[200q20v] Crutchfield comes through(and some audio pro questions)

[Brett Dikeman]

Everyone's always looking for vendor stories, so here's a good
one...I originally ordered a Blaupunkt Tokyo receiver on clearance
from them, along with a thummer remote.  Get everything, get it
installed..#$@! remote doesn't work!  Shoot!  Well, I assumed it was
bad batteries and just tossed it aside and said "eh, I'll look at it
later."  Cool doinkus, but I'll live for now.

Later= 4 months later :-)  Pop new batteries in...nothing.  Aim it at
my digital camera, its -blasting- out IR.  Hmm.  Call up Crutchfield.
I get some lip from the sales rep..."its been 4 months, yadda yadda,
dunno what we can do etc etc."

"Well, -your- sales guy picked the part number, I just told him I
wanted a thummer to go with THAT radio.  He screwed up, not me!"

"Well, I dunno.  It's been 4 months. Here, let me put you through to
tech support"

<groan>

less than a minute later I'm talking to one of their tech support
guys.  "Oh yeah, that's the wrong remote, he screwed up."

"Any chance I can get it exchanged for the right one?"

"Yeah, sure...no problem.  Let me advance it out to you; throw the
wrong one in the box and send it back."

So I added in a aux input cable for the laptop on long trips; $12 for
one that plugs into the DIN connector on the back and has a several
foot long cable w/mini jack on the end; sounds silly, but I have a
32GB drive and a small inverter; it ain't no iPod, but iPods don't
offload pics off your digital camera, run Photoshop, check email, etc
:-)  And yes, I know about the head units that have mp3 capabilities
in them; they're really behind the ball on things like reading ID
tags in the mp3s and such; some early units only displayed the
filename on the CD..yuck.  Maybe in a year or two.

While I had him on the phone, I threw him a curve ball.  "Okay, I've
got a funky setup with a soundgate adapter going to a bose system,
but I've got motor servo noise coming through from the head unit.  Is
this some sort of grounding problem?"

"Yeah, sounds like a ground loop.  This is going to sound really
stupid, but...disconnect the ground to the radio from the harness.
It'll use the antenna ground instead...if that doesn't work, try
unplugging the antenna and see if that makes a difference."

I'm going to give all this a shot, but any thoughts?  Soundgate had
cautioned me that I might have to provide a better ground than the
factory harness.  The noise is servo motor noise; you get weird
brrrrrup weep weep weep brruuuup! noises as the CD head moves into
position to play a track, and there is faint static...all this from a
unit that is supposed to have excellent S/N ratio etc; it is one of
their top of the line units, $400+ new(I bought it for something like
$150 I think.)

Last but not least, anyone know of diversity adapters?  OTOH, I've
got a cell antenna center-top of the rear window from the PO, and
I've often thought "hmm, that'd be a great place to mount one of
those amplified VW style antennas..."

Dan Sinclair mentions in the archives that he had great luck simply
building a y-cable with parts from Rat Shack, which is fine by me;
that mixes the two inputs into one without any diversity circuitry,
but he said it worked great.

B
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