What's all the buzz about? About to drive me bonkers, that's what.

You see, there are at least four forms of iPod integration in cars. There's the Volvo version, which amounts to playing your iPod through your headphones. Then there's the old-car-with-a-tape-deck version, which involves one of those cassette adapters that you last used to play your portable CD player through your car stereo. And there's the auxiliary input version, which has a magical plug on the dash to which you connect the output of the iPod for pretty great albeit analog sound.

What I wouldn't give to wake up
in traffic to this on my dash
And finally there's the way uptown dock connector version, which integrates the iPod so seamlessly that you might just forget you're driving and instead spend your time watching the stereo's head unit flash the track information from the iPod ... almost as though it weren't so unnatural to desire such control over one's music.

I'll bet you've already surmised the one I must suffer with. But other than that tiny complaint I've been completely satisfied with my car stereo. Until now.

Quite some time ago I decided that I would simply have to make CDs from my iTunes playlists in order to be able to stand listening to anything in the car that I swipe via LimeWire. This is due to the constant static that attends any attempt to play an iPod through an FM transmitter or modulator. Although I can't imagine that you would, if you'd like more information on this phenomenon, please check out this prior post. Okay, it's admittedly less an informational post and more a jeremiad, but it's not as though I coerced you to follow the link. If you'll recall, I didn't even give it much of a recommendation.

But yes, there's a place in Hel for the improvident creator of my stereo system: the guy who thought it unimportant to add an auxiliary input to a stereo with a six-disc, in-dash changer but who did see fit to slap one on the cheaper, single-disc version. "No, Sven, I don't need to add a six-disc changer in the trunk, but that won't keep you from being wedged right between the guy who invented dentotape and Miss Carol Channing ... forever!"

As fun as it is to speculate on who's doomed to spend eternity bored and peppered with food flecks, the point of this rant is that I'm not completely satisfied with the performance of my car stereo--even with the iPod removed from the equation. For you see, although math rock CDs sound great on it, the myriad noises of that genre are but masking the equally innumerable noises emanating from the builtloose speaker panels in my Swedish rattletrap. Upon playing classical music on it, this deficiency immediately reared its ugly, buzzing head.

And those noisy buzzings have got to stop. Unfortunately, the only way I've yet found to shut them up is to turn off the stereo. But then there are all the other Nordic rattles, blips, beeps, and whirs that I use the stereo to drown out in the first place.

And yes, there's a place in Hel for Sweden. Right between Norway and Finland.