What are the options with the standard radio?
Many MX-5 drivers are switching to a more modern radio with a touchscreen and support for Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, so they can stream music, make calls, or use navigation. That’s a great upgrade, but not everyone is interested in it. You can also choose to keep the original radio and find another way to make calls and stream audio.
A few years ago, I bought a Parrot MKi9000 car kit—deliberately without a screen, but with a small wireless control panel that you can place wherever you want. I like to have things like that within easy reach, so I chose a spot between the window switch and the gearshift.
The Parrot car kit was connected to the radio using a mini wiring harness—in this case, the Kram ISO2CAR 86140. This allows you to install the car kit between the wiring harness and the radio by connecting the large connector—which is normally located at the back of the radio—to the mini wiring harness, which in turn has a large connector that fits into the radio. Since a Parrot car kit needs to be universally compatible with all kinds of cars, it always comes with ISO connectors. To make it compatible with, in this case, a Mazda MX-5, you use a Kram ISO2CAR cable to adapt the ISO connectors to a specific type of car—or, more precisely, car stereo. That explains the cable’s name, as well as why there are so many different ISO2CAR cables. All in all, you’re adding quite a bit of wiring to the car, but it is a plug-and-play solution.
This Parrot car kit supports several Bluetooth profiles. To make hands-free calls, you need the Hands-Free Profile (HSF). To stream audio, use the Advanced Audio Distribution Profile, better known as A2DP. To control the volume, replay a track, or skip a track using a remote control, the car kit must support AVRCP, which stands for Audio/Video Remote Control Profile.
The advantage of the Parrot car kit is that it always controls the speakers. It doesn’t matter whether you’re listening to the radio or a CD; the car kit always takes priority when a call comes in or when you want to stream music from your phone. The car kit then temporarily mutes the radio and sends the audio to the speakers.
However, there are also a number of drawbacks:
- The sound quality is determined by the quality of the amplifier in the car kit. Of course, it doesn’t have the same quality or power as the original radio;
- The control panel—which is essentially a remote control—is clearly a non-original element in the car’s interior;
- Since the control panel is wireless, it runs on a button-cell battery that eventually runs out and must be replaced;
- No matter where you place the control panel, it’s always a compromise. If it’s within easy reach, you’re likely to press it accidentally; if you put it somewhere else, you’ll have to search for it or stretch to reach it;
- You can press the radio buttons as much as you like, but they have no effect on the car kit, since it only accepts input from the control panel.
All in all, it’s a solution that’s perfectly acceptable. I’ve gotten a lot of use out of it, but right now it’s just sitting idle on a shelf in the garage. That’s mainly because I saw potential for a solution that, in my opinion, is more elegant. I’m talking about the Yatour module, which supports the same Bluetooth profiles as the Parrot but works with the original radio in a different way.
The photo shows that you can also use a small control panel with the Yatour, but in the MX-5 that isn’t necessary because you can use the radio’s buttons instead. This makes it much more intuitive to use. The Yatour, model YT-BTA-MAZ1, connects to the 6-CD changer port on the back of the radio. The radio recognizes the device as if it were a CD changer. This also means you can control all functions using the radio’s buttons, and you’ll need to select the CD changer as the source to listen to music streamed via Bluetooth.
Precisely because the Yatour can be controlled using the radio’s buttons, I took it a step further and adapted the audio buttons from a Mazda 323F (manufactured around 2000–2002). The radio recognizes the signals sent by those buttons. I’ll explain exactly how that works in another post, but it allows me to control the radio, CD player, car kit, and Spotify right from the steering wheel.
I placed the Yatour’s microphone in the lower right corner near the instrument cluster.
