Harman Kardon Drive + Play 1

I often thought about getting an ipod to keep me company on those lonely walks, long drives, and early morning showers, but the price tag and the thought of an FM transmitter in the car just would not beat CD’s and my phone (N95) with a 4gb memory card…

Most of my music listening happens in the car nowadays (which is a shame, because I have a lovely home theatre system at home [duhh] that I’d like to spend more time with). I used to cart around multiple CD’s, as well as a couple of CD carriers in the car. All in all I think I had about 50-80 CD’s in the car at any one time.

Neat huh?

I tried a small carrier for convenience, and a huge carrier for multiple choice, but neither worked well for me. I ended up never changing the CD’s inside the small case, and getting bored of flicking through the CD’s in the big case.

So I stumbled on the Harman Kardon Drive + Play at www.hotdealsuk.com for a grand old price tag of £30…I was interested. The ability to have all my music (which at the time of writing, was about 86GB) with me all the time, and get full stereo kick ass sound?

I investigated.

It appeared that the company had recently released a new version (version 2, obviously) of their Drive and Play unit, which included a colour screen, and the ability to display album art. These things did not interest me that much, and the £200 price tag certainly didn’t entice me. The old version looked good, it had a black and white backlit screen, and a simple control dial (the bottom thing is the ‘brain’ which can be hidden anywhere in the car).

Drive and Play 1

My biggest concern with this thing was the fitting of it. I rang around a few garages and they all quoted between £90 and £130 for fitting it. This was a scary prospect, what started out as a neat little £30 investment, was turning into a £120 pain in the ass.  I decided to order the Drive and Play unit and see how it worked before I splashed out to get it fitted (after all, it could be used wireless, and powered with a cigarette lighter)

So some time passed, and the finally my unit arrived… I was excited… I had no ipod, but luckily for me, my girlfriend did. I unpacked it all, and hooked everything up…I spent a lot of time looking at this diagram, figuring out how and what to do with the multitude of wires, knobs and dials I had opened (it looked so simple in the image above).

Installation diagram

Once I had it all hooked up, I turned it on plugged it in and away we went… it sounded ok, no better than an itrip though, so I started looking for other ways to connect my Drive+Play.

It turns out the UK model of the Drive and Play comes with a built in wireless FM modulator, which means that it basically works the same way as the itrips available on the market. This was not an ideal solution for me, because I knew the quality of those little beasts was not that great, especially in built up areas. So the US model comes with a wired FM modulator, which does the same job, but connects directly to your car stereo via the aerial input (it sits between the aerial lead and the stereo). I contacted Harmon Kardon, and they told me where I could get this from, so I ordered it for £10 inc postage.

FM modulator

The other option I had was to hard wire the ‘brain’ of the Drive and Play into the stereo via a 3.5mm -> RCA jack lead. This is great if your car has an AUX input (3.5mm -> 3.5mm jack lead) or standard RCA inputs (the red and white stereo input). Sadly my car had neither of these, and the unit would cost about £40 to buy (For my 2005 Ford Focus I needed the CTVFOX001 unit) so this is why I opted to try the wired FM modulator.

After some significant faffing around, my FM modulator lead arrived, I unpacked it, and ran to the car to fit it, only to find that Fords and Renaults seem to have a different aerial lead to the harmon kardon version. Dammit. Anyway, a quick bit of scouting around on ebay, and I found the 2 adapters I needed to have a fully working model. Awesome.

I used the FM modulator for a few weeks, and decided in the end that the unit really did not add much over the wireless modulator, which was a bit gutting considering I had spent a tenner on something that didn’t really seem to do anything.

I bucked up, and decided to go crazy and buy the Aux input adapter from connects2.com who were a very helpful company, and had excellent e-mail support. The adapter basically takes place of the CD changer input on my stereo, and yo ucan select the input by just pressing the CD button to flick between the actual CD in the stereo, and the AUX input.

Ford AUX input

As soon as my adapter arrived, I plugged it in, and straight away I had an amazing sound from my ipod. I think my first choice of music was Biffy clyro’s ‘living is a problem because everything dies’ which sounded excellent.

Next I had a bash at fitting it in my car – and not being very good with cars, I was nervous. At first I mounted the screen on top of my dash, which looked great, but did also shout ‘steal me’, being so visable. So I had a play around with several different positions, and finally realised that with some help from some sticky back velcro, I could mount the screen in my car, and be able to hide it on the ledge under my steering wheel when it wasn’t in use. Check the gallery to see some more pics of the unit mounted in my car (Ford Focus)

Drive + Play mounted in car

Installation diagram

Drive + Play mounted in car

Drive + Play mounted in car

The next step was to hide the wires – which wasn’t actually as bad as it sounded. I ran a wire from the cigarette lighter in the back along the floor and just under the footwell, I hid my ‘brain’ – which was accessable by just lifting the plastic on the right of the footwell and sliding the device inside the gap (which fitted perfectly). This enabled me to run all the wires behind that magic bit of plasitc, and into the glovebox neatly – so that I had my ipod connector and the 3.5mm jack (more on that later) ready for use.

I got round to buying an ipod (I went for the ipod classic 160gb model, so that all my songs fit on it, I hate the thought of having to choose which music I want to listen to), and it works great with the Drive+Play. The only problems I have, are that the Drive+Play was out before ipods started having a podcast or audiobook section to them, which means that you cannot select either of these functions through the drive+play menu. There is however a workaround – because the unit has a 3.5mm headphone input (aux in) on it, this means that you can also hook up your ipod to it with the 3.5mm cable, and just press play on the ipod to listen through your stereo – ok so it’s not ideal, but hey, it’s something.

Update: I missed something really obvious here… you can just create a playlist in itunes (or any itunes replacement) full of your podcasts and/or audiobooks, and control them from your Drive + Play

Verdict: awesome gadget that I can’t wait to see more development on. It lacks some features like podcasts and audiobooks, but I am luckily not a big listener to either of those things. The other thing to note is that my 160gb ipod sometimes takes a little while to spit up all the artists/songs – but once they are loaded, it flys through them at a rate which you can actually set in the menu (a bit like how many lines your mouse wheel scrolls). The other bonus is that anyone driving near you can tune in on the wireless if you choose to keep on transmitting those signals (you can turn it off through the settings)

Check todays prices for the Drive and play here: Drive and Play prices

I also found a seller on ebay offering some pretty good prices on spares for the drive and play, should you ever break or lose something you need: visit them on ebay