The only radio we lis­ten to in the Miata is from RadioParadise.com. OK, occa­sion­ally on a Sat­ur­day morn­ing I’ll tune to an NPR sta­tion to catch some clas­sic Click & Clack, but 99.9% is an MP3 ripped from an inter­net stream and burned to a CD. Ten of those CDs sit inside a car­tridge housed inside a Sony Disc Changer that is tucked into one cor­ner of the trunk. It has been that way for the 9–1/2 years the Emperor has been in the fam­ily. This same changer even pre­dates the Emperor for a cou­ple years prior it sat inside the spare tire of the trunk of our pre­vi­ous Miata With No Name.

Recently this unit has been ran­domly pow­er­ing off leav­ing noth­ing but sta­tic ema­nat­ing from the speak­ers. I’ve checked all the con­nec­tions and they all seem sound, wig­gling any of them (espe­cially the power cable to the changer) will not make it hic­cup, once or twice a ride it will cut out for any­where from a few sec­onds to around a minute. Annoy­ing to say the least. Last week I decided to do some­thing about it.

I ordered a GROM AUX-IN Adapter that that allows the use of an iPod and plugs into the back of the Miata’s head unit where the OEM Mazda disc changer would have went. We hap­pen to have a 4Gig Nano that only gets used one or twice a year when Donna and I fly in an air­plane, the rest of time it sits in a charger wait­ing patiently, this will give it rea­son to get excited for each new day.

The adapter arrived in the mail­box on Mon­day, so nat­u­rally the rest of the day was spent rip­ping out the Sony Disc Changer, reclaim­ing 5% of the Miata’s tiny trunk space. Then I needed to remove the OEM radio to get at the con­nec­tor on the back. Using instruc­tions found in the Miata.net Garage I made my removal tools from a coat hanger, but no amount of pushing/pulling/squeezing/ wig­gling would get it to come out. After 20 min­utes, a cou­ple of cuts, sev­eral bruises and a blood blis­ter on my left index fin­ger I gave up. I guess I might have to break­down and buy 2 sets of the offi­cial removal tools. I had dis­con­nected the bat­tery to take out the CD Changer, so I hooked it back up and set the time on the clock and even loaded a cou­ple of the local radio sta­tions as presets.

Tues­day morn­ing when I got in the car to drive it to work the radio didn’t come on! Pushed the power but­ton and it just bounced back at me, no click. The dis­play didn’t even light up with the clock. There wasn’t any face­plate illu­mi­na­tion either. Didn’t have time to do any trou­bleshoot­ing, so we took the Sonata to work.

At work I called a cou­ple auto parts stores to see if they had any of the removal tools and struck out. Then I tried a local car audio place and the guy there said just bring in the car and I’ll pop it out for you. After work I went there and lick­ity split he had the unit loose. Amaz­ing what the proper tool for the proper job will do. I thanked him and came home. The radio fuse was fine. I pulled the head unit out and dis­con­nected the har­ness. Got out my trusty Radio Shack Mul­ti­me­ter and with with the pin out dia­gram for con­necter (thanks again m.net garage) checked for 12 volts. Unfor­tu­nately I had the cor­rect volt­age at the cor­rect pins. I say unfor­tu­nately because that meant the radio was dead.

Hooked the radio back up, slid it back into the dash, but­toned it up so the inte­rior looks good and wish­fully tried the power but­ton again (still didn’t work.) Now comes deci­sion time, try and locate a very scarce used Miata Bose head unit keep­ing AUX-IN box or return the AUX-IN box and just buy a new after­mar­ket head unit with the iPod func­tion already built in. Until a deci­sion is made it’ll be kind of quiet in the Emperor’s cockpit.

The sound of silence will not be as hard to get used to as it will be to not see the time on the radio display…