak of engineering, and then we immediately abandoned it for worse options.