Cassette tapes might not have the audiophile cool of LPs. Or the durability of CDs. But for a long while, they were the medium of choice for plenty of folks, and damned near ubiquitous in cars. If you’ve got an older car, like me, you may appreciate this cassette player hack, which turns an ordinary line-in cassette adaptor into a Bluetooth-enabled one.
There’s something satisfyingly retro about this particular hack, which takes an ordinary cassette car adaptor and makes it Bluetooth compatible. Sure, it doesn’t charge while you’re playing it, which would be great, but otherwise I could see myself using this a lot in my ancient rusty old ride. [Hacking Projects via Hack A Day]
Sicarius123
Monday, September 12, 2011 at 1:31 PMThat is fairly cool, although would the audio quality be any higher than using an in car radio transmitter?
Alex Kidman
Monday, September 12, 2011 at 1:33 PMAn FM transmitter? Quite possibly — there’s lots of FM interference around, whereas if you got a solid BT connection it could work well. Although the builder does note that the tape head itself is quite noisy.
olearymo
Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 2:33 PMMost phones have bluetooth, very few of them have FM transmitters.
Craig
Monday, September 12, 2011 at 1:49 PMWouldnt it just be easier to use those old tapes with the cord hanging out that you could plug in your phone or mp3 player to?
Matt L
Monday, September 12, 2011 at 4:54 PMEasier (Pairing = pain in ass, plugging in = normal)…. Just as useless tho… You might aswell put HDTV in a 1953 AWA black and white television
E.E.
Monday, September 12, 2011 at 6:31 PMNow if only he had put the USB socket on a short cable.
Anchored onto the cassette case and soldered to the USB header on the motherboard.
Run a short cable from the cigarette lighter to the protruding socket.
Bingo! Constantly charging receiver.
Rob C
Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 5:27 AMWouldn’t it have been easier to just buy a $50 mp3 headunit from ebay, install it and save the old tape deck in a drawer?
You can get cheap units that only play from SD and USB cards. We bought one, and you could probably even strip out the innards, which is a single flat circuitboard, and put them into the tape deck.
I frankly don’t see the point of keeping tape decks. The sound quality is awful, and the tapes don’t last without suffering major problems.
Taper
Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 4:13 PMIt is recommended not to use these adapters with metal heads. They screw up the auto-reverse tape play head in no time. FM transmitter is a better option as there is no wear and tear suffered by the tape play head. One of the early effect is wearing off the one side of the auto reverse head. The other effect is breaking of the side reversal switch.
Tape players are supposed to play pure cassette tapes. Putting these cassette adapters will ruin them in no time.
FM transmitters are also cheap < $10 (far cheaper than standalone MP3 players). You also do not lose the tape functionality.