> The real problem was almost no one had a CD player not even in their car!
And here I am driving a 2003 Golf with a tape deck (and CD player).
And here I am driving a 2003 Golf with a tape deck (and CD player).
That sounds wonderful.
There was a brief, magical moment in history when cars would come with AM/FM radio, a tape deck, a CD player, and an aux port so that you could plug in audio from every other device that humanity would invent for the rest of time.
It feels like the most fleeting of moments, and it was so long ago. Maybe it was just one summer afternoon in the early 2000s.
Anyway, I think we've largely been going downhill since then. For whatever reason, humanity achieved a lovely little peak of engineering, and then we immediately abandoned it for worse options.
I went through two phases:
1. I ordered some type of Walkman-like car kit that came with a portable CD player, glue strips to adhere the CD player to your dashboard, and a cassette tape adapter that plugged into an aux port (on the CD player) and inserted into the tape deck. I'd burn CDs to play in the car that way.
2. I got a Zen Stone, a tiny mp3 player with no screen that was easy to operate by feel. I stored mp3s on it... and plugged the cassette adapter that I still had into it. That was as good as in-car music can get without being voice operated.
They still make the adapters: https://www.amazon.com/Arsvita-Audio-Cassette-Adapter-Auxill...
I ripped my collection to my phone and I use CarPlay and it works well enough. But still if I could, I'd buy a car with a CD player.
My next car might be a Slate truck because they supposedly support single or double DIN radios and there has to be an aftermarket option that would work.
But I understand that it is a different kind of magic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-kqUkZnDcM (VW Cabrion Pink Moon ad)
I also found the 'night drive' ad to be interesting:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U9I7QrpSkk
> That sounds wonderful.
I don't know if people are really serious but there seems to be a good market interest in car's that's not just equipped with touchscreens and Apple CarPlay. It's interesting (and perhaps understandable) how no car manufacturing is interested in tapping into such a niche segment.
Except that rust is eating it and I'll have to replace it soon-ish.
Your comment does not disagree with GP's in the way you think it does
In audio connectors, I've had some pretty crazy builds getting from various formats when the exact right thing isn't available but a giant milk crate of random cables was on hand.
I've never had any of those issues with a short piece of wire operating at audio frequencies.
Huh I also have Subsonic on my home NAS and Symfonium on my phone (connectable via Android Auto). Another Rube Goldberg invention would be to put the audio CD in the drive connected to the NAS, have a driver that pretends to be a filesystem of MP3s but actually encodes the CD tracks (on the fly on every playback, of course!), stream it over the Internet to my phone, that's connected to Android Auto. That's how to play a CD on a modern car!
I really like CDs and enjoy buying them second hand when on road trips. It was fun to put in something new while traveling, but now it requires an extra device on the off chance that a CD is found.
Sadly when you stream music over Bluetooth there is lossy compression taking place.
People can bitch all they want about "320 kbps mp3 using a modern encoder being indistinguishable from the lossless source", the fact is: mp3 were nice 30 years ago in the Napster day (when I had my ADSL Internet connection).
It's 2026 and I play lossless music, including FLAC files I bit-perfectly ripped from my own CD collection (and the rips have been verified online with a DB of rips, so I now they're bit-perfect) and including lossless music from proper music streaming platform (I pay a Qobuz subscription: amazing quality, huge offering, but shittiest music discovery platform ever btw).
Really: it's 2026 and if people like to listen to lossy music, more power to them. I don't, and hence I don't stream audio over Bluetooth.
My car both takes CDs, memory sticks (mp3 and WAV, no FLAC) and has got its own memory. I've got a few hundred songs stored in the car: they go losslessly to the car's DAC.
High-end luxury car and it's the type of car where people who've never been in one say: "I never knew music could sound that good in a car" (which btw is funny to witness when some car youtubers try a car with an amazing soundsystem).
Now of course it's still a car. Don't get me started on home stereo because I've got that too (and when you know what you're doing you can get amazing audio for a really very reasonable price: for example I won't put 30 K in a McIntosh amp where a Yamaha amp costing 1/30th of the price will do).
Call me an audiofool and... Enjoy your lossy Bluetooth streaming adding a layer of lossyness on your already lossy mp3 on your car stereo system which sounds like crap anyway.
This might seem pretty obvious, but I wasn't expecting it to matter as much since the end result was compressed again (and yet again on my car's Bluetooth) using a different codec.
This isn't on anything close to audiophile gear either. My car stereo is thoroughly mediocre and my home stereo is speakers I literally found in the trash.
Now I'm (belatedly) rebuilding my music collection in FLAC...
I have a budget android phone with a jack and it's miles more convenient than a dongle or Bluetooth headphones which are never comfortable to me.
Nothing could sell a phone with a jack, but then you don't need to pay 300$ for some crappy Bluetooth headphones
Have you looked at the price of actually mediocre Bluetooth headphones recently? They’re like… $20 for a distinct fine set of true wireless headphones, including the case, even from a real brand. Certainly comparable to $20 wired headphones.
I don't feel like having to charge two devices.
On long international flights a traditional headphone jack beats Bluetooth every time.
Bluetooth headphones last as long as their batteries do. Wired headphones, particularly ones with replaceable cords, last forever.
I'm not sure why your being argumentive here, it's a known fact that Bluetooth has to compress everything down and sacrifices quality to do so.
