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Collateral Damage posted:Aftermarket car audio is slowly fading to nothing as even the budget segment of new cars come with decent speakers and aux-in/bluetooth/ipod integration from the factory nowadays. Nobody cares about the head unit any more, all you need is a way to connect your phone (and if you're over 60 maybe a radio). Very true, although I met my friend the other week and he was driving a early 2000's Corolla (2002-2003 maybe)? It had a factory tape deck, no cd player either. I was baffled, as I can't remember anyone using tapes past the late 90's. But my memory of the years might be way off My first car was a '95 Mercury Mystique, it had a 6 disc changer in the trunk ffs And in typing this I managed to find out the last car to come with a factory tape deck was a Lexus, in 2010  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/automobiles/06AUDIO.html?_r=0
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Oct 20, 2014 11:41
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drrockso20 posted:Okay since today's my birthday, I think it'd be a reasonable request for everyone to tell me all the interesting things you can about the Commodore 64, 128, and Amiga family of computers, since I think they are really cool and want to know more about them Hold-and-modify Obsolete? oh yes. Failed? I think not!
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Oct 20, 2014 11:59
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Sappo569 posted:Has after market car audio progressed past gaudy-as-gently caress head units yet? Late 90's weren't bad until Sony started pushing that Xplod crap out. Then it became flashing, spinning LEDs all over the place. These days Nakamichi, Clarion, Blaupunkt and Pioneer have some rather tasteful single and double DIN units. Pioneer in particular has some nice double DIN sized units that sound great and dont look like an disco nightmare.
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Oct 20, 2014 12:11
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drrockso20 posted:Okay since today's my birthday, I think it'd be a reasonable request for everyone to tell me all the interesting things you can about the Commodore 64, 128, and Amiga family of computers, since I think they are really cool and want to know more about them
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Oct 20, 2014 12:14
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To be fair, you can do that today, it's just you have a lot more memory to sort though and it tends to excite your AV.
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Oct 20, 2014 12:46
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True but it's usually through a software debugger that puts the relevant process to sleep, not a hardware device that interrupts the whole CPU.
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Oct 20, 2014 12:50
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Sappo569 posted:Very true, although I met my friend the other week and he was driving a early 2000's Corolla (2002-2003 maybe)? quote:Audio seers say that the CD, too, will eventually fade away. Technology marches on, and automakers are wary of becoming stragglers in that parade. And yet they all come with FM radios, even up here where there is a definite "FM will be turned off and completely replaced by DAB" - deadline.
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Oct 20, 2014 14:47
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Grumbletron 4000 posted:I used to be into car audio back in the late 90's. I still am a little bit but back then having your poo poo stolen was a big problem. It doesn't seem like anybody gives a care about stealing car stereos now. The best solution for stolen car stereos was the removable face plate which most people remember. I had this exact head unit in my truck about 10 years ago. The ribbon cable that went to the face plate wore out after about 2 years. I soldered a new one on and it lasted about 4 more months before breaking again. Went back to the OEM radio after that.
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Oct 20, 2014 15:17
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Computer viking posted:And yet they all come with FM radios, even up here where there is a definite "FM will be turned off and completely replaced by DAB" - deadline. FM will probably continue to exist for decades more, if only for traffic and emergency announcements.
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Oct 20, 2014 15:30
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KozmoNaut posted:FM will probably continue to exist for decades more, if only for traffic and emergency announcements. If AM is still around, despite there seeming to be an average of two-three stations in any given area (one of which will just be a local sports channel that probably has an FM sister station anyway,) I suspect FM will still be around for a while, too.
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Oct 20, 2014 15:57
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http://www.radioworld.com/article/norway-sets-2017-sunset-for-analog-fm/23318 . (Though even that allows for local channels to continue on FM, granted.) But anyway, my point was more "without DAB" than "with FM".
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Oct 20, 2014 16:11
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Computer viking posted:But anyway, my point was more "without DAB" than "with FM". Yeah, but DAB reception sucks bad enough when stationary. It's completely random when you're moving at ~60MPH.
