ipod

I bought this item because it is well designed and makes use of the iPod in a car very simple and elegant. When I first used it, however, I was very disappointed. I searched all over the bandwidth for a relatively open station, which was hard to begin with. Mind you, Raleigh isn't the biggest city in the country by any stretch of the imagination, so imagine using this in a denser city.

Once I tuned the iTrip to the appropriate station, which was easy to do, the sound from the iPod came through relatively clear, but not near CD-quality at all - there was always some underlying hiss. Once I started driving, any hint of an overriding station would cause interference. Also, if I moved the iPod around at all, the radio would lose reception of it quite remarkably.

In short, I found it much more useful to wire the iPod directly to the head unit - the sound is much clearer and there's nothing to worry about with losing reception as you drive around. This can be done several ways:

1 - Buy a head unit with a pre-amp (aux) input, in the the front or the rear of the head unit. These are becoming incresingly more common and inexpensive, and allow for great sound and ease of use. I use one now, and it's fantastic.

2 - If your head unit has a CD Changer control and you don't use a CD changer, get an adapter (from Blitzsafe or other manufacturer) that allows you to plug any aux audio source into your CD changer port on your head unit. These are cheaper than buying a whole new head unit, but may require a little more effort to install. With some adjustments (mostly volume adjustments on the iPod and head unit), the sound quality will be perfect.

3 - Install an RF modulator that connects in-line with the antenna to the existing head unit. This provides a hard-wired solution for playing your iPod through the radio, and has excellent sound. These are also cheaper than buying a whole new head unit and also require a little more effort to install, and may carry a slight degradation of sound quality. This degradation is trivial though, and the sound will be much better than anything like the iTrip.

4 - If you have a cassette player, just use one of those cassette adapters with a plug on the end. Not the prettiest solution, but they work fine, are easy to use, and are very inexpensive.

Conclusion - don't waste your time on the iTrip or any products like it, unless sound quality is not your priority, and/or you live in a very sparsely populated area.

Well I had a Bad iTrip. The thing was a knobathon to get going in the car while driving (and that was with my CoPilot) and when i 'luckily' found a station almost by accident, it sounded terrible. Like an MP3 thru an FM channel or an FM station thru a tin can.

it has been returned - up for auction it goes.
(++ on the plus side the design and concept were way too cool - it hooked me. It might take 2-5 years to perfect the technology maybe then i'll try again...but for now it definitely sucks.)

I will first say that the ability to choose which station you want to us brilliantly better than the numerous iPod transmitters that only let you choose between 4 pre-set frequencies.

I will also add that the iTrip is powered through its connection to the iPod iteself and consumes very little of your iPod's power supply, which is also an excellent feature.

The only problem is that the stations on which you can broadcast are stored ON your iPod as mp3 files. That means that they appear in your library, and worse, if you are like me and usually like to just listen to your entire library on "shuffle", what happens is that you will "shuffle" to one of the stations, effectively *changing* the station on which you are broadcasting.

This is a supreme pain in the buttocks, because invariably you will find yourself broadcasting on a frequency that is competing with a high-powered radio station in your area, and, worse, you have to suddenly change your car stereo's receiver to match it. You will never realize this is happening until after you are blasting static, though.

In the end this fatal flaw makes this device worthless if you like to shuffle.