JBL GT5-A402 Install & Review, sorta

When I bought my Miata back in June, the audio situation in the car was pretty dire. An aftermarket Pioneer head unit with possibly the worst front interface I have ever seen was rattling around in the DIN slot. The previous owner asserted without much confidence that it was indeed in working order. I turned it on, it sounded like it was shorting across the speaker outputs, so I turned it off and never turned it on again. Honestly, the stereo system is really at the bottom of my priorities when buying a used vehicle. The number of clean aftermarket installations are sadly outnumbered by various levels of clusterfuckery ranging from simply cheap components often inferior to stock (which it seemed I had encountered) to hacked up harnesses complete with a rats nest of unlabeled and severed wires.

So I paid no attention to it, and after I discovered that the head unit was held in place by nothing more than the force of gravity, I yanked it out. It was just so much dead weight, anyway.

I toyed with the idea of removing the remainder of the stereo. I didn't want to dedicate a huge amount of resources or accrue a large weight penalty by putting a monster stereo in the car. Besides, that goes against everything the Miata stands for. On the other hand, I wasn't sure I could get adequate performance from simply a head unit and door speakers. It's not quiet in the Miata cockpit.

So, rather than a head unit and an amp, I decided to skip the head unit completely and just use one of the many MP3 players I have lying around. Hey, head units are heavy. I decided on the JBL GT5-A402 for the amp because it was a) two-channel and b) cheap. But, importantly, not ridiculously, awfully cheap. There aren't any absurd and unrealistic wattage ratings on the casing and it comes from a big (very big) and reputable manufacturer, Harman International. In this case branding means it won't be completely crap.

Honestly, the hardest part of this install was getting wires figured out. Yes, the harness had been mutilated. Once that was done the rest of it was surprisingly easy.



There's a tunnel that runs from the trunk to the passenger compartment, and since the battery is mounted in the trunk, the install is almost trivial. No drilling in the firewall.



The amp went behind the passenger seat. Note that if you have a post-1994 NA, the ECU is mounted here. I think. Someone correct me. Either way, make sure what you're drilling into.



I was expecting to find stock speakers in the doors, but it looks like someone put in these poly cone Pioneer units when they installed the head unit. If they're installed with the same level of skill as the head unit, there are wires twisted around the speaker terminals and wrapped in electrical tape back there. At the moment I'm just going to leave them. They don't actually sound too bad, and I haven't figured out exactly what I want to put in the door yet.



I know this install is neither unique nor revolutionary, especially in the Miata world, but I am still pretty happy with it. It fits the Miata ethos. Functional, minimally complex, and light. The amp is very slightly heavier than the head unit that got binned, but I excised about three feet of tangled up wiring and three (yes, three!) inline fuse holders. At the very least, I've reduced the risk of my car burning to the ground in an electrical fire.


As for the amp itself? I didn't tear it down to check out the quality of the components or the packaging. I don't have reference quality speakers to listen to it critically. I can say it has way, way more power than those particular speakers need. It's not supposed to be a flagship amp - I paid $80 for mine - but I'm confident it'll deliver its rated output with a minimal amount of distortion. I've been impressed at how much detail I'm hearing even with the poor speakers and the large amount of cockpit noise. The screw terminal block could be wider and beefier but it's not exactly flimsy. The included mounting screws are the perfect length to mount through about half an inch of insulation and carpet. They aren't self-tapping. The amp has a nice soft turn on feature, but that's hardly ground-breaking or upmarket these days.


So, for a total of right around $100, including the mounting kit, I've added two 60 watt channels. Is it going to win any competitions? Well, I hope not. Does it go louder and cleaner than any head unit? Absolutely. Combined with an almost infinite playlist, the fact that I don't have to carry expensive and obnoxious media, and the fact that it looks like my stereo has already been stolen - this is an unbeatable upgrade for the working Miata.

