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Tech News and Commentary
Dave and the team discuss Amazon satellites, Snapchat and
Yehuda in Silver Spring, Maryland listens to the podcast and asked: “I added a Bluetooth adapter to my car because it didn’t come with one. When I’m driving, I hear the noise from the engine over my car speakers. I tried a bunch of filters, including ground loop isolators and alternator noise filters, and none of them seemed to help. This is more of an audio question than a tech question, but you’re audio guys too, I guess, and I’m wondering if you have any way to get rid of that noise.”
Yehuda, like most electrical problems in cars that may end up being a tough one to fix.
The typical cause for what you’re describing is a grounding issue, but it looks like you looked into that, and an alternator issue would probably be the second most common one, which it looks like you also looked into. You can also try a filter on your power to the adapter you added, if that’s not how you tried to filter out problems coming from your alternator and battery.
Another possible cause could be an active microphone, some cars don’t have Bluetooth but have active noise suppression systems (kind of like noise-cancelling headphones, but for the whole car), those can interfere with the audio system too.
Frankly, you’ll probably get better answers on this one if you stop by a shop that specializes in vehicle audio systems, unfortunately this one is a little outside our sphere of knowledge.
John in Carey, North Carolina listens on NewsRadio 680 WPTF and asked: “I’m concerned about whether I should buy an iPhone or an Android, and any help I can get, I’d appreciate.”
John, there’s no right or wrong answer here.
Ultimately, it’s going to come down to what you like better and feel more comfortable with. What they each can do is comparable, frankly, maybe we should even say “the same” since they few things that are different are really in how they each do it but they can both do what the other can do.
The only thing we should note is that there are no cheap iPhones but there are cheap Android phones and there is a big, big gap in quality and performance between the $99 Androids and the $999 Androids.
That doesn’t mean that you should only buy the super expensive, high-end flagship models, but keep in mind that if you spend as little as possible you will get the worst models out there, and the difference is very apparent.
Other than that, the only real answer we can give you is to stop by a store and play around with them, or ask your friends to let you play with their phones. The one you’ll be the most satisfied with is the one that feels the most natural. In terms of what they can do, they’re basically Google Home and Amazon Alexa: they do the same things in slightly different ways.
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