I Need a CD Player For My Car

Now that I think about it, there is one New Year's resolution I have that I would like share with you, though it may not be a resolution as much as it is a goal - like becoming a movie star, marrying a Kennedy, or getting elected governor of California (sorry, Arnie!). Anyway, it's this: I plan to get a compact disc player for my car.

You'd think I'd have one already, since my Volkswagen is a 2000 model. In fact, a CD player in the base Golf model was an option at the time. I had the opportunity to have a CD player installed in my Golf when I bought it new, but I decided against it. I figured I already had a cassette player, I had an AM-FM radio, and I normally didn't travel far enough on one trip to listen to one album anyway. Plus, I thought, if I wanted to listen to a CD in my car, I could always tape it off a portable CD/cassette player.

Five years and change later, I now regret my decision, for the following reasons:

Radio in the greater New York area, where I live, has gotten worse since 2000. We're down to one classic rock station, one straight rock station (in suburban New Jersey), and one urban folk-rock station, which is NPR-affiliated and broadcasts at 90.7 megahertz, so the signal is weaker in some parts of the area than others. (At least we have the only jazz station in the country - like the rock station, it's in New Jersey, and like the urban folk-rock station, it broadcasts on the low end of the dial.) The remaining stations in New York - a hip-hop/disco town, I must concede - all seem to have formats designed to accommodate "Got To Be Real," a lousy hit dance-pop song from 1979 that should have stayed there.

Record companies don't put albums out on cassette anymore. Once they realized that CDs were just as portable, cassettes, with their inferior sound quality, proved to be redundant. They're also unreliable; they jam a lot, and they break far too easily.

We've managed to accumulate at least three portable CD/cassette players - "boomboxes," if you will - and the cassette decks on all of them managed to break. Even if I can find a new one to tape CDs on, what does this mean for the tape deck in my car?

I have a job that requires me, on some occasions, to drive longer distances than I had to five years ago.

So I'm thinking of getting a CD player - a genuine Volkswagen factory CD player, not an aftermarket one. I've had trouble with aftermarket car stereos before. I should make a decision by April, when winter is over and I can drop off my car for the installation at a dealership a half-hour walk away from my place of business. If I don't get one, I'll either get a CD adapter from Radio Shack or get another boombox and tape as many records as possibly can.

Doing nothing is not a viable option.

Then there's the issue of satellite radio. . . but that's for another time.