I tend to work off real world experience and not everything I read. Many of the automotive trade magazines are written by journalists that really don't have much time in the field.
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Car Advice?
- Thread starter Dr. Cheese
- Start date
Crutchfield probably has a BT ready system for your car, if you want to spend the money.
I'm still rocking a cassette deck in a few of my cars, the newest being the factory deck in my 03 2500HD.
I had no idea! I wonder if any local shops do installs of this stuff. Hmmm…
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Move on or take it to PM, please.
Yeah, mine has cassette and CD. Honestly, I’d be happy with just a wired connection that let me play stuff from my phone through the stock system. Not sure if that thing has an aux in back there or not. Probably not.
I'm only seeing your post now. As a retired mechanic myself, I congratulate you on also being retired.
Looking at your profile, I see you're in PA. Not sure how much salt your area used on the roads, where I am in Western NY they toss salt down like confetti at a NYE parade in Times Square...... so rust is definitely a deciding factor when any customer asks about how much longer they should keep their current vehicle.
I could post rust pics, but y'all would need to be up to date on tetanus shots before viewing them.
Most of the time I drive with nothing playing....... I often prefer the sound of "mechanical music" versus the same beat to death FM rock radio songs.
I subscribed briefly to Sirius XM and while it's allegedly "commercial free", having to listen to whatever DJ babbling between songs drove me nuts...... the worst being Eddie Trunk.
I really don't care how many rock stars you partied with, STFU and play the next song.
Eventually the old school guys (like myself) retire and we can only hope that the next generation can carry the torch we left behind.
I started in the field in 1983 at a 6 bay Mobil station. That shop was full of old timers and I was the greenhorn at 16......
Anyway, those guys didn't believe in being parts changers..... they'd diagnose everything and if a starter, alternator, brake caliper etc was bad, we rebuilt them in house..... there weren't a bunch of off the shelf parts available at that time, so we did as much that we could in house.
Today it's more parts changing than anything else..... even the diagnostic flowcharts will often say "substitute part X with a known good part" and then see what happens.
The crew that came into the shop as I was leaving were a bunch of 20 somethings with pieces of paper from whatever online "university" and no real world experience. I'll wager that none of them could have told the difference between a roller cam and a roller skate.
I miss my old customer base, I loved what I did but I don't miss it.
So did you go out and get the left handed crescent wrench, the quart of striped paint, all that?
Agreed and I just picked up an 09 Corolla for $700.
Needs brake lines and an A/C compressor....... but it's low miles for the year with a clean body.
Basic car with manual locks and windows, but it's an automatic with A/C.
I should do pretty well when I fix it and sell it.
Crutchfield has a Find a Local Installer portion on its site: Invalid Link Removed
Depending on your car, especially an older one, a DIY install may not be bad. I did one on my 2000 Accord Coupe, although pre-Bluetooth.
The car I replaced it with and my current one, a 2012 Mazda 3, has both Bluetooth and a CD player, which was a major change once I upgraded to a smartphone. While I still put in CDs on occasion, most of the time I have a playlist on my phone on shuffle. It's especially nice with Waze navigation, as it pauses the music to give a direction.
I’m more of a podcast/ebook/esoteric Apple Music guy these days. But at highway speeds, the mechanical music is a little too loud for me to really hear all of these things. The stock system was plenty loud.
Most modern cars have "integrated" stereo systems that combine music players, navigation, cell phone, dash cams, and other features into one unit.
Upgrading the music player is no longer as simple (or cheap) as swapping in a new, standard size head unit.
On my 2014 Focus, the stock stereo was just awful. If you turned the volume up loud enough to hear music over the typical cabin sound, it would distort. It was literally so useless that I never listened to it because it sucked so bad.
In order to upgrade the sound, I had to first buy an adapter kit, which essentially replaced a good portion of the center dashboard above the climate controls and I had to swap a bunch of parts over in order to keep certain functions. The adapter kit itself was over $200.
All this stuff has to come out:
The upgraded head unit was a basic Alpine music player that cost me only $100 new. It doesn't play CDs, but it does have Bluetooth, a USB Input, and an auxiliary input.
I hate subscription streaming audio, so most of the time I play prerecorded music from my portable music player through the aux in.
That setup, plus a pair of Infinity Kappa 6" door speakers in the front and a 12" Kappa subwoofer in the back seat make for a surprisingly clean sounding hifi auto sound system that gets low and loud, but is still very affordable.
While I did the installation work myself, I wouldn't recommend it to those without experience.
It will cost some money to have a shop install an upgraded stereo system into a newer car, but it's usually not wise to start hacking into a modern car's dashboard equipment on your own if you don't know exactly what you're doing.
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There used to be the cassettes with a wire that would plug into a phone or a portable CD player, I used one for years in my old 79 K20.
Not sure if anyone still makes one or not.
Most new cars are assembled around the radio and you're correct, the whole thing is comprised of several different systems so it's not like simply slapping a Pioneer Super Tuner in like we did in the 80's.
But in this case I think Chris is looking to upgrade a 20 year old Honda and that should be fairly straightforward.
I like to buy car stereos from Crutchfield because they provide extensive, detailed, installation instructions for pretty much every vehicle in existence.
They are a good place to get stereos from, seems like the sales staff actually knows what they're selling.
We used to have a bunch of stereo shops around here, all but maybe two of them are gone and the two I know of also offer other stuff like window tinting, lift kits, wheels/tires etc ....
I went to one a while back and asked if they had any shaft mounted radios and the guy laughed at me. He wanted to sell me one huge radio with the giant screen and all sorts of features, all I wanted was something simple.
It was for my 68 ElCamino and I'm not cutting the original dash up for a big screen radio.
I wound up getting a JVC AM/FM cassette deck from eBay for $15 and it works great.
Nowadays I get that stuff form flea markets. Recently found a cassette deck, an 8 track player and a cassette to 8 track adapter (remember those?).
A friend who restores 60s cars puts them in his period correct projects.
