Bare-bones stereos for iPods and MP3 players

[It's another MadMariner feature from a few weeks back. —Tim]

I’m old enough to remember the Walkman Revolution. It seemed like all of a sudden you could jog around the neighborhood listening to whatever you wanted, all courtesy a cassette deck and a pair of small headphones. Actually, the current iPod Revolution looks, well, pretty much the same.

Except that the iPod holds several hundred (or is it thousand?) cassettes-worth of music, and it’s a lot smaller, and it runs a lot longer before it needs a recharge. Still, the same problem emerges: What if you want to share your music?

In the old Walkman days, of course, you would eject the cassette and shove it into a car stereo or a cassette deck at home. The media moved from player to player. In that sense, the iPod is a different animal: the media and the player are one and the same.

Yet most car (and boat) stereo units look essentially the same as they did 25 years ago. Oh, the new ones include an auxiliary input for your iPod’s 3.5mm stereo headphone, and they play CDs instead of cassettes. But they require the same amount of space for the head unit, which has to be mounted where you can reach it, since that’s where the controls are located. It is as if the designers, or perhaps consumers, haven’t really figured out that you don’t need a head unit at all.

DITCH THE PLAYER

You don’t need your installed stereo to be a “player” anymore. The iPod is the player, remember? Playback controls, including volume, are all onboard. All you really need installed in your boat (or car) is a set of speakers and a behind-the-scenes amp capable of taking low-power “line level” output from your iPod and amplifying it to the point where it can drive a pair of speakers.

On some boats, particularly those with limited room and battery power, such as PWCs, tenders and voyaging sailboats of all sizes, a strong argument can be made for minimizing the size and maximizing the electrical efficiency of any stereo installation.

So perhaps it’s no surprise that some of the major marine stereo manufacturers, along with at least one “cottage industry” producer, have brought simple, bare-bones amplifier units to market. Let’s look at a few of the offerings:

AMPS ONLY

First, let’s look at the Left Coast Simple Stereo. Personally, I like the company’s story. Left Coast is not some huge electronics manufacturing conglomerate. Instead, it is, literally, a mom and pop operation located in Anacortes, Wash., where owner Jim Lee had wanted to try his hand at boatbuilding.

“Suddenly, one morning, out of the blue, everything came together with a resounding ‘clunk’. So, what ho! Left Coast was created to be the corporate holder for the boat-building project,” says Lee.

The Left Coast Simple Stereo is a spinoff of the boat project. While reviewing sailboat plans with his children, Lee asked them: “What would you like in your sailboat?”

The kids said they wanted to play their iPods and be able to recharge them.

That’s what you get with the Left Coast Simple Stereo. The idea is that you install the plug-in plate—which includes the 3.5-mm headphone-style audio jack and a USB plug for charging, and mount the Simple Stereo module behind the scenes. Connect it to12V power and the speakers of your choice, and you’re done. It retails for $186 plus shipping from www.leftcoast.biz.

There is no power switch, since it automatically shuts itself down when no audio signal is present, drawing only a tiny trickle of power in standby mode. It has no volume control, since iPods and other portable media players already have them. Its “user interface” is practically nonexistent, but Lee considers that to be one of the unit’s best features.

“Most people seem to feel that the more features they get per dollar, the better,” says Lee. “I’m totally the opposite. I just want my iPod to come out on the speakers. Nothing to learn, easy to install. And, I don’t want to worry about its battery.”

Poly-Planar has approached the problem of simple, no-frills iPod amplification directly. Their MP3-Kit-A includes the amplifier, speakers, headphone-style input jack, and a volume control. Heck, it’s got everything but the iPod. Well, almost everything; it doesn’t have a USB charging jack. It retails for about $180.

Another option is the Full Wave Audio‘s Waterproof Stereo Amplifier, designed specifically for applications where battery capacity is limited. This durable amplifier allows users to easily enjoy music for long periods of time while on their boats, PWCs, kayaks, canoes or ATVs. This is seriously waterproof, with an “ingress protection” rating of IP-68. The unit’s controls, which can be mounted in a convenient location, are also waterproof, and Full Wave offers a line of waterproof speakers. This is the most expensive model in this survey, at about $300, but for installations where water exposure is expected and unavoidable, the expense could be worthwhile.

Finally, you could consider Fusion‘s MS-AM702 Marine Zone Amplifier. This unit is designed to support Fusion’s multi-zone technology, allowing you to add audio in other areas of larger boats. Fusion hasn’t really targeted the minimalist market, but the fact is that the Zone Amplifier is small and relatively simple, making it a viable option for simple iPod amplification.

It would require a bit more effort, since you would need to provide speakers and wire a 3.5mm stereo headphone jack to the unit’s audio input. It doesn’t offer any facility for charging an iPod, since it wasn’t really intended to be used this way.

It has a few controls on the amplifier unit, intended to help calibrate the unit with the main stereo head unit in a multi-zone installation. As with all the units featured in this article, it draws very little power in standby mode, so it could be left connected to 12V power all the time without having any noticeable effect on your vessel’s batteries.

WHAT? NO RADIO?

Perhaps you’re happy to leave all your CDs at home, using your iPod or other portable media player to bring your own music aboard. But what about the radio?

With the advent of portable satellite radio receivers, you may not even notice the lack of AM/FM radio reception. It really depends on your usage, of course, but on my boat, we hardly ever listen to AM or FM radio, opting instead for our own playlists created at the computer.

So instead of trying to find a spot for a conventional marine stereo head unit receiver, maybe it’s time to consider a simpler solution.