Well, I’m back from Calgary, and as I was doing some cleanup around the house yesterday, I ran across the cassette adapter I had bought for my iPod shuffle a few weeks ago. Having forgotten I had it, I’d put it off to the side of my desk, which promptly got covered over with paperwork.

Cassette adapter, you say? Yeah, it’s old school. But from what I’ve heard from other iPod owners, the FM radio adapters available, while feature-rich, are pretty mediocre when it comes to audio quality. The fact that they cost around twice the price of the cassette adapter is another consideration. :)

Having some time to kill, I whipped out my shuffle and the adapter and headed down to the car to try it out. Hooking it up was dirt simple (plug in the adapter to the iPod, pop in the tape, turn on iPod and play — a 2-year old could manage it.) To my surprise (and after figuring out the tape deck in my car that I’d never used before), the audio quality was excellent (i.e. no noticeable degradation in audio from listening to the iPod straight up — making the MP3 encoding quality/bitrate the limiting factor, and not the tape adapter.)

The shuffle itself is well-suited to use in the car (since it’s so easy to dump a random playlist onto it), and the audio quality is significantly better than radio, and saves you lugging around a dozen CDs or loading your changer. If you have a shuffle, for the price (which isn’t too bad, I think I paid around $27 CAD for it), the Monster Cassette Adapter is well worth picking up.

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Posted in Gadgets |

Tags: ipod, icarplay, monster, car+audio