WANTED: A Digital AV Adapter Cable Extender To Reduce Wire Clutter

If you use an iPhone 5 to connect to your AppRadio 2 or 3, you have experienced this issue. There are one too many wires running from your dashboard or center console to your phone creating a messy look. There is an HDMI cable and a lightning cable connected to the Apple Digital AV adapter which in-turn connects to the iPhone 5.

Older generation iPhone users don't have this issue. Some Android users may need multiple wires running to and from their phones to make things work but I wanted to discuss issues with the iPhone 5 connection. I am looking for a solution to reduce this wire clutter.

The Apple Lightning Digital AV Adapter has a short wire which means you cannot hide the adapter anywhere in the dash close enough to where your phone is mounted. With one of the mounts I've used in the past (Kenu Airframe Vent Mount as pictured above) the adapter sticks our like a sore thumb sometimes even resting over the AppRadio screen.

So this is what I was looking for… An adapter with a longer wire…

Unfortunately, no such adapter exists. This is the only adapter Apple makes and even third-party makers don't make anything like it. There aren't any Lightning cable extenders that will work either.

After much searching, I found a Lightning cable extender on eBay. The description said it would work for video, audio and charging functions. So I purchased it for $15. Sounded too good to be true.

I got the extension cable and tried it but the hunch I had that it wouldn't work was right. It only charged the phone. AppRadio mode did not work. So I returned the cable to the seller.

I tried to see what a cross section of the cable would look like. I searched the web for anyone that may have done a teardown of the adapter out of curiosity. But I couldn't find anything.

So I decided to take the cutter to the wire myself, hoping it will be a bunch of eight cables (since Lightning is an 8-pin port) which I can extend by adding additional wire. On cutting the wire on the adapter I was in for a big surprise.

Now, I'm no hardware expert. So the cross section looked way too complicated with a mesh-type wire along with what seemed like four or five other finer cables that were quite hard to splice. There were reds and blues and greens and whites. This is what the mess looked like…

After connecting as many wires as I could, I only got the charging function to work. Video didn't get transferred through the cable though.

Apple's 30-pin cable, the predecessor to the Lightning cable, had plenty of third-party extension cables available. One such extender, the CableJive DockXtender worked well when I had an iPhone 4S. I had it hooked up to the AppRadio because the cable that came with the head unit wasn't long enough.

So I've almost given up trying to find an extension for the Digital AV adapter. If anyone out there has any ideas on how to get this done please leave a comment below. Meanwhile, the search for the perfect setup continues...