Current gen over ear ANC headphones have battery life in excess of any international flight. Most in excess of a round trip, even. True wireless ones don’t, but that’s not typically what you use on a plane. If you’re using the in flight infotainment, you’re corded anyways… so it’s a bit of a moot point. I can’t possibly imagine flying without ANC headphones at this point though, which requires a battery. The cable is also such a pain on a long flight. Any time you get up or move around, it’s inevitable you have to relocate or move the cable around to prevent it from getting snagged. If I could have Bluetooth on every infotainment system I’d love that.
> I'm not sure why your being argumentive here, it's a known fact that Bluetooth has to compress everything down and sacrifices quality to do so.
My point is that although that’s technically true, it’s practically not true. The quality is sufficient that you’ll hardly notice for most environments. If you’re in some listening room, sure fine. Use your fancy wired headphones.
In public, with environmental noise, etc or especially on planes? The picture is a lot muddier.
You know the neat thing about phones with an audio jack, you can use Bluetooth or wired headphones.
Apple figured out they could print money by selling AirPods and now every phone brand has some crappy Bluetooth headphones they want to sell.
Thus most phones don’t have jacks anymore. I don’t see any advantage to the end consumer.
Sorry that occurs with you. I know some people are much more sensitive to it than others. Also, lower quality or older ANC products have a much stronger “head pressure” effect which is definitely undesirable. Modern high end stuff from Apple, Sony, or Bose basically have all eliminated that effect in my experience.
I’m not sure what your vendetta here is against phones without jacks. There’s so, so, so many decent USB to 3.5mm jacks that are nearly free these days. Same with ones that also offer pass through charging.
The fact is today Bluetooth headphones are 99% of the market for phone users, and for the rest of folks the dongle is a perfectly suitable solution. In fact, dongles are a way to offer superior performance to most phone 3.5mm jacks. If you really care about the audio performance of your headphones, most phones offered mediocre or even outright bad audio quality out of their headphone jacks.
There's literally no benefit to the end user.
Dongles are a great way to put stress on a single point of failure. If your USB c port stops working your phone can't be charged anymore and is useless.
I have more Bluetooth earbuds then I can count. At 30$ a pair they almost always go bad within 6 months. My wired headphones work for years.
It's not like my opinion matters that much. Literally the only flagship phone with a jack is a 1300$ Sony Xperia.
The benefit to the end user is lower cost, fewer parts that can break, more area for other components, and potentially improved form factors from not having to have a 3.5mm cutout. Maybe all of those don’t immediately translate to tangible benefits from consumers, but there’s quite a few phone form factors that have existed that would not be possible with 3.5mm jacks.
> If your USB c port stops working your phone can't be charged anymore and is useless.
Pretty much all phones have wireless charging in some form now. That’s your backup, or potentially primary if you’re in the wireless charging ecosystem. Also, most phones have a method of repairing/replacing the USB-C port. Not convenient of course, but this is no different than damaging a phone from yanking the charging cable or whatever.
> I have more Bluetooth earbuds then I can count. At 30$ a pair they almost always go bad within 6 months. My wired headphones work for years.
Then… don’t buy cheap products? I’ve never had a battery go bad in over ear Bluetooth headphones, and even if they did I’m pretty confident a replacement set of batteries would be widely available. I’ve replaced parts on extremely old Bose headphones without an issue.
As I started this thread Nothing doesn't include a jack on their phones because they want to sell you a 300$ pair of Bluetooth headphones that I can guarantee are inferior to my 70$ Fiio headphones.
You'd have a point if *every* single phone oem wasn't trying to sell Bluetooth headphones.
>and even if they did I’m pretty confident a replacement set of batteries would be widely available.
Airpods , which are above and beyond the most popular Bluetooth buds don't have user replaceable batteries. You have to ask Apple to do so at 50$.
Apple did this as an outrageously anti consumer move. And they've made billions of airpods in doing so. Then they brought Beats which sound worse than 30$ sennheiser HD201s.
Nobody is forcing you to buy their most expensive headphones. Also, the cheapest Bluetooth earbuds that Nothing offers are literally $25. I don’t get your point here. They’re offering a range of competitive headphones and you’re free to choose other brands. There’s also nothing forcing you to buy the same brand of headphones or earbuds.
> Airpods , which are above and beyond the most popular Bluetooth buds don't have user replaceable batteries. You have to ask Apple to do so at 50$.
I said over ear headphones. Pretty much all of those have user serviceable (without destroying the device) batteries. Even the AirPods Max you can do it.
And for true wireless earbuds, form factor makes that difficult. Nonetheless, there exist earbuds that do actually have user serviceable batteries. I’ve personally replaced a pair of batteries in Sony WF-1000XM3s. At a cost of $10… hardly a lot for the original price of these things.
What do you mean by this? AAC or SBC is perfectly fine for $20 headphones. Definitely for that quality of headphone. LDAC or Apt-X are pointless for a headphone in that price bracket.
I have some $70 wired headphones from AliExpress that literally beat anything I've personally tried wireless up to like $300 or so.
Why? I used to use wired Bose noise cancelling headphones in the late 2010s.
Also, a significant advantage to wireless when using ANC is you don’t have to deal with cable noise. Especially in a quiet office environment, noise from the cable moving around on your body gets amplified and you can hear it.
I'm one of those people who cannot tell until the bit rate gets stupidly low or the encoder cannot handle the symbols on drums but that is no universal.
Even then I stick to headphone jacks when possible. If it is a low quality podcast, occasionally my $20 bluetooth buds come out but that is a reasonable trade off.
I wrote [1] to post-process my (slightly obsessively) neatly tagged mp3 collection for use in my car.
[1] https://github.com/andyjohnson0/ID3Minimiser
Obligatory note: destructively edits tags, so run it on a copy of any mp3 files.