I'm starting to think I'm going to have to wait until I buy a new car.

Let me back up. I'd like to hear some suggestions from you fine folks for car/phone integration. I know there are still plenty of people here with empegs still in their vehicles, and that's great, but if anyone has shifted towards using their phone more, I'd love to know what you've done.

Personally, I've been using my phone to play podcasts for the past few years. I drive around from place to place all day, often spending an average of 1-3 hours in the car. Podcasts have kept me sane, but using my phone in the car is not pleasant.

I have a 2008 Toyota Highlander Hybrid Limited. It's absolutely a fantastic vehicle, and I'm so thankful for it. It was inherited - a gift from my father - and replaced a 2000 Honda Odyssey with about 110K miles on it.

The one complaint I have about the vehicle is that even by 2008, the in-car technology was sub-par. I have hands-free bluetooth calling, an AUX-in, and that's it. No A2DP. To make it worse, the hands-free apparently has very bad quality for the people I call. About every fourth person I talk to complains about my audio.

Entertainment-wise, I've had my phone connected with the AUX-in jack, and I have to pick my phone up, unlock it, bring up the podcast app if it's not open, and pause/fast forward when I want to. This is less than desirable when driving.

What I'm looking for is a way to get my phone talking to my car with ease, and some way to control it. I've tried some solutions and I can get into that, but what do you folks do in your own cars?

I suffer. I really like our 2008 Audi A3, but it has no AUX in at all and no A2DP. I could go with a third-party (Denison) solution, but that's expensive and seems kludgy.

Ouch. I don't know what I'd do if I didn't have the AUX in. A tape adapter's no good since like most cars I don't have a cassette player anymore, and I can't go back to FM transmitters. I can't stand those things...

http://www.amazon.com/Kensington-LiquidA..._pr_product_top

BT to Aux adapter with remote. This is the *kind* of thing you should look for. This one doesn't seem to be in stock.



You can get an AUX in adapter for recent Audi models - ebay.



$15 to $100 depending on what you want/need for your car/phone combo. Everything gets hidden in-dash so it's all seamless from the outside.

So I slogged through the Dension web site. According to their list of Audi configurations, it seems there's some ambiguity. Do I have a Symphony II stereo or a "Symphony GEN II+"? Probably for former, but it's hard to tell. That gives me five different Dension products to choose from. Ideally, I'd like Bluetooth A2DP, but my car already has Bluetooth for making calls. Do these play nicely together? I have no idea and haven't been able to find anybody posting anything useful on any forums. See, for example this post, where the last entry (from 2010) ambiguously says "Yeah this thing works perfect for A2DP. We are still testing the bluetooth functions because they are very unstable. Contact us if you are interested."

If I'm going to tear apart my dashboard, I really want to do it only once.

EDIT: For the record, the face of the stereo says "Audi Symphony", making it further ambiguous whether I have a Symphony II or Symphony II+.

I custom made an iPhone dock with USB charging, aux-out through the dock, and it even charges my bluetooth headset, all in one plug. I custom-made the mount itself because every other car-mount I've seen is too large and bulky. This one is tiny and unobtrusive.

I made it by taking a portion of the packaging that the iPhone 3G ships in... There is a small plastic tray in the box that holds the phone itself. I cut a portion out of that tray and heated up the sides with a candle and curved them around so that they cradle the sides of the phone. (When I upgraded to an iPhone 4 later, I did a little more work to the cradle to make it fit that phone.)

I attached all of that to a custom-modified Apple iPhone Bluetooth Headset Charger plug. The modifications allow aux-out to work on the plug, which is running to the aux-in on the 'peg. Inside the dash, it connects to a 12-volt aftermarket USB charger. Details of this modification (and some problems I had with it after the IOS 5 upgrade, mostly solved now) are in another thread here on the BBS.

With a little help from my housemate, I made a custom metal bracket that mounts it to an existing screw on the instrument panel cowling.

The result:
The phone sits up perfectly straight, just behind the steering wheel. From my driving position, I can see the entire iPhone screen, and the top edge of the phone is just even with the bottom edge of the windshield. I've been using the TomTom GPS software for navigation, and this arrangement is absolutely ideal. I can also listen to Pandora thanks to my being grandfathered in to AT&T's unlimited data plan.

Still prefer listening to the 'peg, though.

