Need car radio recommendations

[RadioGaGa75]

I just acquired my late grandmother's old 1992 Honda Accord. I'll tell you this car is nice! Only 103,000 original miles, car port kept, fully loaded, runs great, great gas mileage, and the best part. . .it's paid for!!!!! The only problem is that the Kenwood after market radio in this vehicle is awful! The reception scratchy on FM and the engine noise makes listening to AM radio impossible. Since I work in the business, I listen to a lot of radio including AM radio.

I'm looking for recommendations on good car radios, especially for listening to AM. I've thought about taking the old radio out of my 2000 Civic and putting it into this vehicle. That radio has always had excellent reception and has been especially good at filtering out engine noise. Ironically, it's actually the original Honda radio that came with the car.

Any engineers out there got any advice?

thanks!

 

[Chuck]

These days, factory radios are usually very good. How about visiting a local salvage yard and buying the factory radio that belongs in your car? That shouldn't break the bank...

 

[WNTIRadio]

He said that the car is a 1992. The factory radio that goes in it is crap as well. 1992 was before non-luxury automakers even thought about putting in a good sound system. Even the so-called "premium" systems were garbage by today's standards.

Go Sony. I've never had a problem with them and their tuners are excellent.

Before you try a new radio though, ground the crap out of the one you have. Run a heavy strap from the case on the radio to the body of the car. Make sure you have good metal-metal contact! No paint!! Run a second negative wire directly to the battery. Make sure your antenna is well grounded where it is attached to the car. If it's a Honda, it probably has the pillar mount antenna. Tighten both screws that hold it in.

You may find that clears up 95% of the engine noise.

 

[Tom Wells]

He said that the car is a 1992. The factory radio that goes in it is crap as well. 1992 was before non-luxury automakers even thought about putting in a good sound system. Even the so-called "premium" systems were garbage by today's standards.

Go Sony. I've never had a problem with them and their tuners are excellent.

Before you try a new radio though, ground the crap out of the one you have. Run a heavy strap from the case on the radio to the body of the car. Make sure you have good metal-metal contact! No paint!! Run a second negative wire directly to the battery. Make sure your antenna is well grounded where it is attached to the car. If it's a Honda, it probably has the pillar mount antenna. Tighten both screws that hold it in.

You may find that clears up 95% of the engine noise.

Everything he said. You may be real happy with that radio the way it is. Get a real whip antenna if it doesn't already have one.

If it does, take it off and wire brush the grounding area where the antenna sits in the fender. Then re-install.
Ground bond the hood to the fenders to the firewall with 12 gauge wire in newly drilled holes.

 

[alleo]

Re: Need car radio recommendations, one thing

You could try this trick on your car. I found that remove the ground shield from the ant end from the car body lost lots of noisy on AM .

 

[Kmagrill]

The original factory radio in the Accord had a Bose nameplate and actually sounded very good. My older brother still has his in a '93 Accord. Premium sound systems stared showing up as stock radios in American cars in the mid-1980s. My '86 Z28 had a stock AM C-QUAM stereo radio with 5 band EQ and 25W per channel. Japanese cars followed a couple of years later so hifi sound was available in all brands by 1990. However, the Accord radio of the day had a cassette deck and no CD. Most of the Accords had a power antenna, so be sure that yours goes up when the radio is on. Kenwood usually makes a nice radio, so the problem is likely with the car, not the tuner. In addition to the suggestions already made, you might also consider replacing the antenna. They do go bad. When I was about 16 or 17, I was sure that my car radio was junk. I tinkered with it for days, even taking it apart and tweaking all the IF stages, but to no avail. Replacing the antenna solved the problem and taught me a lesson.

 

[WNTIRadio]

Don't know what cars you were buying, but until the early 2000's, most of the factory radios were junk in both the American and Japanese cars, especially the lower/mid level cars.

Even my top of the line Subaru radio in 1998 was junk. Sure it was 25WPC, but still had a crummy receiver and bad EQ. And those 25 watts were mostly "peak power" and not RMS.

The first car that I've left the factory radio in is my 2008 Subaru Outback. 6 disc changer, aux input and a tuner with DSP and at least 2 IF bandwidths. I can literally be at a transmitter site, tune to the 1st adjacent station if there is one (and one that's 20 miles away) and hear it narrow down and lock on! It's pretty damn impressive! And it does it with an in glass antenna in the rear window.

The 1992 Accord has the antenna in the rear fender if memory serves me.

 

[CatFM]

I had a 1991 Civic with a stock Honda radio and the AM side sounded better than the FM side. If you're going to be listening mostly to AM, that would have been a good choice. The stock radio in my 02 Civic has a much better FM side, but the AM sounds flat as day old beer.

One thing I can tell you about old Hondas is they tend to have a lot of alternator noise at idle and lower RPMs. I had it on a couple of Civics, and I have seen the same thing in Accords. It was a real problem using my 2 Meter ham rig in the car for a while. The best solution I found was to run a fused hot lead directly from the battery. It seemed strange to me that the loud whine showed up in receive and transmit at idle and speeds up to about 40-45 mph, then it completely disappeared. One of the hams I talked to regularly bought an older Accord and had the same problem until he ran a direct power lead to the battery. I thought about hooking my regular car radio to the direct lead, but the only AM station I listened to around town was close enough and powerful enough for me to pick it up without any real noise. I could do nighttime DXing on the road most of the time without any problems.

