Limitations

 Ah yes. The Chevrolet Vega. The car I drove through high school and eventually into history. I put a number of stereos into that car. I have a very visceral memory of a group of my friends all attacking the panels in the back seat, with hacksaws and metal snips attempting to create holes big enough for my fancy new triaxial speakers to fit. It was, as Steve Martin once described comedy, not pretty. 

The reason for the somewhat frequent changes in hardware was simply because of the speed at which new technology was being unleashed. AM and FM were simply not enough when it came to the sounds emenating from your car. You needed a cassette deck. Then you needed an auto-reverse cassette deck. And when I had reached that plateau, there was a graphic equalizer to attach to that machine along with those previously mentioned advanced speakers. More bass. More volume. More music. And once the bending and tearing was all done, the wires were stuffed back behind the dashboard and waited for the next permutation to be applied.

This wave of car stereo nostalgia comes crawling back out of the swamp of my memory to make me wonder what I thought I was thinking when I took on the task of putting a new radio into our little electric car. There were hours of research done in order to find the compatible machine. I was burdened by the new term "head unit," which brought not just AM and FM and who would want a cassette or CD player when there was Bluetooth available as well as satellite navigation? This wasn't just a car stereo I was installing. I was suddenly thrust into the role of brain surgeon. 

I watched a number of videos, taking careful note of the wiring harnesses and the plug and play aspect of the installation, feeling confident that the chore I was embarking on would take me a few hours but leave me with a fancy new machine that would do my bidding and respond to all my commands. 

Sadly, I was not the first person to have this idea. The previous owner of our little Fiat had put his own new "head unit" in to replace the factory version, and when I got ready to attach our new version, the edits that had been made previously to the wiring stuffed back behind this dashboard were not like the ones I had studied on YouTube. I got the lights to come on, but no sound came from the speakers. I found the speaker wires and could not jam then into any of the nicely prepared modular sockets. I resorted to my Vega days and began to strip wires and attempted to splice them into the color coded spaghetti that lay before me. Black with black. White with white. White with black stripe to white with black stripe. What about this purple one? 

After an hour of making things worse instead of better, I surrendered. I went back inside and called a professional. In the forty-some years in between my initial forays into creating vehicular sound systems, my knowledge base had dissipated. I was in a strange new world. A world in which giving up and paying someone far more knowledgeable and far younger than I to make this thing work. 

So I can play music from the 1980's as I drive my fancy new electric car around a brave new world.