Microphones often decline in quality as form factor shrinks, giving audio producers on the move a difficult choice between bulky gear and full fidelity

For all the advances the iPod—and now the iPhone—has made, Apple still hasn’t solved a fundamental problem. The pack-in earbuds suck.

Your Nano Gone Retro

Back in the olden days, before there was iPod, and even before Sony made music collections portable with the Walkman, the kids were known to enjoy music on the go with the help of a transistor radio. Larger than a shirt pocket, but small enough to carry around, they were especially popular in the middle decades of the 20th century and produced a distinctive kind of sound—thin and tinny, with a narrow frequency response and a tendency to distort at high volume. The effect was anti-high fidelity…but it was portable.

Shift your tunes into your car.

Getting music from your iPod to your ears is usually easy—use headphones or one of the kajillion iPod speaker docks littering the countryside. But the question of how to get music out of your iPod and into your car stereo can be a bit more vexing. A direct, wired connection sounds the best, but if you don’t have a built-in iPod connector, or a fancy stereo with a line-in jack on the front, your options are limited to expensive aftermarket iPod-friendly stereos or yanking your current stereo out of the dashboard to install a cable yourself.