First International Digital irock! 300W - Car FM modulator - gray, white - plastic

Amazon Customer Reviews

(3 out of 5)

Y settle 4 it as it is? Fix it!

Based on the reviews, I decided to try it and then return it if/when it didn't work. Of course, it didn't work, even with the one unused FM station slot in our area. But before I took it back I decided to take it apart to see what made it (not) tick. Turns out that the thing might work if they'd just made the pigtail a little longer, one of the wires in the cable is an antenna -but it's way too short. So I just soldered some 24 guage wire to the circuit board pad where the antenna attaches, fed it out the door of my car, wound it around the car antenna and stuck a piece of electical tape around it. Viola! Works perfectly, in stereo with no residual noise or static and I can even overpower active stations. And, since I left the plastic button out when I reassembled it I don't have the inadvertant turn-on problem. For a permanent installation I'll probably just run the antenna wire along the car antenna and cover the whole thing with heat-shrink tubing, or I could put an A-B switch in line with the antenna cable and hide it under the dash. If you are uncomfortable with taking the thing apart, you might try just winding a coil of wire around the pig-tail cable and then to your car antenna. Good Luck!

(2 out of 5)

Useful, but needs work...

For the money, this is a nice, inexpensive way to hook your computer to your stereo, or play your MP3 or other portable music player through the car stereo when you're on the road.

On the other hand, if you're a stickler for sound quality (like me), you'll most-likely be disappointed. The signal is not consistent, fading in and out with various hisses and pops. In addition, the device picks up interference from just about everything, including the device it's plugged into, so you really have to fiddle and adjust positions and frequencies to minimize the static. It's not so bad if you're using it around the house, but extremely annoying if you're on the road where the sound quality and interfering signals may change every couple of miles.

(2 out of 5)

Weak power output

I bought this unit to use with an MP3 player. It has four different frequencies to choose from (88.1/88.3/88.5/88.7 MHz) and uses two AAA batteries. It simply plugs into the headphone mini stereo jack with a very short cable and has a simple power on/off button with LED indicator.
I found that for my car stereo to receive the signal from the Irock! it needs to sit within 2-3 feet of the antenna. This requirement leaves me only one choice for placement and that is on the passenger side dash. Unfortunately the placement means that every time I turn a corner the Irock! and my MP3 player slide across, and often off, my dash. If I had a car with the antenna in the back this would have been useless.
The low power of this unit allows even very distant FM channels to interfere with reception and causes me to retune to one of the other channel selections often. Also I expected longer battery life, while I can get up to 6 hours on a set of batteries I find that the power output drops quickly after the first 2 hours and requires new batteries or the 2-3 foot antenna distance drops further.
While usable I would not recommend it to any one traveling where there is a possibility of moderate to strong FM in the units operating frequency range.

(5 out of 5)

Cool, works great

I've had mine for nearly a year. Use it in the car all the time. My car stereo has a CD player but no cassette deck or auxiliary input. This thing is perfect for use with my MP3 player, cassette player (books on tape), and shortwave radio.

Having 4 available frequencies is good for traveling, when near a local station that's using one of them (they tend to be college stations, with relatively weak signals, so they fade quickly & don't 'bleed' into nearby frequencies). This thing usually overpowers any station, however - has a pretty strong signal, although I sometimes have to move it around a bit to get clear reception (due to the car's frame?). Outside of the car, the signal stays strong for at least 50 feet.

I recommend using rechargeable AAA batteries - they'll perform well as this device drains fairly quickly. And the on/off button is sensitive, so it turns on when not in use unless you store it carefully in the car. I've wasted a few sets of batteries by tossing the thing in the back seat.

(3 out of 5)

There are better models out there...

I gave this product 3 stars because I think it's an average of two things: a very neat idea, but a pretty poor implementation of it.

This product concept is a great idea -- particularly for those of us poor souls who drive around in cars with nothing but an AM/FM stereo. I am in a situation where I fairly regularly have to make a drive that's 1100 miles round trip -- which is just no fun when you're at the mercy of whatever radio stations the city you're nearest to happens to carry. Yes, I could get a better stereo system installed in my car and use the tape adapter to play my mp3-CD player (or splurge for a car mp3-CD player). But these gizmos are comparatively inexpensive, and with some fiddling, the sound quality is decent. (In order to achieve this, I also had to turn the volume of my mp3 player to maximum like other reviewers.)

However, the Irock! adapter is absolutely NOT the best model I have found out there. After a good deal of research, I found the Arkon SF-120 Sound Feeder on cruchfield.com, an online store that specializes in electronics (the price was 25 dollars instead of the 30 dollar Irock, though Crutchfield doesn't have free shipping that I'm aware of). The Arkon model doesn't look as sleek as the Irock does, but it's more functional -- you can manually tune the Arkon to any frequency in the FM band, from 88.9 to 107.9. I found this much more practical when driving through big cities, where the 88-band is often taken up by NPR-type stations. Note, though, that the Arkon has the same low-power limitation; this is due to FAA regulations that basically limit the power of these mini-broadcasters so that the car next to you won't have their favorite radio station overridden by your Metallica mp3s.

Bottom line: if you're a serious audiophile looking for a shortcut to playing high-quality CDs or mp3s in your car, this will not have the sound quality you're probably looking for (it sounds like, er, an FM radio station). If you're cheap/poor and this is all you can afford right now, this concept will work well for you -- but you might want to explore other models than the Irock, which has a very limited frequency range.