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.
That’s new tech. I had a Radio Shack adapter to play cassettes that plugged into my car’s 8-track system.
Better yet, play your phone audio through your 8-track system!
This is blowing my mind lmao. At what point just buy a new radio deck. They make modern ones that look vintage. Has HD radio and BT…
I had a Bluetooth cassette adapter as recently as like 2021, I like old cars
These comments are blowing my mind. It’s like no one here knows that you can easily upgrade the stereo to a modern one. Plug and play in most cars with the right adapter.
Ha! Nope actually, not in my old Cadillac or my Mercedes. Those both had anti theft. That would have been nice though.
I drive a 2001 which is in that dead zone after cassettes but before aux plugs. I still had to be burning CDs a few years ago but eventually stumbled across an adapter that tricks the car stereo into thinking my phone is a 6-CD changer in the trunk.
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.
keep it steady? did you neglect to install the shock absorbing plate?
My new hotness has a 30-sec anti-slip feature!
Not gonna be anti-slip when girls see it 💦
Damn I remeber my dad built it’s own shock absorber plate with springs and everything…
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.
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.
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 these in 2008 to play music from my PSP.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
It’s 1995!
And, now that I’m older,
stress weighs on my shouldersoh neat, TMBG! I’m seeing them live on Sunday
heavy as boulders?
but I told yall, until the day that I die…
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
“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 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 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
