Ok so its official, by modern standards and common consensus I am old. Not because of my chronological internal clock or the 40 summers I have seen. No, I am old because I refuse to fill the boot of my car with a box the size of a fridge and play music through it so loud that it makes birds fall out of the sky.
I am talking about music in cars, I.C.E, toonz, da stereo, or in my case the eight track. 
Well that’s a bit unfair, I actually DO have a CD radio in the car, but its so full of LEDs that light up to show me this that and the other, it looks like a Jean-Michelle Jarre concert everytime I turn it on, so I don’t bother. I really can’t understand the fascination of driving around with music up so loud and bass so deep that it makes every ones windows rattle. The cost of this stuff is just astonishing, a fridge sized speaker that you fill up your boot space with starts at about £100, the ‘headunit’ (or ‘stereo’ for us unhip lot) starts about the same and keep going, until your wallet is peeing blood. Honestly prices run to the deposit on a small bungalow by the time you add speakers, cables, amps and god knows what else.
All this, just to make a noise in an acoustically terrible tin box on wheels, and make other people miserable.
Look at it this way, you buy your nice car, add some nice wheels, tweek the performance and handling so you have a quick, fun to drive machine that’s a joy in the twisty bits and a hoot when you can stretch its legs. Then after all that you add ballast all over the place, that then unbalances the car and makes the poor thing move at a crawl. But this is the real puzzler, this is the thing I really don’t get, you drive around with your windows down (or up! its so damn loud that you can hear it several miles away, buried in a concrete bunker) and you firmly believe that you look cool, you really think that your ‘Drum and Bass Compilation Remix ’09 CD’ (or anyother CD, to be perfectly frank it could be Barry Manilow…) makes you look like Snoop Doggy Daddy, and without exception, EVERYONE thinks ‘Pah, what a complete toss pot’. Even teenagers think this, though secretly they ache to be behind the wheel of their 1.0l Peugeot pumpin’ out da choonz.
Apart from the cost, which would be so much better spent on refining your car, The other point is sound. Hi-Fi buffs (there are a few of these around I’m sure) will tell you that there is a correct way to listen to music, to get the very best from the recording. The position of the speakers, correct size and distance to get perfect stereophonic sound, special rooms just to achieve the perfect listening experience. Its why Linn only make record players for houses.
The only real reason for all this hardware is to make a noise. Well that and to make people look and point at you as you crawl through the town. Well I have a better solution, fill the car with fireworks, and light them as you drive by, its cheaper and you would probably get a few admiring looks, well I’d cheer anyway.
So why the heck do they do it? Do they hate driving that much that every journey they have to have something to distract them from it? Conversation in the car has to be done in sign language, and that’s quite hard with blood pouring from your ears. I love to drive, even if I’m just on the school run I concentrate hard (see my previous blog, holy cow you need your wits about you near any school, not just from wayward kids but parents who are too engrossed in ‘Hello!’ magazine and the Ministry of Sound at 1,000,000 watts) 
I have to admit, a radio in a car can be an entertainment god-send if the traffic is stationery and has been for the last hour and a half, you are alone or the company in the car is boring. It can be a useful and informative tool, though I cant for the life of me work out why it tells me of the jam ten minutes after I have hit it. DVD in a car is a great idea, if its in an MPV and keeping the children quiet in the back so they don’t need the driver to turn around and yell at them to shut up, distracting him and making him drive into the car in front, causing yet another tailback.
People that need noise in the car just to make it move are in the same category as people that moan when they have to drive for more than 10 miles, if you really hate driving that much then for goodness sake take the bus, or go by train so the roads can be freed up for those of us who love it.
