“Let me put my my burned CD of mp3s into my discman that is connected to a tape adapter.” Me, until about when Zunes hit,Woot for$99.
I had a disc-based MP3 player. The looks on my friends faces when I had 150 songs on my discman and they had 12.
Yep this was me. Anti skip CD player then mp3 CDs then zune
I wanna repair my dad’s 1st gen zune so bad but I don’t think you can just drop on Flacs which is like the 1 thing id use it for
dad’s 1st gen zune
I still used one of these daily until at least 2009 to play music from my 2006 5th gen iPod video on my 1993 Buick regal because it sounded 100x better than any fm transmitter could produce at the time.
Joke’s on you - that’s literally what I use in my 03 Jetta 😂
I always thought these things were brilliant but was never sure how they worked. They basically had a recording head that sat against the playback head of the tape player and sent a signal into it, right? I was never even sure of that.
Gonna drop this here for those interested.
So normally the magnetic tape would spin by the reader in the player. However instead of a tape they put an electro magnet there. Then they use the same technique to simulate a magnetic tape. Tadaa you made digital audio into electromagnetic audio
That’s what I always thought - I think it would work to use a recording head as the electromagnet, treating the player’s playback head like tape.
There’s actually no digital audio involved anywhere in this process. It’s all analog.
A magnetic tape cassette holds raw wave data of the sounds it records. Just like a vinyl record, except the groove is in the magnetic field instead of physically etched into the surface of the tape, and the needle is an electromagnet instead of, well, a needle.
An audio cable using a standard 3.5mm jack also transmits raw wave data. It has to, because the electromagnetic pulses in the cable are what directly drive the electromagnets in whatever speakers they’re hooked up to. If it’s coming out of a digital player, the player has to convert the signal on its own using an onboard digital-to-analog converter (a DAC).
The neat part is that since a tape deck read head is looking for an analog wave signal, and an analog wave signal is what an aux cable carries, the two are directly compatible with one another. If you actually crack one of these tape deck hacks open, you’ll find the whole thing is completely empty, save for the audio cable wires going directly to the write head that mimics the tape. Beyond that, there’s no conversion equipment, no circuit board, nothing. It’s a direct pass-through.
The body of the thing is nothing more than an elaborate way to trip all the mechanisms in the tape deck to trick it into thinking it’s holding a valid cassette, while simply holding the write head fixed in the proper spot.
I’m sure you already know all of this. I just think it’s really cool and I enjoy talking about it. Analog tech is amazing.
And the best part is, because the signal is so clean, and there’s no crappy tape grinding across the head adding noise, the audio quality is damn near on par with just connecting the aux directly to the amplifier.
Mid 80’s me had a cassette player that plugged into the car’s 8track tape player
My buddy in the 80s drove a shit station wagon from the 70s that his parents gave him that had only an 8 track.
Aw hell yeah, Sparkomatic!
My best friend in high school in the '80s had something on his home stereo I’ve never seen before or since: an 8-track tape recorder. We would make 8-track mix tapes and take them to parties … which we promptly got kicked out of because they were tapes of stuff like Yes, King Crimson, Laurie Anderson, Tangerine Dream and Vangelis, and didn’t nobody want to listen to that kind of shit back then.
Techmoan on YouTube covers stuff like this. Here’s a video for anyone interested.
Mid-’80s* me
1995? … I keep this adapter for my old 2004 GM Truck … and no one I don’t want bluetooth. The atrocious sound quality is nostalgic to me and reminds me of being a teenager.
I heard the sound quality was really good because it was a direct feed to the reader.
this is very very wrong. the sound quality was a dumpster fire
Yup! I have a drawer of these things because my brother & I used to fight over them. Still use one in my dad’s truck when I steal it from him.
Leave those air pods in your pockets kids. Nothing brings the heat like the annoying clacking of the auto reverse on a cassette deck, constantly trying to flip over a cassette that doesn’t flip, while matching the rhythm of your current jam.
… or the faded degraded sound of ‘Appetite For Destruction’ from the worn down cassette you’ve been playing over and over again for the past ten years.
I think yours might be broken.
noo… you’re not moving the wire right. You have to move it back left when it does that & then hit the ff button twice.
fuckinghingworksjuatfinedroveacrossthreedamncountiestofindafyckinradioshack25goddamndollarsassholewouldnttakediscover
See. Told you it works!
shitbirdbettersitstillandnotjostlethatdamnwireifuckinlovethissong
Used this in an 05 Jetta until earlier this year. It handled calls too.
Still use this to this day in my car - although the Bluetooth variant. The only downside is that you need to recharge it from time to time. That problem has been recently solved by the purchase of a second one :)
Wouldn’t it be easier to have Bluetooth but have it plug into the cigarette lighter plug and run into the player like the other ones do? I feel like that could have been easily done by the designers
Technically an option for sure. With the Silkroad-special model sold through Amazon the manufacturer decided to have the adapter turn off during charging. So listening to music while the adapter being plugged in is not possible unfortunately.
Get a poorly made one and it doubles as an AM radio too, or I should say it is only an am radio since you get nothing over the speaker but Am interference.
I’m still doing that in 2024. Get on my level.
Boss
Respect. The casette-aux is way better than the radio transmitters, if you don’t have bluetooth nor an aux input. I was using one up until about 2015 (with my ipod instead of a cd Walkman though), before my car finally gave up the ghost. Now I just use bluetooth
This shit blew my mind back in the day, much like how I can plug a dongle into my cigarette lighter and somehow Bluetooth my phone to my old ass stereo.
The cassette player in my old car had a cover that was also a display panel. It folded out, then you put the tape in and flipped the cover back so it locked, then you could play.
Got one of these adapters to plug in an iPod. Stuck it in, then went to close the panel. The wire got in the way so it couldn’t lock. No way to jam it without damaging the cable.
No return policy back then. It sat in the dashboard until the car died many years later.
I was still using one of those til 2012. That’s what I get for having an old car. I did upgrade to a mini disc player tho.
Why didn’t you just upgrade the radio? A decent head unit with an aux jack and bluetooth can be purchased for as little as $40-50, and takes less than an hour to install in most cars with the right adapter. Literally plug and play in most vehicles.
It was one of those times when you already have something that’s working for you just fine and it wasn’t important enough to change it.
I was using one of these, and then later a short-wave radio to play on my car radio that was too old for USB but didn’t have AUX-in either.
I still use a radio adapter because phones no longer have headphone jacks.
wha? my phone still has an audio out jack. but of course it’s 6 or 7 years old.
You cannot possibly be ignorant to this. Do you live in Somalia?
Well I finally got a USB hole and Bluetooth this time, but now I have the Blues Brothers soundtrack stuck in the CD slot (which seems like a pretty ideal choice to be stuck in a car radio).
Gotta Velcro that bitch to the dash!
I literally just got my first portable CD player on Sunday. The sound quality is way better than my super cool DRM-free digital library.
