Greetings class. First time caller here, and I'd like to start by giving a little love, 'cause that's the kinda guy I am.

After a lengthy loss of sanity where I woke up one day and found myself stuck with a Slaab 9-5, I finally pushed it off a cliff and got back to my Lexus roots by taking delivery of an '05 RX 330 last week.

Out of principle, I almost walked out of the dealership on account of Lexus' cluelessness to the popularity of portable music devices. ATTENTION LEXUS ENGINEERS: GET OUT INTO THE REAL WORLD! IF YOU DON'T PUT AN AUXILIARY AUDIO INPUT IN ALL OF YOUR '06 MODELS, I'M GOING TO PERSONALLY FIND YOU ALL -- ONE BY ONE, AND BEAT YOU SENSELESSLY WITH MY IPOD'S POWER SUPPLY.

But I digress. Nonetheless, the rest of us still have to live with their gross and profound negligence (bitter? who's bitter?). After scouring the web for an acceptable solution (I don't find the Ipod's wireless FM transmission device or a cassette adapter to be "acceptable"), I obsessed until I got a hold of Audiovox's "Mobile Video -- FM Modulator with Isolation Transformer" (model FMM100A) thingamajob.

It's a $50 kit that I got at Circuit City. Best Buy installs it for $50. So what do I have now? An 1/8" mini jack with ~2 ft. of slack that I keep coiled up in the little tray area down at the bottom of the center console. When I want to use my mp3 player, I plug the cord into the headphone jack of my ipod, flip the switch that they installed into one of those boarded up holes in the dash that was obviously there for a feature my car doesn't have (there's gotta be a sniglet for that), and I dial up 88.9 FM (or something like that). Voila, clean sound for my mp3 player.

It's not the same as using the Ipod's (et al) wireless device that is set to a radio frequency. This thing is hard-wired and merely uses the channel to activate it. I'm sure there are people who can better explain HOW it works. I'm just here to tell you that it DOES work. For roughly a c-note you can get any audio device to run clean sound through Lexus' sound system. Hell, run a karaoke machine through it. Lexus can't stop us now! Muuuuaaaahhhhhhahahahaha!

One last thing, you'll also need to buy a "two RCA female to one 1/8" mini male adapter, since the kit is made for RCA connections.

Hope this helps.

John in Chicago

 

Hi John. Welcome to CL. Your first mistake was to leave Lexus. Your second mistake was to not come here first. I think this is a better solution although a little more costly.

http://www.vaistech.com/aic100.html



I'm just playing with you. This product is just starting to appear so you would not have been able to get it earlier anyway.

Here is a review from a very trusted member of CL:

https://www.clublexus.com/forums/sho...hreadid=139939

 

Thanks for the heads up. Dunno how I missed that posting. While that looks like it might be a superior product, I think I did the right thing for my needs. I've only got one, discreet black cord with an 1/8" jack on the end sticking out of the bottom of my center console. I really don't want / need a device (that appears in the diagram to look like an amplifier) mounted anywhere in the car, let alone the visibility of the entire RCA to mini Y adapter cable that apparently would be needed. I also only got hit for a little over $100. The integration feature with the stereo system appears very nice on that product though!

 

Glad you like your current setup. That is the important thing. Some people, however, just don't like going through the FM modulators so this would be perfect.

 

The Audiovox FMM100A is a FM Modulator like the others. It does add a nice feature where the antenna is automatically disconnected when it is in use. But this is less important if you are on a clean frequency. I still think the cassette adapter has it beat for sound quality but has other problems of its own. The VAIS tech solution adds a true high quality audio input to your system.