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Oct 20, 2014 16:15
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I've seen claims that newer versions are more robust, but so far that seems to be a real problem, yeah.
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Oct 20, 2014 16:20
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Collateral Damage posted:Aftermarket car audio is slowly fading to nothing as even the budget segment of new cars come with decent speakers and aux-in/bluetooth/ipod integration from the factory nowadays. Nobody cares about the head unit any more, all you need is a way to connect your phone (and if you're over 60 maybe a radio). My wife's 2003 Mazda 6 came with a stock in-dash 6 disc changer. The drat thing stopped ejecting CD's two years ago so she's been listening to the same ones since. A couple of weeks ago she rolled up a magazine to swat a bee on the dash and now the player doesn't work at all. The service writer at the dealer suggested it might be cheaper to take it to a local stereo place and just have them replace it with a single disc unit. I stopped by for a quote and just parts alone was gonna be around $600 due to the replacement dash plate costing $200 (on Amazon, even!). I'm not gonna fork out that much, so as a Plan B, I bought a stock one with the radio and changer included on Ebay for $110 shipped. The dealership guy is gonna go ahead and install it. He said they usually won't but since the other option was gonna be so expensive and he felt bad about the bad recommendation, he'll make an exception. I'm sure there will probably be a fair bit of labor costs involved, but at least the parts bill is only 1/6 of what it could have been otherwise.
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Oct 20, 2014 16:47
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In the US digital radio broadcasting has been such a huge flop that I can't see analog radio going away any time soon. I don't know of a single person who owns a receiver for terrestrial digital broadcasts and it is not even offered in most stock car radios, even the "premium" versions. This is can probably be blamed mostly on the FCC for choosing a propriety broadcast format that requires a costly per-unit royalty to the company that created it. Satellite radio broadcasting (which is subscription-based) is doing better but has always struggled to maintain a sustainable subscriber base even though it is now a standard feature of all stock car radios.
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Oct 20, 2014 16:57
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I actually had a digital compatible radio, and there was only one station that was even slightly listenable in digital mode. Even though there were a few stations broadcasting, the signal just degraded so heavily because of trees and buildings. Satellite radio has it's issues because most people don't want to pay for radio when they can listen to FM or their phone for free.
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Oct 20, 2014 17:06
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Grumbletron 4000 posted:Late 90's weren't bad until Sony started pushing that Xplod crap out. Then it became flashing, spinning LEDs all over the place. These days Nakamichi, Clarion, Blaupunkt and Pioneer have some rather tasteful single and double DIN units. Pioneer in particular has some nice double DIN sized units that sound great and dont look like an disco nightmare. I bought a Blaupunkt unit for my 86 Crown Vic because it was the only thing I could find that looked decent at the price; for $120, it actually sort of blends into the interior properly instead of the usual gaudy poo poo you see in older cars. It streams bluetooth and everything, you can stick an SD card in behind the faceplate, plug in a USB cable, or use the AUX jack. Elliotw2 posted:I actually had a digital compatible radio, and there was only one station that was even slightly listenable in digital mode. Even though there were a few stations broadcasting, the signal just degraded so heavily because of trees and buildings. Satellite radio has it's issues because most people don't want to pay for radio when they can listen to FM or their phone for free. The other problem is that satellite radio is always really loving boring. Sometimes I'll get rental cars that have satellite radio and it's always like somebody just typed "Classic Rock" or whatever genre into the iTunes store, bought the top 100 results, and hit shuffle. The DJs are always incredibly boring, and even the ads are worse than FM because they're not even localized. FM isn't too bad, I always enjoyed cross-country trips scanning along until I found something that would carry me the next 50 miles or whatever... worst case, I had my Dark Side of the Moon cassette handy (2001 Hyundai Accent, came stock with cassette) AM sucks any more. Around here the band is pretty full, but it's all:
There used to be a station out of Modesto that played music from the 50s and early 60s, even had some old Wolfman Jack recordings for the evenings. It was perfect for the AM-only receiver in my 62 Studebaker. Unfortunately, it seems they didn't have enough listeners or advertisers (half the ads were actually them saying "please advertise with us"), so at some point it's gone over to a Catholic station. Still streams online, though: http://www.kmph840.com/
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Oct 20, 2014 17:50
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Satellite radio really only seems worth it anymore for people who can't figure out how to do Spotify / Pandora, people who really really like Howard Stern, or people who want the AM experience of live sports but don't live near their preferred market. Jason Ellis is pretty funny, I listen to the comedy stations occasionally on long road trips, but really if I hadn't bought the lifetime subscription when I bought the receiver I would have canceled it long ago.
