In My Humble Opinion

Mike makes a DIN about vehicle audio systems.

Mike has a song in his heart.

‘You haven’t lived until you’ve sat in a traffic jam or at a red light spooling back spewed and chewed-up cassette tape with a biro’

 One of my other regular motoring activities involves road-testing cars for my website and a sister magazine of this publication. It’s great to whizz about in shiny new cars, but there is one thing that makes my heart sink upon entering one for the first time: pairing my bloody mobile to the audio system. On some cars it’s a simple affair and others it’s a total nightmare. I once spent nearly half-an-hour in a Honda trying to get my phone to work hands-free.

Owing to job-role changes and the need for practicality, I sold my Saab 9-3 convertible and bought a pretty and low-mileage top-of-the-range 2004 Volvo V40 estate. It’s slow as hell compared to the turbocharged Swede, but I adore the extra 10+ miles I get from every gallon of unleaded. It’s fullyloaded right down to the leather chairs and reverse parking sensors, and it has more paperwork than a High Court murder trial. The best bit of all is the audio system in all its double DIN glory.

Does it have DAB? No. Does it have Bluetooth? Non, mes amis. Does it play MP3 files? Nyet, comrade. What it does have are my three favourite mediums of musical reproduction: an RDS FM radio, a single-slot CD player and, wait for it, a tape deck with Dolby noise reduction. Simple old-school formats that continue to work all these years later. I still have racks of compact discs and boxes of albums on cassette. Only last week I fell upon an unopened pack of blank TDK90 tapes – I told my partner they would come in useful… er, about 10 years ago.

Somewhere in a drawer I have one of those Lieutenant Uhura-style Bluetooth earpieces should I need to use the phone while driving, but for audio simplicity I’m in heaven. I admit that being able to scroll through Spotify from your phone to the head unit in the car is great, but it lacks soul and realism. It’s a bit like home music centres: I still have a ginormous JVC tower system as tall as a small child, with a turntable resting on top. (In the loft you’ll find another Sony hi-fi resplendent with mini-disc player.) It makes music – and Frampton for that matter – come alive. Slip on a vinyl copy of The Dark Side of the Moon through some quality earphones and you’re as good as standing next to Dave Gilmour in Abbey Road studios circa 1973.

I’m so looking forward to having to make sure there is a Bic biro in the door pocket or glovebox to wind the slack out of a cassette. You simply haven’t lived unless you have sat in a traffic jam or at a red light spooling back spewed and chewed-up cassette tape with a biro. In-car entertainment has never been so entertaining since the days when you would stand at the bar, drink in one hand, removable head unit in the other. It seems a lifetime ago when I would wander into Halfords to gaze and drool over the various makes of stereo systems, eventually picking out a Pioneer system with CD autochanger.

Beat box

Hacksawing into the parcel shelf of my Tasman Blue Sierra GLX and fitting some 6x4-inch speakers along with some A-post-mounted tweeters was one of my finest DIY moments. What a bloody racket it made, but then I was some 20+ years younger. That audio system moved from one car to another as I chopped and changed motors as quickly as underpants. Removable faceplates and keycodes have now changed to infotainment systems that are linked directly into the car’s ECU. No longer do you half bleed to death trying to fit one of those damn tin plate sleeves into the dash.

Some say it’s progress, but I see it as just another motoring ritual that’s been banished into history. If I had my own way, part of the driving test for blokes would be to fit a Sparkomatic graphic equaliser into a Ford Cortina MKV without cocking up the wiring and blowing the 5A in-line fuse. But that’s cars in general, isn’t it? The simple tasks we once loved are no longer required or even humanly achievable. A good acquaintance of mine has only recently spent almost £200 having a headlamp bulb changed. Halogen has been outshone by LED, FM abandoned for DAB, and even petrol and diesel for hybrid or electric propulsion.

So that’s why I admire my Volvo. It has three pedals and a stick thingy beside my left hand to make it go faster. It has plugs and bulbs you can physically get to, even a handbrake lever that clicks as you pull it on. You might laugh, but both aforementioned items are becoming a thing of the past. So long as old duffers like you and I still exist, we can fettle and preserve our soon-to-become-extinct four-wheeled dinosaurs without booking an hour’s workshop time just to change a sodding dip-beam bulb.

Before I disappear into my box for another month, akin to the closing scene of Camberwick Green, I’ll leave you with this: a friend who worked as a local radio sound engineer for the BBC was telling me a while back that the house wine in the now defunct Television Centre Restaurant was called Sans Fil. That’s French for ‘wireless’.