Voices call to you on the road without a cellphone. Once you tune into these sirens (as in mythology, as opposed to those from emergency vehicles), driving may never be the same.
Satellite digital radio comes of age this year and may be the biggest enhancement to the driving experience since the car CD player debuted almost two decades ago.
As with satellite TV, two companies offer the service. In the case of radio they are XM and Sirius. Both spent lavishly in the high-tech boom to build studios and launch satellites and are struggling financially, waiting to be discovered. Once they are, the only time motorists may return to earthbound radio is for traffic and weather reports.
XM has more than 483,000.subscribers; Sirius has about 65,000 (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text). Each needs about a million paying customers to make a go of it. They share similar formats, about 100 channels, of which roughly 60 carry music programming and 40 news, sports and talk. All of the music channels on Sirius are commercial-free, as are most of the music channels on XM.
They share similar formats/genres as well, though Sirius seems more devoted to the teenagers and twenty-somethings. XM and Sirius offerings range from folk to disco, opera to hip hop. Sirius even has a channel labeled “turntablism,” alternatively known as scratch (DJs abusing records on turntables). Unlike satellite TV, where you pick and choose packages, satellite radio is all or nothing. XM charges $10 a month and Sirius $13 a month for the works. XM offers one other advantage: It sounds better than Sirius.
Both companies target drivers, whether in the rush hour commute or the cross-country vacation, who can keep the same station throughout a journey. They use terrestrial “repeaters” in urban areas so reception remains clear when buildings block the path of the signal from the satellite. A memory buffer in the radio compensates for brief signal loss when driving under viaducts, so they fade and flutter less than FM broadcasts. Both offer shuttle receivers that can go from car to home.
General Motors and all of its divisions, along with Honda, Acura and Isuzu, announced support of XM, as a factory or dealer-installed option. Sirius claims Ford and its subsidiaries, including Mazda and Volvo; DaimlerChrysler; BMW; and Audi. Nissan and Infiniti are driving on both sides of the street.
If you want to install XM satellite radio in your vehicle, you can choose among receivers from Alpine, Delphi, Pioneer and Sony. For Sirius, Audiovox, Clarion, Delphi, Jensen, Kenwood, Panasonic and Visteon. Kenwood is being particularly aggressive in supporting Sirius. However, the players keep switching when they see an advantage.
Furthermore, one major name, Toyota, including its Lexus division, has not announced support for either system. But its new Scion division will offer a Pioneer stereo with XM capability.
The entry fee for satellite radio in your car is $130 for a basic receiver, such as the Delphi SKYFi radio, plus the cost of an antenna, which adds another $30-$50. The original XM antenna looks like a small shark’s fin, but the second generation is smaller, about the size of an audio cassette. That’s also about the size of a Sirius antenna. Sony and Delphi make portable XM receivers that work in the car and at home with an adapter.
If satellite radio fails to entertain the kids, KVH TracVision A5 is an advanced satellite TV antenna that mounts flat on the roof. Using a military technology called phased array, it electronically, rather than mechanically, aims the antenna, so you don’t need a dish pointing at the DirecTV satellites. KVH says its TracVision A5 works even while driving.
The other major trend in sound on wheels is that nearly all aftermarket CD and DVD players, the kind you buy in an electronics store for installation, now play MP3-encoded CDs. Unlike store-bought CDs that hold up to 75 minutes of sound, MP3 CDs that you burn on your home computer store up to 10 hours of music. While the MP3 encoding reduces fidelity, that decline should be unnoticeable while driving because of road and engine noise.
Many factory-installed CD players also include MP3 CD playback capability. That adds little or nothing to the cost, because a very inexpensive integrated circuit chip does the decoding with minimal modifications to the player.
Some Sony and Pioneer aftermarket players include a slot for Sony’s proprietary Memory Stick to play music from the memory card that’s the size of a stick of chewing gum. Additionally, some Sony and Pioneer models include a computer hard drive for music storage. You fill the hard drive from the built-in CD player or the Memory Stick, which can ferry music from your home computer.
An example of this is the $2,100 Pioneer DEH-P90HDD, which does everything but drive your car. Alpine permits removing the hard drive from its HAD-5460 car stereo and connecting it to your computer through a USB port for loading the drive with music.
If you want to personalize your car stereo, Pioneer and JVC offer customizable faces for their stereos.
You can download graphics from a special Web site or create your own, burn them onto a CD-R on your home computer and play the CD in the car stereo, which reads the data and changes the display. JVC calls its system PiCT. It also offers interchangeable faceplate skins on its $210 KD-SC800. You can choose from “millennium blue,” “candy apple red,” “melodic flower power” or “sizzling hot rod.”
While many companies offer outboard MP3 players that work in the car through an adapter that inserts in the cassette player, Digital Innovations introduced one of the most clever pocket MP3 players, the modular Neuros MP3 Digital Audio Computer. It transmits to the car’s FM radio, and offers a HiSi feature that captures 30-second snippets of songs at a touch of a button. So if you’re driving and hear a song you like, but don’t get the title or can’t write it down, just touch the Neuros HiSi button.
When you return home, you upload the snippet to your computer, which goes to a site on the Internet and searches for the title, artist and CD information. The basic Neuros costs $249, or $399 with the hard drive backpack.
At-home format
The road show keeps growing larger. LCD screens for cars keep increasing in size while shrinking in price, following the trend of falling LCD prices. Another trend is wider screens in the 16:9 widescreen format that is becoming more common on home TVs.
Virtually every car electronics manufacturer offers a rolling theater system with ceiling or seatback mounted LCD and dash-installed DVD player. For example, JVC offers the KV-MR9000 ceiling mounted widescreen, 9-inch (measured diagonally) display for $1,000.
Some companies also offer screens that retract or fold into the dash that will display maps while moving, but not moving video. Pull over and take the car out of gear and you can watch movies or TV in the front seat.
Kenwood has the Excelon KVT-915DVD in-dash receiver with DVD video and multichannel audio, along with a TV tuner, surround sound processor and a built-in 7-inch motorized LCD touch screen that controls all features and functions with a tap of your finger on the screen. The unit costs $2,900.
Audiovox markets an 8-inch screen as part of its VOD-806, which includes a built-in DVD player and TV tuner, while offering nearly wireless installation. The ceiling-mounted unit replaces the dome light, simplifying installation by using the light’s power connection and replacing the light with its own. It further simplifies car wiring by using wireless infrared to supply the rear-seat headphones, and FM to transmit sound through the car radio.
No-hands format
Finally, Alpine promises the first hands-free mobile phone/car stereo, its MobileHub for the Nokia 6310i cellphone.
It permits one-button call/answer, speed dialing, phone book access and text message alert to be controlled through nine Alpine head-unit models, while delivering superior hands-free sound quality through the vehicle’s audio system.
You can send and receive text messages only with the vehicle parked. No price was announced.
Some companies want to be the rage of the road by attracting young buyers. Sony continues calling its car stereo line Xplod (pronounced explode) while JVC retaliates with its new Arsenal line and Audiovox goes on a Rampage.
Clarion calls its system Joyride, which takes us back to simpler times. In our day and age, however, the Alpine Status system offers a less violent and reckless symbol.
