fm adapter vs. ipod adapter.....

Meg and I went to Circuit City Tuesday night to have a car stereo installed in the Accord. It already had a factory AM/FM/CD player, but it wouldn’t play CD-R’s. Plus, iTrips don’t work too well in the Nashville area, so (gasp!) Meg couldn’t listen to her iPod in the car. I could have ordered the same thing from Crutchfield, saved some money and installed it myself. However, the last time I did that it took me almost 5 hours and since I’d just gone through the toilet debacle, I thought I’d do the smart thing and let someone who knows what they’re doing handle it. Besides, installation was FREE! Yeah, free, right. By the time you add on all the adapters, wiring harnesses, installations kits, etc. (all of which actually comes free from Crutchfield), the installation ain’t all that free. The point is that you end up paying for it one way or another.

We went in thinking we knew which unit we were going to buy. But the salesman showed us a stereo that you could add an iPod adapter to, allowing you all the iPod functionality on the face plate of the stereo. Yes, it was $50 more, but I think it’ll be well worth it in the long run.

This experience made me think about the “stereo” I had in my first car. I was 17, and Dad and I started shopping for a car for me to drive back and forth to school and work. I remember going to look at a Mercury Comet. It looked a lot like the Ford Maverick in the picture, even down to the same puke green color. Don’t get me wrong, I would have taken it. That’s the thing about being a 17-year-old teenage boy who doesn’t have a car to drive – he’ll take anything with wheels and be grateful for it. But deep down I remember actually praying , “God, please don’t let Dad buy this car. I really don’t like it. I’ll take it, but I don’t like it.” Then we looked at a couple of Chevrolet Monzas. Seems like one was a 1977 and the other a 1976. We ended up with the 1976. It was sort of a copper-brown color. And I loved it. I thought it was the greatest car anyone could ever have.

My 1976 Monza didn’t have a CD player. It didn’t have a cassette player. It didn’t even have an FM radio. (And it didn’t have air conditioning!) All it had for entertainment was an AM radio with a 3-inch paper cone speaker in the dash. Smokin’! My solution, since I didn’t have enough money to add a new stereo, was to buy an FM adapter to add to it. For those unfamiliar with an FM adapter, it looked alot like a regular in-dash car radio, only a little slimmer. All you did was plug the adapter into the cigarette lighter outlet, tune your AM radio to 1610, then tune in 101.5 WQUT (or any other FM station) on the FM adapter, and you gots all kinds of stereo tunes coming out of a single 3-inch paper cone speaker in the dash. It wasn’t a Bose, but I could at least listen to Southern Rock instead of static.

So as we stood there in the car stereo section of Circuit City Tuesday night trying to decide whether to go with the front auxiliary input for the iPod or the iPod adapter, I couldn’t help but think back to 25 years ago. Meg's very proud of her car stereo, with its iPod adapter, wireless remote and MP3 capability, but I don't think she's any more proud of it than I was of my FM adapter and my 1976 Chevrolet Monza.....