LineX FM Transmitter

A guy on Ebay saw that I bought this FM transmitter and asked me what I thought of it. I’ve been happy with it. Here’s what I wrote:

I got mine for my iPod as well. I tried two different transmitters that I got at Best Buy and neither one worked very well but they were only $20 whereas this one was $36 including shipping. I thought with 3 batteries and a claimed range of 150′ that maybe the Linex would have more oomph. It is adequate, but not powerful.

The 3 batteries give it a long life (they claim 150 hours but I haven’t used it that much yet). It works well at home but I have to get the antenna in the right position. It has 7 different frequencies it can play on at the high end of the FM dial but only a couple of those work well for me because there are 3 or 4 radio stations at those frequencies. I play it at home through my stereo so that I can control the volume, pause, and skip songs with the iPod close by, essentially using the iPod as a remote control.

I’ve only tried it in the car once. It didn’t seem to work quite as well, maybe because the 3′ wire antenna can’t stretch out. But it worked for the most part.

The sound quality is not CD quality. Apparently FM is capable only of 20Hz-15,000Hz and a CD goes to 20,000Hz. Last night I was noticing a very slight buzzing in the background maybe because of a nearby fluorescent light. Sometimes you get a little static. I use a cassette adapter in the car which sounds good, but my car is so noisy it doesn’t much matter. It certainly sounds just as good as FM radio (because that’s what it is!).

The Linex is small, about the size of the iPod, but not tiny like an iTrip. It has no AC adapter or car power adapter so you will have to run it off of batteries. Also it is a pain to switch frequencies since it is done through 3 dip switches (the first frequency is off-off-on, the second is off-on-off, the third is off-on-on, etc.: binary counting). I wanted something that wasn’t specific to the iPod so it would work with other devices and I may not always have an iPod (plus Apple is already on their second version of the expansion port).

The bottom line is the two I bought at Best Buy were not acceptable and this one is. It’s still not great, but it works. If you can’t use a cassette adapter in your car, this should work.

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He wrote back and asked if the cassette adapter would give better results and I wrote this:

If you can use a cassette adapter, do that. It is cheaper and it sounds almost as good as plugging the iPod directly into the stereo. Definitely better quality than with any FM transmitter and it doesn’t use batteries either. Sony makes a good one for about $20 that is widely available. That’s what I use in the car.

Of course if your stereo has an Aux In on the front or even on the back then that will give you the best results so you should look into that. If you have RCA input on the back (not pre-outs) you can get a cable and run it out of some place in the dash (like the ashtray) or get really fancy and make some kind of jack where you could plug a mini plug in.