Have you gone car shopping and looked for a vehicle that's compatible with your iPod or MP3 player? What about looking for a car that can receive signals from the more than 1,000 U.S. radio stations that are now broadcasting digital HD format? If you're looking for cutting-edge audio in your next vehicle, you might be surprised to find that automakers are often several years behind the times. Chuck Buhman of Plantation, Fla., and his wife went shopping for a new car and settled on an Infiniti M35 sedan. Although they bought the car, they were disappointed to find that there was no hookup that would accommodate their iPod. "I was very surprised that an upscale sedan wouldn't be equipped with a jack to plug in my wife's iPod," Buhman says. So a side trip to Circuit City was in order to get an aftermarket hookup that is not nearly as elegant a solution as a factory setup would have provided. BMW was the first manufacturer to embrace HD radio, which provides a digital signal that produces sound quality comparable to satellite radio. While it's possible to get an HD radio receiver from Wal-Mart, Best Buy and other electronics stores, it's a rarity on a car's options list at this time. What's at work here is the difference in speed between how quickly change comes in the electronics industry and how slowly change occurs in the automotive industry. Factory audio systems are light years better than they were even a decade ago, but they still lag behind what's often on display at the local car audio emporium. Cell phones have also been a thorny issue for carmakers. When some upscale manufacturers began offering built-in cell phones several years ago, they were faced with complaints from buyers when the factory-installed cell phones were quickly made obsolete by a stream of new models that seemed to be arriving every few months. For consumers interested in state-of-the art audio gear in their new vehicles, the conundrum is whether to spend money on a factory-installed system or go for the basics and then swap it all out with a much more advanced aftermarket system. Either decision is costly. Ford, for example, offers what it calls the Shaker 1000 audio system in its Mustang at a sticker price of $1,770. While it will play MP3 compact discs, it doesn't offer HD radio or an iPod jack. If you go with the standard AM-FM/CD player in the Mustang and swap it out with an aftermarket in-dash unit that can handle an iPod, satellite radio and HD radio, it's likely to cost just as much as the Shaker 1000 option, especially if you also upgrade the speakers, subwoofers and amplifiers. To keep better pace with the change-a-day world of audio in the future, Ford and other manufacturers are forging ever-closer ties with manufacturers such as Sony. Until such agreements begin to close the car audio development gap, consumers need to be aware of what the factory equipment can and cannot deliver.  | | This week | | | |
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