2012-07-27

Car Audio Sucks

Seriously. Why do car audio systems look like they were made by and for teenage boys? A million useless, crappy features, but none of the ones that would actually be useful. And a design that clearly ignores a decade of Apple's work on making interfaces that are clean and efficient in favor of TOTALLY AWESOME DOOD designs. Features you say? A tuner so I can listen to radio would be ok. I want at least two aux inputs. One on the back (that I can plug my ham radio into) and one on the front (for my buddy's iPod / whatever). I want bluetooth with all the bells and whistles so that my phone can stream audio using A2DP as well as not sucking too much for phone calls. You want to really impress me? Implement the bluetooth protocols for sim offloading and then _be_ an android device. I step into my car and my handset greets the car-mount, and hands over it's responsibilities. I want mixer functionality so I can have more than one channel playing at once. Want to really impress me? Throw in the ability to auto-mute one or more channels when there's sound on another. (phone call => mute the entertainment) I do _NOT_ want a CD player. Stuck in the 90's much? I'm not going to burn a CD. I don't think I even own a functional CD burner anymore. Yeah, maybe a data-cd full of MP3s would be nice, but even that is crap when compared to any of the cloud services. Watch a DVD? This isn't my living room. Sirius radio? Are you kidding me? I can have more variety with better music from any of a dozen cloud based services. Like the rest of the auto industry, these guys feel like they're in a coma. Wake the fuck up, car audio makers.