Celsus ICE MediaDAB Means Digital Radio In ANY Car

One of the biggest single pains in the ruddy arse about modern car radios for the likes of the enthusiastic, is ironically one of the wonderful ‘one-less-thing-to-worry-about’ bracket items for ‘normal’ people. It is that car radios in dashboards are now quite unlikely to be casually replaced upon a whim any more. They work well and are deeply built into the fabric of the car’s visible and hidden parts. They get stolen less, too. There used to be whole grim empires based upon theft – by way of insurance replacement specialisation. (It wasn’t nice visiting them as a rep, either&;)
The ‘car radio replacers’ will tend to be real hardcore car audio fans. Some will even spend two grand on converting the dash of their Vauxhall Astra or Insignia, just so they can choose which Japanese or Blaupunkt double DIN head unit they can fit in the dash so as to access better features and sound quality. That features in my video titled ‘Aftermarket Hope’.
But what of the UK’s 26 million vehicle car park, belonging to all the people YOU, Dear Reader of Talk Audio Magazine know? What do you tell them when they ask you about digital radio?
Because the time is NOW! Olympic radio stations, stations of every era you might imagine and most vitally, superb sound versus FM. Like the studio feed you hear in the green room while you await the chance to go do ‘talking on the wireless’ if you make a bit of radio from time to time, like I get to.
This is one of the leading solutions to the whole car park problem of nice cars which need digital radio without messing with their insides, nor sticking yet ANOTHER carbuncle on the screen. It’s called MediaDAB. You do need a correct twig – which can be a fully effective glass mounted membrane type that hardly shows, or a skinny shark-fin, or else a classic powered coil-whip bee-sting aerial, as well as the unit and it uses a radio preset frequency on your factory FM radio to feed both digital radio up the aerial socket in your system and the digital radio display information about station indent and so forth by deep cunning. It uses the RDS text carrier thingy and just puts the digital radio information through that! So you see the digital radio display on your own factory radio and you can change the stations from your steering wheel controls as normal. There’s even an extra cute remote if you want to use it for your expensive and still excellent aftermarket unit that does not have digital radio.
Terribly clever and dead easy to use, either way.
I went to Poole in Dorset to see how the rich live, then toddle off to the hub of empire in a shiny high tech industrial estate (you can smell the new-tech wealth generation on the air, along with the brine) where I found a boardroom converted to an ad-hoc TV studio by my old brother in arms, Chris Bennett.
We don’t feel it (all the time) but we are now some of the longest time-served dudes in car audio, with so many others having gone as the world changed from ‘everyone’ to ‘enthusiasts’ and we can both recall cassette, MD, DAT, MiniDisc and CD of courseand so have seen a few revolutions in car electronics. But none have been so sweepingly cool as the new era of digital radio. As for the first time, it is not just fidelity or even choice, as CD then iPod brought us but it’s broadcast content that has exploded and right now if you do not have a digital radio in your car then you bloody need one. Here’s what Chris Bennett of Celsus Ice has to tell you about the device and the antennae that they do and then we both check out the car install, just sat in the car park.
I do apologise in advance for basically being in the way as far as Chris’ YouTube fans are concerned, as I can reveal that the reason we especially went and did some intensive filming of a bunch of clips is that Chris has become my own personal YouTube star, with his style of delivery racking him a slew of fans and one of ‘my’ (his, really) highest-rating video views counts of the half-million or so I have got on over 200 videos so far!
There’s still places where I shoulda shut up, though&;..


And if you want to just sort your car out, then here’s what you need to get your dealer to orderon a list on the relevant web page here:
link