Introduction
Day-tripper John Hill climbs into his
automobile, his
baby beside him at the wheel, to check out five FM transmitters for use
with iPods and other music players
If
you want to
play
an iPod through your in-car audio system, you have three
choices. One is to buy an in-car entertainment system with a
suitable input. The next is to use a cassette adaptor that plugs
into the iPod - assuming the car has a cassette player. The last is to
buy an FM transmitter.
These FM
devices transmit the output from an iPod stereo on a radio frequency of
your choice and this is picked up by the in-car radio. Some work only
with iPods, others work with any portable music player that has a
headphone socket.
You tune the in-car radio to
an empty
frequency or one that is very weak in your area (you might have spotted
the gotcha already) and then set the FM transmitter to broadcast on
that same frequency. In effect, your portable music player
becomes another radio station.
It was only
late last year
that FM transmitters finally became legal to use in the UK. Now that
manufacturers have had the chance to sort out their products so that they
conform to the new regs, we thought it time to look
at a bunch of transmitters to compare their
merits.
Griffin was one of the very first
to offer
an FM
transmitter for iPods,
turning
iTrip almost into a generic name, like Hoover (click for larger image)
Although some
models are designed to use only with iPods, FM
transmitters fall into two further sub-categories. One type can only be
used in the car – or any vehicle with a cigarette lighter.
The
other can be used anywhere there's a radio.
Most
people
will
probably buy for the car (their own or a hire car) but there are many
additional uses for transmitters
that can also work outside of a car.
They can,
for
instance, be very successfully
used as multi-room music sources at home or for listening to
music
in hotel rooms
or holiday accommodation where there's a radio.
For
those
with a warped sense of
humour, they also offer bags of potential for sabotaging radio-based PA
broadcasts – putting an end, for instance, to those awful
radio
programmes about the history of Welsh cutlery that seem always to be on
in hospital waiting rooms.
The five models we
reviewed were
tested in four different vehicles, including soft-tops, and under a
wide
variety of travel conditions. These took in short city-dashes, long
cross-country journeys and a train ride under the English
Channel
followed by a lengthy drive around France.
Before
we start getting hands on, let's consider some general observations
about FM transmitters...
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