A Text to Riswick from the i3 - 2014 BMW i3 Long-Term Road Test
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A Text to Riswick from the i3 - 2014 BMW i3 Long-Term Road Test
The 2014 BMW i3 does not have a CD player, which is just another reason it's very much a car of the 21st century.
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Well, duh - you can just download them, of course! Um, no you won't...while there are a few sources that sell downloads of that quality, they don't have anywhere near as large a catalog as iTunes, or Amazon, for example. But iTunes sells 256kbps compressed, and Amazon 320 kbps. Streaming audio? iTunes at 256kbps, Spotify at 320.
If my okay-sized 800 CD collection disappeared tomorrow (it won't - it's all backed up losslessly...), I could replace it with new CDs...maybe 95% replaced, as there are a few I can't find anymore. If I wanted to replace that collection of music with CD-quality files via legal downloads...I don't think I could ever do it - that wide a variety of files of that quality is just not available for download.
If memory serves me correctly, the old Lexus SC was the last car to come with a tape deck but even by that time the cassette was long since dead and hadn't been sold in countless years. The quality was poor and they don't age well. On the other hand, I can and still do buy CDs and my oldest ones from decades ago still sound the exact same.
I've tried to load the music library I've purchased over the years onto my iPod but the flash memory based unit I have topped out at 64GB which isn't nearly enough to store everything I have in a decent bitrate. I did try putting my entire library on a 256GB USB memory stick, but has any of these automakers who are pushing USB-based digital media playback ever tried to index and sort through really big libraries? Some systems I've tried panic and give errors on libraries over 10k songs and even if I load up a memory stick, with the poor sorting and indexing you can never find anything.
As an example, many systems don't appear to let you select an artist and then see their albums but instead display all songs from all albums by that artist. If I can't recall the name of the album I have to work my way through the menus, select the artist, find a song, start playing it to see the album name, then go back to the poor menu system to sort by albums just so I can do the equivalent of grabbing a CD and dropping it in.
I'll stream sometimes but with data caps and poor cell reception on long commutes this isn't a solution. The heavily compression audio of streaming or satellite sounds pretty bad, even in an automotive environment with more background noise. Then you have some manufacturers promoting HD (hybrid-digital) Radio but neglect to build a good base AM/FM receiver.
If automakers are dropping CD players because they think "millennials" don't want them, that's the equivalent of trying to build cars to chase younger markets. Even if you succeed you'll probably alienate and lose a lot of older people who still have money and want great cars. Also like the millennial generation it was long touted they didn't like driving as much as older generations but recent studies show this is turning out to be untrue. Makes you wonder if dropping CD players when you can still buy CD media might be a similar mistake.
-end rant-