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Oct 20, 2014 18:02
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Pudgygiant posted:Satellite radio really only seems worth it anymore for people who can't figure out how to do Spotify / Pandora, people who really really like Howard Stern, or people who want the AM experience of live sports but don't live near their preferred market. Jason Ellis is pretty funny, I listen to the comedy stations occasionally on long road trips, but really if I hadn't bought the lifetime subscription when I bought the receiver I would have canceled it long ago. Once I got a rental car while Sirius was doing a Monty Python channel, that was pretty cool.
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Oct 20, 2014 18:10
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Drove a rental from LA to San Francisco in the middle of the night while listening to some US folk station on Sirius radio, that was pretty neat. But the car should have just had an AUX in jack 
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Oct 20, 2014 18:14
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One of my friends had XM back in 2004. He put it on the punk station because I like that poo poo, and they played Crass and the Bouncing Souls. Never thought I'd hear those bands on the radio. This was before the days of internet radio, and even slightly before the time when everyone had an iPod, so I guess it was pretty awesome in it's first few years. Definitely a waste of money now though.
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Oct 20, 2014 18:16
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Mad Hamish posted:Oh god, my dad had an IBM enterprise 2 that he made me do my schoolwork on. It had a box of tape cartridges, made a hum loud enough to drown out the vacuum cleaner, and I can still remember the smell. Why did it smell? It was like hot metal and dust. The first electric typewriter in my family had that smell, like metal and oil, and I remember that hum that accompanied turning it on. It used these big Coronamatic cartridges.  EDIT: Oh! Here it is! This typewriter is the reason I type like a mad bastard. Used to jam up if I typed too quickly. 
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Oct 20, 2014 18:21
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I've got bluetooth/aux in on my car stereo, and use Google Play music almost daily, but I still like the radio for the randomness of it. I know Play music can do "radio" but sometimes I just like flipping channels and hearing stuff that I've either forgotten about entirely or is outside of what I normally listen to. I listen to a lot of NPR too, but I know I could also stream that too if I wanted. And yeah OEM stereos are getting better. I do miss my old Blaupunkt MP3000 that I put in my last car, though. That was a great head unit. Looked very nice, sounded great, did mp3s off of disc and when the drive failed, it had an aux port I wired up to.
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Oct 20, 2014 18:26
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WescottF1 posted:I stopped by for a quote and just parts alone was gonna be around $600 due to the replacement dash plate costing $200 (on Amazon, even!). Honestly this is what is killing the aftermarket car audio market more than cars coming with Bluetooth and auxiliary inputs - integration of the factory stereo into the dash and to a lesser degree, making the stereo also perform non-ICE functions like trip computer and backup camera. Often the adapter costs more than most middle of the road head units and doesn't integrate with the rest of the interior well, sticking out like a sore thumb. e: WescottF1 posted:My wife's 2003 Mazda 6 came with a stock in-dash 6 disc changer. The drat thing stopped ejecting CD's two years ago so she's been listening to the same ones since. Do her a favor and install a sylfex AuxMod. Mazdas of that vintage (early 2000s up to 2013s) used a common stereo platform that included an expansion port that could connect to a tape deck, minidisc player (available in the Japanese market), trunk mounted disc changer and in later years, satellite radio. The AuxMod uses the port and emulates a tape deck, allowing an 1/8th inch stereo input. Geoj has a new favorite as of 19:04 on Oct 20, 2014 |
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Oct 20, 2014 18:55
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DAB/DAB+ is doing okish here in Norway. Most of the cities have good coverage now, which means I get almost as many channels as FM with fewer reception issues. Shame about the rest of the mountainous country, full of small towns deep down in their own valleys ... and the roads connecting them. The FM network struggles as-is, so getting full digital coverage will be fun. Someone just bought new radios for the biology lab at work, and they're all digital. I was mildly surprised - but it's worked out as a solid improvment . (FM and cellphone coverage is a bit dodgy there, but for some reason DAB is perfect.)
