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Posts Tagged ‘Customer Reviews: Monster Cable iCarPlay iPod Cassette Adapter (AI CAS-ADPT)’

This review is from: Monster Cable iCarPlay iPod Cassette Adapter (AI CAS-ADPT) (Electronics) I purchased this item recently along with a Panasonic CD/MP3 player. If you’ve never heard of Monster, Ill tell you that monster is well known to audiophiles everywhere. The folks at monster are truely obsessed with making the highest possible quality cables, adapters and so on. Some would even say they go overboard. I’ve always gone to monster when I wanted the best video signal transfer or the best possible sound.

Because of Monster’s reputation in the audio industry I of course assumed that the more expensive Monster Cassette adapter would be of higher quality and produce better sound and less noise than the cheap one included with the panasonic player I bought. I was wrong. Very wrong. This adapter performed terribley in comparison to the cheap included one, producing horrible sound distortion. It didnt just do a poor job, it actually RUINED the sound. You should also note that the other adapter worked perfectly.

The details for this adapter fail to really say whether this item is made specifically for use with just the Ipod or whether it can be used as a general purpose cassete adapter that just happenes to have the Ipod branding and logo on it. I assumed it was just being marketed towards Ipod owners, but I wonder if it may somehow be technically tweaked, performance-wise, for use with the ipod? That doesnt seem likely as a minijack port is a minijack port and analog stereo sound coming out of a minijack on an ipod couldnt be any different than that coming from a sony discman or the back of a PC… it’s a standard audio output. But maybe Monster optimized certain frequencies based on thier knowledge of the MP3 codec and or the ipod to enhance sound output which caused my experience??? This doesn’t seem likely… and what’s more if it is the case it’s absurd… That’d be like RCA making an RCA adapter designed only to work with RCA VCRs even though the outputs and signals are compatible across the board. And besides, if it were the case, there shouldbe something sayin so dont you think?

No, I think this is just a poor product release. Monster should be ashamed. The signal to noise ratio and the frequency response specs arent even listed on this page OR on the package! (which I thought were requiered by FTC regulation) is missing.

Even if you’re an ipod owner, I would try this out before buying it. Otherwise save some money and buy a cheaper one from sony or panasonic… or any other brand for that matter.