Miata 'Ebay Clears' turn signal install

Well, the stock turn signal / running lamps at the front of my Miata were starting to show their age. As in they had huge rock chips and holes and were full of rusty water. One of them was starting to short out in heavy rain. Not good.

OEM replacements are $80 apiece. While I really do appreciate the factory look, I can't see spending $160 on a couple of molded plastic pieces. I really just wanted a functional replacement for the factory pieces. Well, the aftermarket knockoff hucksters on Ebay would be happy to sell you a pair of clear (or smoked - out of the question for this car) turn signal lamps for $30.

For the pair. With bulbs.

I have to say I was skeptical. Would they leak? Would they have fitment issues? Well, no. They may be slightly cheap, but they're totally solid. Proper venting in the back. The pigtails and connectors fit perfectly. I have to say I'm impressed. Worth $30? Absolutely.

Preview: Bridgestone Blizzak WS-60

Snow tires aren't exactly cheap. This set of 15 inchers ran just under $800 with shipping, wheels, and tire pressure sensors. Actually, only about $350 of that money went towards tires. So, they're somewhere in the realm beyond all-seasons and budget performance tires, and well below a serious performance tire.

The real question is: how much would you pay for traction? In my case, since I plan on making 50 or more trips into the Cascades this winter, I thought the expense was justified. You're not going to feel too proud of your thriftiness as you slide towards the guardrail on a snow-covered mountain pass.

I'll come back here and actually compare them to the Bridgestone Turanzas they replaced - hopefully after this weekend.

Broken by Design: Microsoft Wireless Optical Desktop 1000 Keyboard/Mouse

Technically, this should be a product review. And, yes, the Microsoft Wireless Optical Desktop 1000 Keyboard/Mouse is definitely a product, although exactly what purpose it's intended for I don't know. It's definitely not usable in most of the contexts in which you'd want to use a wireless keyboard and mouse. However, let me talk about the actual product for a moment.

As a desktop keyboard and mouse (well, I guess that's in the name of the product) the Microsoft branded input devices might be acceptable. The keyboard is handsome and has a nice feel to it. It also has excellent range - unlike the other half of the equation: the mouse. Again, simply as an input device, the mouse is excellent. It looks good, and the accuracy is decent. But get more than about 2 feet from the receiver, and the cursor motion starts to get erratic. Two feet! The manual claims 1.8 meters, or 6 feet, but that's wildly optimistic, in fact, downright false. The keyboard manages this easily, but the mouse? Not a chance. I'm not even sure it would work well in a desktop situation. You basically have to have the receiver on top of your desk... next to the mouse.

I did attempt to hack the receiver to get more range, with limited success. There are three screws under some adhesive-backed rubber pads that hold the receiver together, and it comes apart easily. The antenna is simply a trace on the circuit board. It runs underneath the white sticker in the image above. I connected a long, very thin wire to the antenna trace, and experienced a substantial improvement in range. Almost enough (but not enough) to allow me to use the mouse from, say, the couch when in front of the entertainment center.

Even with this hackery, the product still fails to meet it's stated range. I put the receiver back together, and this particular product is going back to where it came from. Sorry, Microsoft. Wireless means you shouldn't need wires.

Long-term product review: Michelin XC Road 26 x 1.4 slick

I review the Michelin XC Road 26 inch clincher slick.

I'm moving all my cycling related posts over there, as I think this blog suffers from attention fragmentation disorder.

Long-term product review: Motorola L2

I hate cellphones. I hate cellphones for the myriad purposes to which they are put which have nothing to do with the one thing they facilitate - communication. Status symbol, game platform, music player, digital camera, object of lust... None of these uses interest me in the least. I just want a phone.

Some engineers at Motorola apparently read my mind.

Non-Convergence
There's this term that everyone knows of, even if they don't know the term itself: convergence. Convergence means that instead of two discrete pieces of consumer electronics that each perform a specific function, you have one piece of technology that does both things, only not as well, with less battery life, and more complexity. Not only that, but the weaknesses of each device - fragility, vulnerability to the elements, heat dissipation issues - are combined in your shiny, new, state of the art device that is sitting there, shod of it's clamshell packaging, fragrant of solvent and mold-release.

