NUTS & BOATS The monthly newsletter for to-be and already-are cruisers 2006 #1
Publisher: Trish Lambert
www.takehersailing.com
(C) P. Lambert 2006
Welcome to our new subscribers! IN THIS ISSUE
If you would like to get your own free subscription, use the box at the right to subscribe. OUR PRIVACY POLICY
CRUISER'S EYE VIEW
Thoreau Meets iPod: A "Simple" Guy Goes Digital by Skip Randall Over the past 16 years of living on small boats, I’ve tried to strike a balance between the simple life having some of the creature comforts that I consider part of a happy lifestyle.* I try not to be too anti-technology in this regard. The trick is to be selective. For instance, I use a hand-crank thingie to open my cans but I have an Adler-Barbour refrigerator with a solid-state microprocessor “brain” that has worked flawlessly for ten years. I love anchoring out but I love having dockside electricity to run the hatch-fitted air conditioner during the Florida summer. One creature comfort I must have at anchor or at the dock is music. I have a nifty stereo system onboard, made up of a high-power Sony automotive radio-CD player hooked up to medium-sized bulkhead-mounted two-way speakers. Between us, Trish and I have accumulated somewhere around 700 music CDs (and counting). A collection this size presents a space/weight storage challenge on the small boat. First to go were the jewel cases, and the CDs went into notebook-style portfolios. Still, the whole collection weighed in at 70 pounds and took up about three cubic feet of space. A better solution was needed. So I went the mp3 route. I bought a 60 gigabyte iPod on Amazon.com. Our entire music collection is now housed in a space about the size of a deck of cards. Amazing! I’ve freed up a whole locker and did away with a significant amount of weight for a 30-foot boat. If you have been thinking about using an mp3 player as the source for music (and audio books) on your boat, here are a few thoughts from my own experience of going digital. First of all, you need a computer with enough storage capacity and speed to transfer your music collection into it. The transfer process can be tedious for a large collection, but it must be done. Once everything is loaded loaded in the computer, it’s a simple process to download all that music into the player. (One note: you cannot change back and forth between a PC and a Mac, you have to stick with one or the other.) You can create your playlists on the computer as well, and then download those to the player. As far as accessories go, be careful. You can easily spend as much money on these as on the player. For my choices, I avoided the items proclaiming to be iPod-specific, which I found to be relatively expensive. The first thing was to toss the “ear buds” that come with the unit and get a nice pair of full-sized earphones (Phillips HN110, noise-cancelling, $60). These are great for private listening, on the boat or on an airplane. Next I got a wireless RF signal-transmitting device (Monster’s iCarPlay wireless plus, $60). With this you can wirelessly transmit the music to any nearby FM radio, and it powers and charges the iPod via a cigarette lighter adaptor. I also got a cigarette lighter-110v household plug adaptor (Radio Shack, $20), so I can use it “on land.” The Monster device works well, but has one annoying trait, common to all wireless RF devices: There is a low-level hiss/crackle background noise that often comes through. It’s not too noticeable for most rock, blues or jazz, but can be annoying on soft passages on classical, folk, and other "quiet" music. You can minimize this by experimenting with different FM frequencies, and by dickering with the bass/treble settings, but it’s usually there to some degree. I have a pair of small amplified speakers powered by batteries or a 110v transformer-plug. With these hooked up to the iPod, I get clear, crisp sound without the annoying hiss, and I can crank up the volume to impressive levels. At Trish’s house, I hook up the iPod to her stereo system via a cable with a stereo mini-plug on one end and two phono plugs on the other (Radio Shack, $6) which connect to the accessory input jacks on the back of the stereo. The sound is clear and crisp, and the 50 watts per channel stereo lets me really rock out the tunes to “neighbor complaint level.” My next move is to replace the onboard Sony with a one that has an accessory jack on the face. With this I can directly link the iPod to the unit using a stereo mini-plug cord (again, Radio Shack). This should give me better sound quality and eliminate the annoying hiss. I’m very satisfied with the iPod. I especially like the versatility of having my whole music collection available on the road, on the boat, in a motel room or house, or even in a tent far out in the boonies. Even with 700 CDs in the iPod, there is still a lot of room left to load in more music. The 70 pounds of CDs now live on a bookshelf at Trish’s house, along with her computer, which is the repository of the digitized tunes. Although we haven’t done so yet, the computer-based music collection can be edited and we can make up play lists, then download to the iPod. It's pretty cool. So what’s next for this music-loving Thoreau-type sailor? Perhaps satellite radio. I’ll keep you posted. *Check out my treatise on creature comforts on the THS site. | 
