Love your collection of Apple mobile gadgets? Now you can use an inexpensive iPhone FM transmitter to get the music from your iPad, iPhone, iPod or any gizmo with a headphone jack into your car’s stereo!
For the millions of people in the world today who love and buy Apple electronics, one of them is not enough. In addition to sporting an iMac or MacBook at home, they are also quite likely to use an iPad, iPod, and/or iPhone when they’re on the go.
Perhaps you’re one of them?
If so, then you know that virtually all of Apple’s electronics make for great digital jukeboxes. Loaded with their groundbreaking iTunes platform, everything from a MacBook Pro to iPod Touch allows you to buy, store, and listen to music virtually anywhere. The problem, however, has always been that Apple’s mobile devices are largely designed to play music through earbuds or earphones. While that is an important option for many iPhone, iPod, and iPad users, many others wish they could simply plug in to their car stereo and listen to music through their booming speakers and subwoofers.
Enter the trusty iPhone FM transmitter!
Digital On Digital: iPhone FM Transmitters Broadcast Directly Into Your Car Stereo
Now, for a modest investment of around AUD$20, every mobile gadget in your Apple arsenal can be easily driven through your car stereo, thanks to advancements in digital technology. Early designs for plugging personal music devices into your car stereo involved cumbersome cassette tape inserts that never sounded any good and often managed to break the cassette player function in car stereos. This downside, combined with the fact that few if any car stereos come equipped with cassette players anymore make an iPhone FM transmitter the obvious next-generation choice for converting iTunes-powered music collections into something that can be listened to safely while driving.
The new technology in iPhone FM transmitters is purely digital: just as your car’s FM receiver can digitally tune in radio stations, so too does an iPhone FM transmitter tune in frequencies to broadcast the audio signal from your iPhone, iPod, or iPad. The precision of your car’s stereo and the iPhone FM transmitter both locking in to the same frequency digitally, together with Digital Phase Lock Loop (PLL) transmission technology that helps reduce interference, assures digital-quality transmission of the signal; the broadcast signal itself is not digital, but the tuning is.
Universal Usability
There are a wide range of different iPhone FM transmitters on the market today, many of which are proprietary and need to be interfaced with the iPhone’s dock. But if you have a ton of different mobile gadgets, look for an iPhone FM transmitter that interfaces with devices using a 1/8″ (3.5mm) connection. While docks, plugs, and connectors can vary from device to device, the 1/8″ (3.5mm) jack continues to be universal for listening to music, from your iPhone 4 to your old Sony Walkman.
The only downside to an iPhone FM transmitter that uses a 1/8″ (3.5mm) connector is that it will most likely need to be powered either through your car’s cigarette lighter jack or a set of batteries — it will not be able to run on USB or any other kind of phantom power. This also means that a universal-fit iPhone FM transmitter might have a few extra cables — one that attaches the transmitter to your device, and one that attaches the transmitter to the car’s cigarette lighter.
But this is a minimal downside considering that an inexpensive iPhone FM transmitter can work with all of your favourite devices!
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