My sis gave me her old belkin itrip a while back. Problem is the signal was pretty poor to the point of having to have the sound turned up to a level where there was audible crackling going on.

I know theyll never be 100%, but Im guessing there must be some units out there which have pretty strong transmitters/better quality than others.

Ive not used my ipod in yonks, and am contemplating spotify premium, it would be great to be able to listen to tunes on my phone in my car, and so I need a transmitter that:

Uses a 3.5mm jack
can be powered by USB (I have a cradle that charges the phone and has an additional usb port...so any units which are 12v socket only wont do...)

Any suggestions? Ive seen a few which also double up as hands free units and DAB, which was cool, but I felt that theyd suffer from doing too much at once and be poor all round!

Heh I was just about to totally recommend a Belkin Tunecast 2. I think theyre great !

It uses 2 * AAA batteries OR 12v DC socket...

Do you have aux input on the CD Player at all?

http://www.mazda3forums.com/index.php?topic=57833.0

http://www.msprotege.com/forum/showthread.php?t=123634459

Some ideas if you havent seen them

Yup, seen them. The ones in the second link either are really hard to find or are expensive, or have reports of not quite working properly with my model stereo :/

Combined with the fact that the car is on PCP and I dont want to do anything major to it in case I lower its value, Id rather have something that is reversible/transferable.

My mate fits the cables to the rear of the units, but without looking at the rear of yours i would have no idea how it could be done

Theres an aux port, I know what is back there, I know what needs doing etc, but I really dont want to be removing the stereo and drilling holes to mount the cable. I also dont want to end up with a solution where no holes are drilled but the mp3 player is left in the glove box etc. The easiest solution is an FM transmitter, and cheapest too!

My mate installs a load of these cables, and one thing he does is runs the cable out of the back of the dash down in the footwell and mounts the ipods using velcro, that way you dont do any lasting damage and the velcro can be removed.

When I say Aux I dont mean Auxillary out/3.5mm thingy...I mean theres a port back that that a media device with the right connector will connect to...such devices not being cheap apparently, or the ones that are, dont do much and require you to end up doing all sorts to get it working, like having to press the media button x amount of times to get it to work etc.

I ended up grabbing a generci £20 jobby that I think is just a rebranded belkin from Sainsburies while I was out today. Signal is much better than the old iPod one. Itll do the job. I just need to get a 3.5mm extension cable as the one that comes with the device is stupidly short.

if it has an out for a cd changer you can probably get a wire to plug into that and go to an ipod connection at the other end for a few squid on ebay, what i have in my car - charges the pod too.

Jaimz