Thanks for the input, Bruno, I appreciate it. I'd seen that model but as you say it's out of stock. My most recent attempt at a solution was this device, which Tom apparently also has. But I'm not very thrilled with it. I could live with it, but the call quality is horrendous, and the person I'm talking to cuts in and out constantly. It's awful. Then there's a single button, so I can only control start/stop playback of music and podcasts, or initiate/hang up a phone call. Lastly I seem to be getting...what did you guys always call it...a ground feedback loop? Basically it buzzes with a little bit of static-y sound, because of the power and audio being connected at the same time to the same device.

So I'm still looking, and it's not going well.


Very nice! I like the job you did! That looks like a great solution, and I could see myself getting very fed up with all of this at some point and doing something custom, but I don't trust my ability to pull it off



I'm not entirely clear what you're asking, but when you connect a bluetooth device to your phone you should be able to specify what duties that device will handle (phone/music).

I have a 2005 Audi A4, I can't remember the manufacturer but I managed to find an aux in solution that plugged into the back of the head unit as a second CD source. Now that I have an iPhone I can connect phone through bluetooth and audio via a 3.5mm jack.

My wife has a 2010 Volvo XC60, the iPod connection takes control of the ipod fine if you leave the device plugged in; it restarts play at the point where it was switched off. If you're unplugging your device (as in an iPhone) then you would have to manually get back to wherever you were in your chosen playlist.

Luckily it also has an aux in but then you're not charging the phone...

I don't believe Audi or BMW do an aux in with their newer models, just an iPod connection, so no idea how I'll listen to my iPhone podcasts when I change to a new A4 or 3 series.

I find it shocking that integration is still so poor. It really shouldn't require additional hardware.

In newer cars can't you just leave your phone in your pocket and handle all audio and user input via BT and the car's controls? The latest iPhone/iPod BTW profiles should now support this.

Okay, here's what I think might be the problem with my car. It's got Bluetooth already, but no A2DP. This works great for making phone calls. The car has steering-wheel controls, built-in microphone, etc.

Now, if I got the Dension contraption with its own Bluetooth, I'd want that for the A2DP only. I'd still want calls to be routed through the Bluetooth that's already built into my car. Can a phone be actively communicating with two separate Bluetooth base stations for different profiles?

The fallback position is to buy the non-Bluetooth variant of the Dension box, and that means a mess of routing the audio cable to wherever I want to use the phone. Do I route it to the glovebox, to the bottom of the center stack, or to the top of the dashboard where I might use the phone as a GPS nav system? Uggh. Bluetooth A2DP would clearly be preferable.

I guess what I'd *really* want would be some sort of official Audi Bluetooth dongle that does the right thing, but I fear that no such thing exists. My car is one of the last made before they redid everything for the new MMI business, so I suspect a newer Audi head unit wouldn't be compatible with my car.

Absolutely. That's what I was attempting to say in my last post. You pair with both devices, then in the bluetooth settings on your phone you'll be able to tell select the device and choose what you want to do with it. If your car had both profiles, you could select one or the other.

Really? Very interesting. I've contacted my local car stereo shop to see if they can source the right Dension box for me. If not, it looks like I can order it from some German web sites for EUR 140 or so. (I'd rather buy it locally, if only that if/when it doesn't pan out, it's easier to return it.)

Footnote: Rereading my car stereo's manual, it appears that it supports MP3 CDs. At least I can burn something for road-trips until I get this Dension thing sorted out.

Yes, although, I guess I should caution that this is how it's worked on my last couple phones. Here's a screenshot of the bluetooth settings from my current phone. This is the settings page for that Belkin device I linked to earlier:

Yeah, my Jawbone can do both phone and A2DP, so I'll try running that simultaneously with being in the car for telephony-only Bluetooth. If that actually works, that's the green-light for the Dension.

I haven't tried it with any recent phones, but way back when I had a Palm Treo 650, it did much to my surprise Bluetooth itself up to both my GPS device (Holux GPSlim 236) and also my car phone (Nokia CK-7W) at the same time. Yes, you could navigate and take a call at the same time. When that happened, the TomTom instructions even came out of the Empeg through Bluetooth mixed with the call audio. Pretty rockin' back then.

That sounds fine, as long as control of what's playing remains with the iPhone, I guess I'll have to wait and see, won't be buying a new car till 2013

Further web surfing has turned up a whole lot of unhappy Audi owners. My favorite of the bunch:

In short: in the modern era, the car is an accessory for your phone, not the other way around.

