So there's absolutely no way to play a CD in a new car without a phone?

Here's some free advice for you: Do not under any circumstances attempt to explain to a member of the Steve Hoffman forums that CDs are a thing of the past. They'll respond by saying they own a lot and continue to buy more and this is 100% proof you're wrong on the macro level.

 

No, the problem is the cars stereo can't play CDs. At least, the OP thinks this a problem and we're in the minority, yes, but that is our position.

 

I’m not arguing that OP shouldn’t prepare to move on from the use of CDs in the car. In fact I suggested an iPod or iPad as an alternative to an iPhone (which is possibly a monthly bill OP may not find necessary). I just don’t understand your “everybody has to have a smartphone because everybody has one now” argument. Some people don’t, and it’s fine. Personally, it is mystifying to me, but it’s fine.

 

Well, to be honest, a boom box would take care of things and not cause any issues with the rental car.
Besides, you could don a long coat and hold the boom box above your head while picking up the passengers...If you have any passengers that is.

 

It just feels like barking at the moon at this point. Tech moves on. CD players in cars is a superfluous concept rendered so by the advancing of technology. This is a fact of life. I’m sure people were just as furious when they took cassettes out of cars as well but they did it. They are not coming back. Eventually, CD players will leave cars completely and they won’t be back either. It’s just the way of time and technology. There’s no use in fighting it nor is it a surprise.

Ed

 

If most did not have a smart phone, CD players would be a standard in new cars. They aren’t. I already said I’m not bothered if you don’t. I’m equally mystified by people’s refusal march forward with technology.

Ed

 

Oh I know. I really should stop trying. Eventually I’ll tire of this and move on.

Ed

 

And here I thought this was an audiophile forum.

 

Again, what is it that replaced the capability of playing back CDs in the car conveniently? Playing back flash drives has lots of restrictions or requires much more effort than picking a CD from the shelf. And streaming assumes that you have basically unlimited mobile data volume.

 

Save for the last 2 years, I've rented a lot in the past 10 years and always had a CD player. I guess things have changed in the last 2 years or so. And, I'll bet it also depends on make and model of the rental. I'm sure there are still rentals with CD players. I bought 2 new vehicles in 2017 (Tundra for me and Accord for the wife) and both have CD players.

 

Again, smartphones did. Most of us already use them for other things. We also use headphones/earphones/whatever to listen on the go. We can just as easily connect to the car via Bluetooth and listen there.

If it’s already on the phone, it costs nothing to stream off of it.

Ed

 

Exactly - you’ve won the argument!!!

…But car manufacturers got rid of CD players anyway.

 

He has???

Ed

 

Most likely a new car would be fitted with USB ports (which was confirmed in this case), possibly an aux-in port and/or Bluetooth. So I'll hit these one at a time.

USB is a bit of a PITA, from my experience. The format options are usually limited and navigating through a thumb drive, while driving, can be cumbersome depending on the UI setup on the car. One advantage is that you don't need to self-power a thumb drive, that comes right from the USB port itself.

Aux-in, if available, can be very useful as you could connect any portable device that has a headphone jack. A portable CD player, an old phone, a DAP, a Walkman. And add a car adapter if you need power for longer drives.

Bluetooth is also extremely useful, even with older tech. An old iPod Touch or an old smartphone that someone's given up on can likely be used to connect that way.

 

Really what’s happened (and what you are saying) is that car manfacturers have increasingly accepted the tradeoff of cost savings by not including CD in their designs in exchange for leaving some people behind. Their market research must show that very few people use, or demand to be able to use, an in-dash CD player in a car, and it’s begun reaching a tipping point where, if a few people are going to not buy a car because there isn’t a CD player, they still come out ahead by not taking on whatever cost goes into implementing a CD player in their new car entertainment console designs (which you would think are very small costs at this point, but these companies haven’t stayed in business this many decades without developing some actuarial expertise).

The smartphone/iPod/iPad as transport instead of CD in a car certainly can provide the functionality of having more music titles available than you could possibly keep in the car in CD format. I agree it’s progress. I also understand how it’s presumptuous to assume everybody is equipped and eager to move their habits along with it.