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Oct 20, 2014 18:59
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Geoj posted:Honestly this is what is killing the aftermarket car audio market more than cars coming with Bluetooth and auxiliary inputs - integration of the factory stereo into the dash and to a lesser degree, making the stereo also perform non-ICE functions like trip computer and backup camera. Often the adapter costs more than most middle of the road head units and doesn't integrate with the rest of the interior well, sticking out like a sore thumb. This next year you should start seeing some aftermarket head units that have Android Auto and what ever the iPhone equivalent is to give you you better phone/head-unit integration than you get with just bluetooth or aux ports. I imagine that you will see a brief (but probably small) resurgence in people replacing their car stereos. At least until it's the standard on new cars coming out and people have replaced their cars.
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Oct 20, 2014 19:19
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drrockso20 posted:Okay since today's my birthday, I think it'd be a reasonable request for everyone to tell me all the interesting things you can about the Commodore 64, 128, and Amiga family of computers, since I think they are really cool and want to know more about them The Amiga OS had a way for processes to survive resets, where the process would add its entrypoint at a specific location in memory and the OS would execute that code on boot/soft-reset. This was designed for "Terminate and Stay Resident" helper programs. Of course, this was immediately co-opted by viruses. It wasn't enough to do a soft or even a hard reset to protect yourself from them - you had to drop power long enough for the memory itself to "fade" so that the virus code no longer existed in RAM. (10-30 seconds was enough.) Some of the graphics for RoboCop 2 were made on an Amiga-based system. This was a big deal at the time, since most CGI for movies was being done on systems like SGIs which cost tens-of-thousands of dollars. If you want to know anything and everything about the C64, I highly recommend watching this fast-paced, technical, and super-interesting talk called "The Ultimate C64 Talk": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fe1-VVXIEh4
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Oct 20, 2014 19:40
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drrockso20 posted:Okay since today's my birthday, I think it'd be a reasonable request for everyone to tell me all the interesting things you can about the Commodore 64, 128, and Amiga family of computers, since I think they are really cool and want to know more about them Here's all the sections from The Dinosaur Den vodcast where Bil Herd, the designer of the C128, chats about working at Commodore: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3wiTffEw_0 (the internal nickname for the Commodore sign was "Chicken Lips").
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Oct 20, 2014 19:55
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I still have my Amiga 1200 with a wooping 40Mb hard drive, the HD costed me at the time 200€ (5€ per mb)  The Spectrum 48k was my first computer and i still have it also, but i have no tape deck for it.
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Oct 20, 2014 20:02
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Lowen SoDium posted:This next year you should start seeing some aftermarket head units that have Android Auto and what ever the iPhone equivalent is to give you you better phone/head-unit integration than you get with just bluetooth or aux ports. I imagine that you will see a brief (but probably small) resurgence in people replacing their car stereos. At least until it's the standard on new cars coming out and people have replaced their cars. Call me crazy but I really want Bump in head units. Having a mapped route on my phone, slapping my phone against my head unit, and seeing the map fly up there would be the coolest moment ever.
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Oct 20, 2014 20:17
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I wouldn't mind satellite radio because for the vast majority of people, they have data caps that make Pandora/Spotify streaming (from their phones to the stereo via bluetooth) unfeasible unless they want to murder their entire data allotment for the month in a few hours.
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Oct 20, 2014 20:23
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Pudgygiant posted:Call me crazy but I really want Bump in head units. Having a mapped route on my phone, slapping my phone against my head unit, and seeing the map fly up there would be the coolest moment ever. I wouldn't call you crazy. Android Auto isn't quite that nice. It requires you physically connect your phone to the unit and your phone outputs display to the headunit and takes input from the head unit controls. The UI it gives is simplified for while-driving use. Not quite as good as just touching your phone to the unit and having it work, but it's getting there.