Why would somebody who is in the market for an Audi even test drive a $22k Ford?

I would guess it was a Mustang.

Some people own more than one car at a time.

My guess is probably not, as that would be the cheapest Mustang you could buy. If you can afford a luxury car you're going to be wanting the GT, which is somewhere north of $30K for your Mustang. Or at least, I'd think you would.

To be fair, I think Ford has done a fantastic job in this arena. I bought my wife a 2010 Escape earlier in the year and was very impressed with the whole Sync system.

By comparision my Infiniti G37 is lacking, though if I'd not played around with the Ford I'd have never noticed. In practice, what the Infiniti has works fine (especially if you're willing to dedicate an iPod to live in the car), but it's suprising how behind the Ford it is.

On a humerous side note- the Infiniti has a dedicated hard drive and you can rip CDs to it, but I've yet to put a CD in the system yet (and probably never will). I probably would've killed for that option 12 years ago . . .

As for the car being an accessory- well, I wouldn't have bought a car I couldn't use with my iPhone, so I guess I'm in that camp. Actually, my initial requirement (from driving my wife's Escape) was bluetooth streaming, but the cars I looked at (IS250, G25/G37, A4) didn't have it, or at least not without a major upgrade. Having had it in the Ford this suprised me, but I conceeded to having a USB connection on the G37.

Ford has done a great job of doing something very few do, looking farther ahead then just the next quarter. They managed to start doing this before hitting bottom, and so far the benefits have been really nice to see. Most of it seems to be from bringing in a lot of the European Ford managers to the headquarters location and allowing them to influence the worldwide operations.

Sync in a Ford is a very nice system. And it's got some future proofing built in. Beyond being firmware up dateable by the end user, it also has hooks in it that can be used by smartphones. Ford realizes people change phones more often then cars, so it makes more sense to expose hooks for current and future phones to tie to, vs just supporting the models out today.

It's a major factor for my next car. My Mustang was too old to be able to retrofit Sync into it, and my CarPC route was a disaster. I just want solid integration, and it's going to have to come from the manufacturer now with the shrinking aftermarket. Even if the built in voice control is bad, I now also have Siri to fall back to, as long as the car has a good microphone setup.

Outside tech features, Ford has also been doing well on the engine efficiency standpoint. They have their assembly line set up to be able to fit any variety of engine (gas, diesel, hybrid, electric) without major changes. They've also been bumping up specs without impacting pricing much. That 22k "cheapest" Mustang is at the same power level as my 08 GT, and it gets better gas mileage. Not bad for a sports car.

Update: my local stereo guy got the manual to the Dension box in question, and it talks about Bluetooth hands-free calling, but says nothing about A2DP music streaming. Most likely, it's not supported at all.

Now I'm checking out the much pricier FISCON Basic ($400 or thereabouts), which appears to replace my factory Bluetooth. This is perhaps more promising, since the Bluetooth gizmo has the additional benefit of having access to the steering-wheel buttons and the display between the gauges. The web page is surprisingly lacking in technical details. I've asked the rep to send me the installation and user manuals. We'll see.

Further edit: Various forum posts have complained that these Bluetooth replacements, while they speak A2DP, will only give monaural audio for the car. Grrr.

For A2DP, couldn't you just install a Logitech Wireless Speaker Adapter for Bluetooth® audio devices and wire it into the in car Aux. Sure, you don't get track skip buttons, track info and all that stuff but with a phone mount it'd probably work pretty alright.

My car has bluetooth support for handsfree calling, but no A2DP. I tried a few other solutions, then hit upon the TuneLink Auto (which comes in iPhone or Android flavors) - http://newpotatotech.com/TUNELINK_AUTO/tunelink_auto.html

It sits in the lighter plug and makes an A2DP connection with the phone, and then outputs the sound (in stereo) out a 3.5mm headphone jack. Additional plusses are the USB port I can use for charging the phone, and the fact that it's also got an FM modulator, so if I'm in a rental car, I can bring it with me and have it work over the crappy FM.

In my car, the aux in is actually in the center console, a couple of inches from a lighter plug, so the thing sits in there unseen and just works its magic. It really is like magic, too. I get in the car and turn it on, and the thing takes just a couple of seconds to reconnect to my phone and tell it to start playing. If I get a call, the phone knows to pause the music and switch over to the handsfree connection directly to the car.

