The good lady recently bought me a premium subscription to Spotify. Amongst lots of new features is the ability to play music on my mobile streamed from Spotify, which, when I connect it to my 3G Mifi, means I can stream almost any album from wherever I am.

Add into the mix the fact that I currently drive a Mercedes Benz A-class with a very nice music console and a 3.5m jack input for aux. input. If I run a short 3.5m stereo cable from the phone to the socket I can get streamed audio straight into car. However, there would appear to be a slight problem. For the past few weeks the setup has been producing a lot of feedback. The sort of engine noise, electric switch style feedback you used to get on old cars with no suppressor on the antennas or speakers.

A quick search on Google turned up instances of other people reporting the same problem. Most ended up taking the car to the local dealer to get it looked at, others involved taking the music system apart and removing a couple of cables. I didn’t fancy the latter so I booked the car in to get it checked out.

I’m in the car quite a lot and on one particular journey the radio was playing awful music, I couldn’t find a CD I fancied so I thought, I’ll just put on Spotify and turn it down so that the hiss doesn’t get too annoying, only this time there was no hiss and on this particular occasion I hadn’t plugged in the USB cable to keep the phone charged.

As someone who always likes to confirm their theories I plugged the USB cable back in and the hiss magically returned. So, it would seem that the problem wasn’t with the music console, or the 3.5m jack or the audio cable but with the USB cable I was using. Investing in a more expensive cable is the way to go, for now though I’ll just make sure the phone is fully charged before I set off in the car!