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Oct 20, 2014 20:30
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Lowen SoDium posted:This next year you should start seeing some aftermarket head units that have Android Auto and what ever the iPhone equivalent is to give you you better phone/head-unit integration than you get with just bluetooth or aux ports. I imagine that you will see a brief (but probably small) resurgence in people replacing their car stereos. At least until it's the standard on new cars coming out and people have replaced their cars. Arggh I just bought an Abarth like six months ago and now I see they're getting this some time soon. I wonder if it'll be an easy swap for the newer factory unit.
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Oct 20, 2014 21:14
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Computer viking posted:DAB/DAB+ is doing okish here in Norway. Most of the cities have good coverage now, which means I get almost as many channels as FM with fewer reception issues. We're never going to get DAB+ in the UK. quote:The Government stated that a decision on whether to set a date for digital radio switchover would be considered when the following criteria are met:
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Oct 20, 2014 21:46
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Is Ford Sync failed technology yet? It works fairly well with my Nexus 5 but shits itself when my fiancee tries to connect her iPhone 5. The worst part of it is that the loving gigantic console on my Fiesta doesn't look like it will lend itself well to just replacing it with a better SatNav/touchscreen option. This poo poo is ridiculous 
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Oct 20, 2014 21:53
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Weird, Sync seems to work fine on my Fiesta with my iPhone 5S. Granted, I've only used it for music and not calling anyone.
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Oct 20, 2014 22:03
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GrandMaster posted:Most big businesses would be using email to fax (and vice versa) gateways, so when you send a fax it would likely go email->fax->receiving fax->email. loving ridiculous. Yeah, this is so much better than just sending a loving e-mail.
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Oct 20, 2014 22:06
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The courts give more credence to fax than e-mail (not that either deserves any), so we're stuck.
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Oct 20, 2014 22:15
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spookygonk posted:We're never going to get DAB+ in the UK. DAB+ isn't "getting rid of FM" it's just a better version of DAB. However, a DAB+ radio is different to a DAB radio so everyone would need to switch again. People in the UK would need to change their radio sets and people don't change them anywhere near as often as TVs and so on. The digital switchover was much easier because people were changing televisions from the old clunky things to LCD displays so convincing people to spend another twenty quid on a box to plug in which gives you another 25 channels wasn't a difficult sell at all. People are still using FM radios from the war for goodness sake. Britain had DAB radio long before countries you'd expect to implement it first like Germany and Sweden. France hasn't implemented it at all. Ironically it is actually precisely because Britain was such a pioneer in DAB radio that DAB+ isn't a realistic proposition in the near future. We got DAB first but we'll get DAB+ (which is far, far superior) last. As for the US, they were always notoriously behind European countries when it came to mobile phones. Your average person in Europe was using a smartphone long before your average American (by "long before" I mean "18 months" which in tech terms is practically an ice age), mainly due to Nokia being the market leader, but with Apples rise the initative has switched. This has worked out quite well for the US market because it's meant that 3/4G rollout could be done a lot quicker as there wasn't as much existing infrastructure to get in the way, which is exactly what is likely to happen with DAB+ radio. Car makers might as well start making their radios DAB enabled for their European/Asian markets (China loves DAB+) knowing full well that any day now it'll suddenly be rolled out across the US. Within a year of it's introduction you'll all be using it*. * Having said that American radio culture is pretty unique so you might not. But that's for venture capitalists to worry about!
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Oct 20, 2014 22:21
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Waterslide Industry Lobbyist posted:Is Ford Sync failed technology yet? It works fairly well with my Nexus 5 but shits itself when my fiancee tries to connect her iPhone 5. The worst part of it is that the loving gigantic console on my Fiesta doesn't look like it will lend itself well to just replacing it with a better SatNav/touchscreen option. It works fine for every iPhone I've used with it but it still sucks and is bad old technology.
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Oct 20, 2014 22:29
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