Mobile Music in Your Car

I

t's hard to believe that just a few short years ago, people were limited to hooking up their iPods through static-heavy iTrips to listen to music while driving. Thankfully, there are other options to get your favorite music from your mobile phone to your car's stereo that don't involve cursing and shuffling through station after station, looking for the one that's the least fuzzy-sounding.

If you're lucky enough to have a car that has auxiliary port already built in, you can obviously just hook up your tunes through that. If not, though, there's plenty of after-market packages you can purchase and have installed for your specific car.

You can also go the route of using a tape-deck adapter, but these can be problematic as they're bulky and not many cars nowadays have tape decks—most have CD players.

The best option we've found for transmitting music from your phone or iPod to your car's speakers is the GOgroove FlexSMART Bluetooth Adapter.

Unlike most adapters, the GOgroove adapter works well with high volumes and in big cities.

We can testify that, when using an iPhone, the GOgroove adapter works especially well, despite being, essentially, an FM-transmitter; we all know that FM-transmitters are notorious for providing horrible sound quality, and this one is the exception.

Plug the adapter into your car's cigarette lighter, press the center button and the adapter finds the best radio station for you—no more shuffling through stations only to find that none of them are that great.

Turn your phone's Bluetooth connectivity on, and select the GOgroove adapter in the menu on your phone, and you'll hear a beep indicating the two devices are paired up and ready to go.

This adapter, unlike most on the market, also allows for high volumes without distortion or thin-sounding music. Overall, it's a great product; this author has been using it for over a month in her car (and she commutes about 2 hours a day) and loves it, and what's best is that again, unlike most adapters, this one works perfectly well in a busy city.

Other one's we've tried and have been wildly disappointed with were the original iTrip and the Monster Cable iCarPlay.

The iTrip was very difficult to find a station with and was easily knocked out of place from the top of our iPods, and the Monster Cable product, while not nearly as static-y as the iTrip, was still pretty fuzzy sounding. Its buttons also rested near our car's center console, so the station got changed on accident a lot, since the buttons were sensitive. Finally, the Monster Cable deteriorated over time, and finally, when we got rid of it, the two cables had disconnected from the center piece, making usage completely impossible—one nudge and the power connection would be lost.

We should note that we were not paid or compensated for this review whatsoever, so you know our opinions aren't biased.