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
“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.
It’s kinda funny thinking back to how awesome it felt to be able to carry around hundreds of songs from the perspective of having access to services that can listen to any song while it streams on a device large enough to hold my entire music collection and still have tons of space left over.
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
It’s 1995!
And, now that I’m older,
stress weighs on my shoulders
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.
Holy Crap at first I thought that was Chandler. Great video tho, and I’ll be damned, those things work exactly like I always assumed. I really thought that explanation would turn out to be too simple. Never thought about also having to make both spools turn so the player won’t think the tape has run out.
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.
I’m still doing that in 2024. Get on my level.
