How to hook up a Nomad Jukebox...?

[Unregistered]

Hello everyone,

This seemed to be the best place to post a question about this sort of thing -- I'll tell you up front that I'm not terribly well versed in car audio topics, but I can follow much of what's happening in the forum.

Anyway, for Christmas my wife bought me a Creative Nomad Jukebox 6GB, one of those portable MP3 players. I'd like to find some way to be able to hook it up to my car's stereo system. I've replaced the stock unit in my '90 Honda Accord with an older Pioneer unit that a friend was nice enough to "hand-me-down". I've got a wee little Sony amp in the trunk, powering my two rear MTX 7x9s. The head unit powers the front in-door MTXs. I know, not much, especially by most of your standards!

The difficulty I have here is that the amp does not have any more inputs available to me. The head unit does not have a line-in jack on the front or anything like that. I've got to find an inexpensive way to work the Jukebox into the mix here. Someone had suggested that the same setup that a car audio place might use to add-in a 6 disc changer might work for me -- that there's some component that would provide a line-in access for the Jukebox. The Jukebox has headphone out and two line-outs (for front and rear speakers).

Anyone have any thoughts or ideas?

Thanks,

Mike

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[Unregistered]

wow, my roommate is also trying to find information on this topic!

but anyways, here goes. he drives a 99 grand cherokee with the infinity gold sound system. he didn't really want to switch head units or anything fancy to accomodate his nomad jukebox so he figured out something else. he found the amp that powers his speakers, or more appropriately, the cables that run from the headunit to the amp, and spliced into them. he just ran a cable with a stereo 1/8" jack on one end to the front of the car (where he would have the nomad). the other end of the cable used to have RCA's on it until he cut them off in order to splice into the wiring.

since you already have a head unit, more than likely you can go directly into it. there won't be any inputs on the front, but if you slide the head unit out (refer to a manual before doing this) chances are you have some sort of input for a cd changer, minidisk, or whatnot. if you have one, youre in luck! just hook up a cable that has two RCA jacks on one end and a jack to match your nomad on the other (stereo 1/8").

a more portable option would be a tape adapter... but these are kind of cumbersome and this won't really help you out unless you have a tape player.

if your head unit has no inputs whatsoever, the other option you have is to resort to an RF modulator. this actually takes the signal from your nomad and will convert it to a close range radio frequency that you would tune the radio on your car to and hear the sound that way. these generally offer slightly less sound quality, but are a easy way to hook it up in the event you have no inputs on the head unit. RF modulators come in wide varieties so you have a lot to choose from.

the biggest question he has is if someone has actually had one of these professionally mounted in their car.

hope this helps.

-BT