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Home > Columns > Noah
Kravitz 
Prices Updated Daily!
Music With Your Coffee: MacAlly FM Cup iPod Transmitter and Charger
Pros: Excellent FM Transmission; Clever Design is Great
if you Have a Free Drink Holder in Your Car
Cons: Useless if Your Car Lacks Round Drink Holders; Pricey
In Sum: Clever, Functional Way to iPod Your Ride, if you Can Spare a Drink Holder
Pricing: $59.99
More Info: Product
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Out of the Pod, Into the Car
In a way I'm lucky. For most of my adult life I didn't have a car, since I lived in Brooklyn, NY
and relied on the subway or my bike to get anywhere I couldn't walk. Taxis abounded for late
night trips home from Manhattan. When I did need a car for
some reason (usually either a music gig or a trip out of the city), I'd borrow one from a friend. Life
was simple, and so was using my iPod in transit: Headphones on the subway, headphones when walking, no
iPod on my bike. Simple.
Now I live in California and share one car with my (new) wife. I'm still lucky - it's a good car,
a car big enough to haul my drums around in, and a car with a tape deck. So hooking the iPod up
to the car is easy - we've got a couple of the old fashioned tape adaptors that plug into the iPod's
headphone jack and playback through the tape deck. There are higher-fidelity ways to iPod your car,
but this has served us fine - particularly over the factory-standard sound system in our car.
Not everyone is lucky enough to have an old school casette deck in their car, though, and for
the many owners of auto CD systems that lack front-mount auxillary input jacks, getting an iPod
to play through the car speakers is actually something of a chore. As such, there's a market for FM
transmitters that broadcast audio from an iPod or other source to the FM radio frequency of your
choice. Macally sent us a clever take on the concept - the FM Cup transmitter/charger - for review. Let's take a look.
Latte or Liberace?
 The Macally FM Cup is a combination FM transmitter and iPod charger that's designed to fit into
a standard round drink holder of the type found in many cars. The FM Cup features an iPod dock
built into a plastic housing with an adjustable, spring-loaded base than can expand or retract to
fit different sizes of cup holders. The base is round, so if you don't have a round cup holder
in your car this might not be the gadget for you. We have square drink holders in our car,
as a matter of fact, so while we were able to sort of get FM Cup to work, it definitely isn't
the ideal solution for us.
If you've got round cup holders, however (like the friend whose car I tested the unit out in),
the FM Cup is a pretty cool all-in-one solution. The built-in dock supports most full-sized iPods
with the included adapters, and
takes care of charging and audio-out in one fell swoop, which is nice. A top-mounted LCD display
with two buttons controls what FM frequency you're broadcasting to, so you can find an open
spot on the dial and move to a new one as need be. A separate power adapter plugs into your car's
cigarette lighter and tethers to the FM Cup with a cable. The expandable base of the cup works well
and holds the cup and your Pod steady while driving. It's a simple solution that looks good and comes
in black and white to suit your fancy.
The FM Cup performed very well in my testing driving through the fairly crowded airwaves of
the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California. Dialing in an open frequency was easy with the
LCD display screen (a vast improvement over the first-generation iTrip and other transmitters of
yore), and the transmitter was able to lock onto a frequency and broadcast clear, FM-stereo quality
sound to the car stereo. Being used to running the iPod through a casette adapter as I am, having
a fully charged Pod at the end of a drive was a nice treat; the FM Cup charges your iPod as it plays,
where as audio-only solutions (like my tape connector) don't.
Conclusion
If you're an iPod user and have a car nice enough to have drink holders but not nice (or new) enough to have
an iPod-compatible input jack on the stereo, then you need a way to get your music out of the Pod and
into the car. An FM transmitter is your best bet unless you're interested in the more permanent and
expensive route of jacking the iPod into the pre-amp section of your stereo via some DIY handiwork
and/or a slick solution like Harmon/Kardon's Drive + Play system.
MacAlly's FM Cup is a very good FM transmitter and iPod charger. If you've got an empty round
drink holder in your car, then it's a great solution, as it fits very nicely into most any cup-like
shape. At $59.99 it's certainly not the least expensive car adapter in the iPod marketplace, but
it works very well, looks good, and is oh-so-clever. Definitely worth a look.
The Macally FM Cup iPod car transmitter/charger is available in black or white
and sells for $59.99 direct from Macally and is also available from online retailers (compare prices at PCPrices/Mac).
* * * *
Get the best price for
your new iPod at PCPrices.net/iPod
* * * *
Noah Kravitz is the
Reviews Editor for PBCentral. A writer, educator, and musician, he
lives in Oakland, CA and is the author of Teaching and
Learning with Technology.
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