Oh, and when one function of the device becomes obsolete, as it inevitably will, you get to toss the circuitry and supporting hardware for the equivalent of two devices into the trash.

Ain't technology grand?

I was opposed to the idea of a camera in a cellphone from the first time the news of this fevered marketer's dream appeared, and cellphones started sprouting tiny plastic lenses like warts. I already had a digital camera, and the limitations of it's huge-by-comparison lens were glaringly obvious. I already had a cellphone, and I wasn't really interested in killing my battery life with a huge color display and a CCD sensor, and the comparatively huge increase in processing power needed to process digital imagery. But consumers as a whole loved the technology. They were only using their digital cameras for snapshots anyway, and this removed several pretty serious barriers to sharing their snapshots - the need for a separate computer to get the snapshots onto the internet, and of course actually getting the images off the camera. The cellphone manufacturers rejoiced as every cellphone in the world was obsoleted in an instant.

Pretty soon it was difficult to even find a camera-less cellphone on the market, let alone get one bundled with a plan from a major provider.

What was a cantankerous luddite like myself to do? Enter the Motorola L2.

The L2 - my Knight in Shining, uh, Protective Metal Casing
I'm not sure how I discovered the L2. I think I wanted to prove to myself (and others, more importantly) that it was possible to have a modern, stylish phone that didn't include a camera. Plus I'd been researching cellular technology, and lusted after a quad-band GSM phone - it'd work just as well in the Carribean as in Berlin. Sign me up. So, I punched these criteria into a helpful cellphone database, and happened upon this delightful sliver of technology.

Only problem: No cellphone provider offered this phone anymore. Some had, for a brief moment in time, particularly in pink, but those days - apparently only a few days total, as cellphones sans camera don't appear to do that well in the US market - had come and gone.

Next stop was of course Ebay, where I found a brand new example of the handset from a British reseller, unlocked, with a universal charger. It was from a batch of Cingular-destined phones, and still displays the vaguely annoying Cingular logo on startup. Hmmm. Perhaps I need to fix that. I think I paid around $90 with shipping. You can pick up similar examples (new, unlocked, US packaging) for $60, these days. The phone works great on T-Mobile's network, and it's easy enough to set up world-wide roaming. The option itself is free, but you'll incur per-minute charges in other countries. Of course, if your friends send you lots of text messages, you might want to tell them to lay off when you're on vacation.

I love this phone. I think I said that already.

It has:

• Bluetooth
• SMS, of course
  
• MMS capability (send and receive picture messages)
• a Java compiler
• 128 x 160 x 16 bit screen
• a USB port for charging and hacking
• quad-band GSM
• 310 hours of standby time, 4 hours of talk time
  
• MP3 playback/ringtones
  

It doesn't have:

• a Camera

Really, it has everything I need, nothing I don't need, and a few bits that I wasn't expecting. The only port is a USB port, which charges the phone and allows access to the filesystem on the handset, for adding carefully optimized background images and MP3 ringtones. I'm not sure I have the original charger anymore, and I don't care. The USB port doubles (triples?) as an earphone jack. I wasn't expecting MMS capability, but since the hardware is essentially the same as the L6 - the same phone, with a camera - the firmware is probably mostly identical. I get about three days on a charge with moderate usage with a one and half year old battery.

Yeah, you can get an iPhone. In fact, these days, there's virtually no limit to the amount of computing power you can carry in your pocket. Manufacturers are packing millions and millions of transistors into increasingly small form factors, hoping to convince you to upgrade your moldy old phone, hoping to finally get you on the bandwagon of cellphone chic, hoping that you'll toss the handset that's served you well for so long (or, perhaps, hasn't).

Good luck, Apple. Do your worst. I've found the perfect phone.