 

[WNTIRadio]

Direct leads are good. But before you do that, ground ground ground and then ground again.

Check your battery terminals for crud too. Get any of it off with a wire brush, put conductive grease on the battery terminals and tighten up the connections.

Check the ground leads coming off the alternator and engine and clean if need be. Some Deoxit on those connections will help as well.

I've gotten rid of a lot of engine noise on various different cars with just those steps. My boat too. Wires are real important in a marine environment since the boat is fiberglass!!

Low noise spark plug wires are a next step if all the stuff with the battery and grounds don't work.

 

[RadioMan203]

Also keep in mind some features of your car may be integrated in your radio. In my friend's 10 year old Honda the keyless entry system was integrated into the radio so it makes removal or replacement a little more difficult if you want to keep such features.

 

[RadioGaGa75]

I really appreciate everybody's advice. One thing I did not discuss (which may be where I need to start looking based on the responses) is about the receiving antenna. It was one of those electric antennas that goes up and down depending on when the radio was turned on or not. The fellow who mentioned that earlier on this thread is correct. It's on the back left side of the car. Anyway, I say "was." It got busted off a few years ago when my grandmother was going through a car wash. Rather than paying to have a new electric antenna put in, she simply elected just to have a retractable antenna put in that you would have to manually pull up or push down. Being on a fixed income, understandably, she was trying to keep costs down.

So it sounds like the aftermarket Kenwood radio may not be the problem, but the antenna?

 

[littlejohn]

Antenna, antenna cable, and grounding. I been having good luck with Kenwoods for quite a while. If you have ignition noise, see if someone replaced the spark plugs and/or wires with other than the stock ones. If you have alternator while, grounding and check the suppression cap which ought to be on the back of the alternator.

 

[mp3RadioGuy]

Kenwood has been making great car revivers for many years. I replaced my stock factory receivers in my last 3 Toyotas and my son's Honda with Kenwood's and there was an immediate difference in both sound quality and sensitivity. Most of the new double-Din models now have Bluetooth, HD, RDS, Nav, USB and play DVD's.

Get out your Crutchfield catalog and take a look.

 

[Kmagrill]

The car may also be producing broadband noise that interferes with the radio. My 1999 Dodge started doing that exact thing when it's cold. The interference stops suddenly when it's warm.

 

[WNTIRadio]

Sounds like a loose ground somewhere with a small gap that expands just enough to close it when the engine bay warms up.

 

[Fieldtech1]

I've always been partial to Blaupunkt for radio reception. Not sure how their newer radios are, but their early 2000's decade models had amazing reception capabilities.

 

[CatFM]

I will toss this bit of info in just for the heck of it. Seems like I posted it earlier, but way back. In the early 80s I put a Pioneer Supertuner in my car and I was impressed with the FM reception. The antenna was a basic OEM vertical mast. I was able to receive one of my favorite stations from about 150 miles away. When I changed cars a couple of years later, I ended up with a Honda that had one of their typical pillar mount antennas at about a 45 degree angle. I kept my Pioneer unit from the other car and put it in the Honda, but I lost about 50 miles of coverage from the same station. The only thing that changed was moving from a vertical mast to the angled antenna. I thought it was a bad idea to have an antenna mounted like that, but I guess fashion won over function in their auto design. Bottom line is that I would recommend a vertical mast. Has anyone else noticed a big difference like that?

 

[Tom Wells]

Ive never had or used a vehicle with a 45 degree antenna but have always thought there would be an effect exactly as
CatFM noticed.

FM broadcast was originally introduced as a horizontally-polarized antenna medium, meaning
old fashioned flat, stacked element TV antennas, aligned horizontally, were intended.

If I recollect what I learned, this began to change as FM made its way into more and more cars, and somewhere
in the late 1960s the FCC began to permit horizontal and vertical polarization, because cars certainly already had
vertical whips at the time, and horizontally polarized signals suffered a lot of flutters and cancellation.


I have an early 1980s Blaupunkt Richmond that has always impressed me with its balance between
sensitivity, selectivity, and seeming wideband AF response on AM. It's probably 13khz max, but very well balanced on
weak and strong distants. It has a DNR button, which works on all modes, and cuts hiss amazingly well.
It also seems to cut off the audio twice per cycle as it senses for hiss, so it IS adding harmonic distortion, but in
the AM mode this serves to provide a very natural sounding "extension" of high frequencies, and an improvement in
signal to noise ratio. In listening to symphonic music on FM, I remember the effect as being less enjoyable,
but the 8-10 db of real hiss reduction was worth the result. Haven't used the car that has the first one in quite a few years.
I sure hope the Blaupunkt works as well when I get it back out someday.


I found a "broken" one on ebay for 15 bucks....the FM doesn't work, but the AM is just fine so I've been using it for an air monitor.