 

You’d be surprised at the discounts on two year old luxury cars coming off lease with low miles (25K or below) and how the price compares to a new Camry or Accord. If you hold your cars for 5-8 years and don’t put on a lot of miles, the difference, including extended warranty isn’t that much and might be worth looking at to see if it makes sense for you.

 

For the streaming option, you can just download songs or albums offline, before a trip.

In some ways that's no different than taking a CD case with you, in that you have to plan what you're taking before you leave the house.

 

The problem is (or can be) storage space. My phone is pretty much always near capacity without any music on it. You can offload apps and cloud stuff off, but that’s adding some annoyance to the workflow that may or may not be more inconvenient than the CD case.

Honestly, I haven’t found that streaming music really uses that much data, anyway. Much easier just to not prepare at all and use the phone to stream on the go as it’s capable of doing.

 

That's a fair point. If I was regularly using a phone in this way I'd probably mentally factor in something like 2 GB as "Tidal offline storage" just to keep myself above water.

I do find the old smartphone option to become increasingly useful though. As long as there's a way for me to keep it fairly updated (as my playlists change frequently) I'll just use the internal storage there and leverage BT. Since it's an old phone anyway I don't particularly care if it sits in the glove compartment for most of its remaining life and a car adapter means I don't care if the battery isn't charging as well as it used to.

 

The point is this is all tilting at windmills - CD players have been gone for a while now and aren't coming back. No matter how solid a point a person feels they're making, the war is over.

 

I bought 20 new CDs (most in the BOC box) this week. Now if you can't get Egypt Station on CD that's a problem fuh you to handle. Most of the bands I listen to on Bandcamp are putting out CD editions. There are yet warriors among us.

 

My policy since around 2000 was, "never, never, NEVER take a manufactured CD in the car". Any music that I wanted on CD in the car was burned to a CD-R. In the event of damage, it was easy and inexpensive to replace.

To add to the overall discussion . . . of course, having music in the car on a CD / CD-R has become a bit antiquated. I get that. For many years, I've had a Cowan D2+ that houses hundreds of FLAC music files that I plug through my car's auxiliary-in port and is set to shuffle. But I also carry about 20 CD-Rs, mostly of albums that I've acquired recently and with which I'm getting acquainted.

As mentioned up-thread, DAPs plugged through USB or auxiliary-in ports often don't mesh seamlessly with the car's entertainment system. For example, with my Cowan DAP, the car's controls and display are not functional; I have to use the DAP's controls, and given its size, it is hazardous to go hunting, so generally, I just let the shuffle do its thing.

Yes, I have a smartphone, but it does not play FLAC files natively, so I don't bother. And as I mentioned earlier, I will not take the extra step of converting FLAC to mp3 merely for portable listening. I will freely admit that I have an aversion -- and it's a bit of a peevish one -- to lossy compression.

 

Even that's getting harder; the days are long gone when a car stereo was a self-contained unit in a single-DIN chassis that had no electrical connections to the rest of the car except for power, ground, the antenna cable and the speaker wires.

These days, rather than being a discrete component that you can replace with something new, the "stereo" is likely just one more sub-menu on the central "infotainment" screen that also handles navigation, alerts, the now-mandatory backup camera, vehicle settings, tire pressure display, etc. etc. "Going aftermarket" may well be limited to finding something that you can stick on the dashboard or in the glovebox that will interface with the factory setup via USB/AUX/Bluetooth.

 

I just replaced my 2008 Subaru with a 2016 honda crv. I didn't see a cd player but that wasn't a deal breaker. The salesman was pretty sure they had stopped putting them in by then. Funny thing was there was a cd icon in the audio choices and an eject button but I didn't see any slot. I tried the eject button and the gps screen opened up exposing the player. Who knew!? Apparently not the salesman. He was amused when I told him.

 

He didn’t know because he was likely never asked about it so he didn’t bother to check. That proves my point further. Few care.

He kinds still should have known though if it’s part of the car.

Ed