There's an app you can use to configure it, like to set the FM frequency and stuff, but I never use it. The one goofy thing is that they sell a separate Android and iPhone version, but I can't imagine that either version wouldn't work with any old A2DP connection from any device. So, why the 2 packages? Who knows...

Anyway, if you had the lighter plug and aux-in ports in convenient spots, this might be a good solution for any of you in the same boat.

I've got that same Kensington thing on my desk right now, and it's a piece of crap. For starters, horrible ground loop. To be fair, Kensington mailed out a filter which took care of it, but the TuneLink I mentioned up thread has the filtering built in. Still though, the sound quality just wasn't that good, and it would randomly fail to work.

The bigger problem for me is that the Kensington device really wants to do the handsfree and A2DP protocols, and I already have handsfree in the car. The Kensington has no option to not do handsfree, and the iPhone doesn't have any way of saying "yes, I know this paired device supports more than one protocol, but only use A2DP with that device". So, I ended up having it connected to both, and they fought each other. I could have just given up on the handsfree built in to the car, but that would be stupid since the Kensington mic was so terrible, and it's mounted right on the part that sticks into the lighter plug, which in my car is in the center console.

So, I threw it into the corner of my office, and moved on to two or three other similar devices before landing at the TuneLink.

Sounds attractive, except my damn car doesn't have an AUX in. Yes, it has an iPod (not iPhone) input, and it has Bluetooth (but not A2DP), and no aux jack. I could maybe tear out the iPod interface and find a simple AUX jack (which, like the iPod adapter, would pretend to be a CD changer), and *then* have *another* box to convert that aux jack to A2DP.

This seems like a recipe for pain.

Very strange, that device simply never turned up in any searches that I've done. I've been on Amazon several times looking for these types of devices and none of my searches listed that device. Either my search terms are bad (probable), or that New Potato company hasn't listed their product very well on Amazon (possible).

One thing I've always wanted from Amazon is a breadcrumb trail (or whatever you guys might call it). For example, what Newegg does. On that result, if that product doesn't interest me but I want to see others in that category, I can back up to "Bluetooth Cell Phone Accessories." I guess Amazon sells a wider variety of things that would fall into more categories, but I've always wanted to be able to shop this way on their site.

It's like the reverse of a brick and mortar store, where you go in looking for something so you seek out the department, then the aisle, then the shelf, then the item. This way I can start with the item and back out to the shelf.

Anyway, back on topic. Aaron, you mentioned that the Kensington device gave you a bad ground loop. So the Tunelink did not? I would not be using it with FM (I've never had good sound from those devices). Also, is that app necessary? I'm a little wary of a device that works on a standard (bluetooth), but touts itself as only being compatible with one device or another. Why couldn't they have made the same device work with apps on either platform? Because they wanted different colors? What if I don't want it to be a green LED ring? Sorry, I just find that odd.

Anyway, thanks for the recommendation. I might order one of those and return it if it doesn't work for me...

Ahh, now I've got new and exciting ideas. I could install a DIY AUX-IN jack (following this guy's example), and then either plug my phone directly into it or spring for that TuneLink contraption, which has the added bonus of being easy to bring with you to the next car. I like it.

No ground loop with the TuneLink. Their site says they have some sort of extra circuitry that either prevents that or combats that or something. I don't know exactly how they do it, but I have absolutely no ground loop with the TuneLink.



It's odd indeed. I would really like to know if the two devices are the same inside save for the LED. I wouldn't be surprised if they're identical firmware even and just packaged with different manuals and boxes in a misguided attempt to make things easier for people.

I have the iPhone model, and I can take the TuneLink out of the box, pair the iPhone and start playing music through it to my aux in without ever even installing the app. I can't imagine the Android model is different. The app allows you to do a little more, like set the frequency and output level for the FM transmitter or set whether other devices can connect while you're connected. The app enables an intriguing mode that sounds fun for road trips where multiple devices can connect at once and queue up songs, and the device will rotate between them. Sounds cool, although I haven't had the chance to ever see if it will work in practice.

I don't have any non-iOS A2DP devices, so I can't tell you from experience whether Android or other devices can connect to the iPhone version, but their website FAQs say yes.