Home > Consumer Reviews > Kiiro Wireless Car Stereo Adapter

This adaptor plugs in your headphone socket and transmits the output to an FM radio, in your car, at home, anywhere. The range is about 2 metres and the adaptor transmits on 88Mhz. Alas this frequency gets swamped by Radio 2 in the UK so you need to get the adaptor close to your aerial in the car. There's some hiss, too, but the gadget works well around the house on domestic rados. It's passable on a decent hifi - if you can get the adaptor close to your antenna. . Strap one to your MP3 player with Velcro, and you've got a handy gadget.. Great fun, limited use if your car radio gets swamped with R2, but otherwise neato.

I bought this as I was fed up with the humming sound that the cassette adaptor made with my RioVolt Mp3 player in the car. I thought this would be able to transmit a good signal from the player to the car radio and allow me to get a louder output than what I previously managed.

On first connecting it, I was pleasantly surprised as I had been quite sceptical about how well it would work. I plugged it in and switched on the player. Tuning to 88.6 which is outside the 88.0 - 88.5 range which it specifies on the packaging, I managed to get my music coming out.

This was fine, but then I was just sitting in the driveway, not moving. I drove a 30 mile journey later in the night and had to fiddle with the tuner every 5 minutes as it needed changing. Also, since I wasn't sitting in the driveway anymore, I was able to turn up the sound a bit, which showed another weakness, it's ability to deal with loud bass. Any loud drums wouldn't come out properly at all, despite me lowering the source volume on the player.

Overall, it does work, but takes a small amount of time to set it up before driving. It is cheap as well which means that it is not as regrettable a purchase as buying a £300 Mp3 player to realise it sounds bad.

Get this if you don't mind the fuss. It's under £20 so who cares if it isn't what you expected?

A suitable but not perfect solution to those that can't use a cassette adaptor.

If you have a car radio with only a CD slot instead of a cassette and no Aux in socket, you need to use some form of FM transmitter to input a mini disk or mp3 player.

There are two alternatives a wireless adaptor such as the Kiiro here or an 'in line' fm transmitter.

The wireless adaptor is the easiest to use as it does not involve fidling with the car wiring.

The Kiiro is easy to use and has long battery life, but suffers from the following problems:
1) Only a limited range of transmission frequencies which clashes with BBC R2
2) The tuning control is very sensitive and can drift, you will have to re tune on some long journeys to counteract strong BBC R2 transmitters.

A tip to improve reception is to attach an extension lead between the Kiiro and your sound device. The Kiiro seems to use its lead as an antenna so lengthening this makes a difference - well it did for me.

I can recommend a few other uses for the gadget, in addition to its obvious role in playing MP3s in the car. I have radios all over the house, and use this to play tapes or minidiscs from a walkman, without having to bother with headphones or portable speakers. I've even managed to broadcast the sound from Sky digibox through my hifi system- though that was using a rather convoluted set up!

I've found it very easy to tune on all radios. Output is sometimes a bit hissy, but the convenience far outweighs this slight disadvantage. It's also much smaller than I expected, which makes it easy to carry around - size is 70mm x 55mm x 15-20mm.

I bought this item to play CD's in my car, which only has a radio. The car aerial must be lowered in order to block any external radio stations at the same transmitted frequency as the Stereo Adapter. But apart from that, the adapter works fine. The instructions do say that the unit is temperature dependent, and they're not wrong!