Story and photos by Dave MacKinnon Norm has covered off many of the highlights of this year’s CES quite eloquently. For me, on merely my 8th time at the show in my 24 year career, It was quite different for me. Usually I am there to directly support the company I work for, or as [...]

Story and photos by Norm Ross   I am calling CES 2012 (the Consumer Electronics Show), the year of the robot. Anyone reading this in their fourth decade of life, or older, will remember the toy robot or car that you got Christmas morning with a long wire to a remote control. If you were [...]

Text by Dave MacKinnon, Photos by the Manufacturers   I was just trolling the 12V Insider forums when I stumbled across a discussion of mobile electronics installation wiring guidelines. I have to admit, this is one of my favourite topics, and one I have spent some significant time researching. It is also critically important to [...]

It’s getting cold outside and we in Southern Ontario are scheduled to get our first snow flurries of the season in the next few days. Typically, this would be the perfect introduction to a piece on remote start systems – but it’s not…

Text by Dave MacKinnon, Photos by the Manufacturers Twenty-two years ago, when I got into the mobile electronics industry, everything was relatively simple. The most complex part of a radio installation was making sure the cage for the pull-out tape deck was secure in the dash and that you had correctly connected the dimmer lead [...]

Last month, we took a look at marine electronics including head units and amplifiers. It was a good primer to get into this cool mobile electronics category, but it’s also only half the story. I have said a million times – if you don’t have good speakers, all the expensive electronics in the world…

I’ll be straight up about this issue of Plugged In – we aren’t going to talk about anything related to cars. When I started writing Plugged In, it was my goal to never beat any single topic to death, and to expose the readers of RPM to as many diverse aspects of the mobile electronics industry…

It wasn’t long ago that automakers phased out tape decks in new cars in lieu of CD players. In the past couple of years, most of them have caught on to the iPod revolution and now include either a USB port or dedicated iPod connection to let the latest generation of music enthusiasts…

Last year, we took a look at how speakers worked, then at what separated the also-rans from the truly great products. In this installment of Plugged In, we are going to delve into the topic of subwoofers. If you ask the average guy or girl on the street what a subwoofer is…

Back when I got into the industry, a mere 22 years ago, the car alarm installed in my 1982 Dodge Aries (sedan version, don’t you know) included an impressive two wires and a knob to adjust the shock sensor sensitivity. We have come a long way, and now have security and convenience systems that can tell us the location of a vehicle, allow us to remote start a car from more than a mile away and even let us use our cellular phone to activate functions from another town,