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A technological contrarian's car mp3 player mount

I dispise the ipod. The Rio Karma is nearly my dream mp3 player. It does gapless playback, can play mp3's, ogg's, and flac files, the dock has rca line out jacks, and most importantly for me, it has a simple and powerful playlist editor and creator on the device.

As depressed as I am that Rio made countless stupid business decisions, including the final one of leaving the portable mp3 player market, I still love my Rio Karma. Primarily using it my car, I have long desired a car mount for it. And since only the ipod has a freakish number of accessories I needed to make my own.

The original Rio cradle is mounted on top of a bendable stalk (from a cheap desk light from Target). Audio and power connections are made by soldered connections to the circuit board in the cradle. Those cables (seen cable tied to the stalk) run to the project box that can be seen below the parking brake. Inside that is a dc to dc converter and a set of rca jacks which are line level audio output.

The cradle/stalk are mounted to the car by a small custom metal bracket that is screwed into the metal frame of the center console.

At the moment the line level audio output from the project box is run into a tape adapter. One day I will get around to ordering a Blitzsafe VW/AUX DMX V.3A, which will allow me to use the line-in input originally designed for the VW cd changer.

Page Created September 2005