Vintage Electronics

Duh, It’s A Vehicle Stereo!

Pretty self-explanatory isn’t it? It’s a stereo system in a car, you say. Whoa, hold your horses, it’s not that uncomplicated. Even though some persons like to put house stereos in their cars and vans (out of dire will need for some sounds), occasionally it just doesn’t work. Yeah, maybe prior to it could’ve worked just fine, all you needed was radio along with a cassette player (or 8 tracks, for the inner dinosaur in you) so sure, lug those huge box speakers into the back seat and you’ll be blaring down the highway. But nowadays you’ll find things like cd players and mp3 players and your popup LCD panels and all that techie knickknack you’d think they’d like to create a house theater system appropriate smack on the console of your van. Should you don’t know anything about these things but would like to have some sounds in your car anyway, here are some things to know about a car stereo.

As mentioned above, at initial units and speakers from home audio systems and professional markets were just merely installed into vehicles. Nonetheless, they were not well suited to the extremes of temperature and vibration which are a regular part of the environment of an automobile. Car stereo enthusiasts were not satisfied with the sound high quality of typical vehicle sound systems, and with the advent of the CD player, they genuinely had to begin modifying some of these property stereos to be able to work well in a vehicle environment and voila!, now we have the modern automobile stereo.   

When you have a new vehicle, first hand bought, say from about 90 to present, chances are you already have a “factory” automobile stereo inside your car. It means the car manufacturer already included a vehicle stereo system in your car, unless specified inside the automobile model but most generally this is the case. Some automobile manufacturers make their own vehicle stereos, like BMW which includes a pretty decent vehicle stereo package head unit and speakers. It is a standard which comes with all their cars (which isn’t surprising considering that BMW is included inside the league of “luxury vehicle manufacturers”). Or like Mercedes Benz or Volkswagen, they use car stereo systems from a German audio manufacturer referred to as Blaupunkt.

A standard automobile stereo (also called a head unit) usually consists of an auto-reverse tape deck, a cd player and sometimes the optional changer – a device which automatically changes the cd in play. On newer car models, the vehicle stereo may also play mp3s and other digital audo file types like WMA and AAC, whether on a cd or a memory device which can be hooked up to the head unit.

The car stereo head unit is connected to many speakers. Older automobile models commonly just had one speaker mounted underneath the dashboard, pointing by way of perforations towards the front windshield. The standard for car stereo nowadays is a pair of “tweeters” (utilized to bring out high treble) on the driver side/front passenger side dashboard, a pair of regular “mid” speakers on both doors, occasionally even the backseat passeger doors if it’s a significant vehicle and larger speakers capable of bringing out low ends at the back protion of the backseats.

Your car stereo is probably ok as it is, as automobile manufacturers make sure that the audio products that come with their cars can handle most dirver’s listening demands. But in case you feel that what you’ve isn’t enough, you may constantly CUSTOMIZE.

How do I get a replacement part for Yamaha Cassette Deck?

I have an old Natural Sound Stereo Cassette Deck KX-R730 (about 20 years old, but excellent condition). The problem is that the belt that turns the drive wheel that controls the cassette door has lost its elasticity and is no longer tight enough. Where can I find a replacement belt/band?

You’ll probably need to have some idea of the rough measurements.

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