I bought myself a 1995 Pontiac Firefly recently; everything works fine on it, except the stereo. Its your average everyday AM/FM cassette deck and it works reasonably well most of the time, but some days when I’m driving I completely lose the radio signal. Now I know its not the radio station or the place I’m driving since I can get perfect reception on my disk man if I try that. Now I’m not sure if the problem is with the antenna or the stereo, and I honestly don’t really have the money to find out or to get it fixed anyway. What I was thinking was since I have an mp3 Discman I could use that instead, but its a pain to have the head phones on when I’m driving (to not mention somewhat dangerous) so I’m wondering if there was a cheap way I could hook up my Discman to my car stereo. Now I don’t have a lot of money, so it would have to be a dirt cheap solution, and I don’t want to destroy my Discman in the process, I’d just need something with an audio input jack that I could plug my Discman’s headphone jack into, I’d also need to have a small amplifier to make the signal strong enough to hear clearly.
My question is can it be done, and if do could it be done for say $50?
I though of maybe just getting a double ended cable and hooking them up, but my stereo doesn’t have an input jack.
Someone just told me that you can get adapters that hook up using the cassette slot, I’ll check those out tonight, but I’d still like your suggestions.
Yeah I thought nowadays discmen come with that cable that hooks up to your car stereo, so I was also gonna suggest that. Hopefully if you get something working,your discman has Anti-Skip functions or something like that.
All in all I’d say screw it, and take out the stereo and get a new one with a cd player. Although I’m a bit biased as I know people here that would do it for me free. Maybe you can look around at your options of getting one installed for a fair price…? I have no clue how much they cost though…
Originally posted by Dark Sand
[b]Someone suggested this to me, I’m going to pick on up tonight and see if it works (if not I can always return it, its radioshack afterall)
That’s cheaper than a good pair of headphones, Kraken. The only problem with those is getting a good spot where you can reach your discman easily but not have it fall and fly around.
Yeah, I payed nearly twice that for my headphones, its dirt cheap considering it looks like exactly what I need. As for reaching it when I’m driving, its not really a problem it has a 2" cable with a controller at the end so I can change tracks, play / stop, and change the volume using that.
Originally posted by Xelopheris That’s cheaper than a good pair of headphones, Kraken. The only problem with those is getting a good spot where you can reach your discman easily but not have it fall and fly around.
I guess that’s the price you pay for not shelling out for a new stereo. Still, with a little ingenuity (read: bungee cords) you might be able to jury-rig something… but dashboards are so different between car models that I can’t suggest any universal solution.
In my brother’s car he has an mp3 player. It is hooked into a special tape which is put in to his tape player. It is also connected to the cigarette lighter (don’t know why but hey)…