Car Stereo Tape Adapters - 8-Track to Cassette to MP3

Over the years, there have been many different ways to listen to pre-recorded music in a vehicle. What you see now on the screen is just a small selection of the formats that have been used for this purpose. I guess nowadays the most common form was the bitter discharge. music via Bluetooth or of course, as always, listening to the radio, but I'm going to back up a little and talk about what happened when your vehicle's player was not able to play the current format of your choice, now the 8

track

s. It had a pretty good run, starting out in the 1960s and you could still buy current releases until the mid-1980s, but actually its heyday was in the 1970s, particularly the early part of the 1970s, towards the end of the 1970s. the seventies, Compaq. he said he pretty much took over and at his lunch so what if your vehicle contained an 8

track

player and you wanted to play compact

cassette

s?

Well of course you will get a new vehicle, you could get a new

tape

player or you could get a

cassette

adapter now there were many manufacturers of these, in fact I think there were too many because there is still a lot of new and old stock on eBay, which It is what it is now. I think we are supposed to sell them to people who didn't want to replace the deck on their vehicle maybe didn't have the money for it maybe like a student who bought an old vehicle or maybe even someone with a bunch of 8 track

tape

s that they I didn't have many compact cassettes.

Now we have controls here to stop playback and fast forward. There is no rewind if you press the stop button, which is also the eject button. Now these would have been a cheaper alternative to installing a cassette deck in your vehicle, but this is not the option. Not bad as far as the mechanism goes, it looks like a pretty decent quality 1970s cassette deck with a nice metal tray sitting on the end of an 8-track cartridge. If you look around the other end, you can see the part that goes to the 8-. track player and which simulates the tape running through the heads of the machine, as expected, I don't have an 8 track player in my car, however, I have a wad in my hair, so I actually have a couple , this is the backup one and This one works fine, so we can try it on this one.

Okay, it doesn't sound very good, but that's why the backup player, the quality ones, is the loudest thing in the room. Now notice how far it hangs from the front, which is a pretty long distance to glue. in a vehicle, but let's listen, I'm glad to see that everything works, including fast forward, the sound is not pleasant to listen to, it's quite distorted, it comes out of the air, it gets too hot, however, the fact that this thing has been It stayed in its box for about forty years or so, it's a good thing it works now the reason for all this was to find out how these things work, obviously the front goes on the eight track player, the back is a hanging cassette player?

How does a cassette get the power to move? I used to think that maybe there was some kind of wheel driving a belt inside it, but that's not the case. Looking at this, there is none of that, there are just two metal pins on one end and apparently according to the specifications it uses a power supply of between 11 volts and 25 volts, well there is no battery inside this thing so How do you get that energy? I think the only way to find out is to take it apart. I'm doing this very carefully because I plan to put it back together and use it later in the video, but it came apart very easily.

You can see the compact cassette deck at the top there and then at the bottom on this circuit board attached to it with a The spring is this element that pushes against the playback heads on the eight-track deck and simulates the step of the tape by sending magnetic pulses. We have these two metal arms here that have a spring on them and they're connected to that circuit board that's connected to the motor here at the top that has a belt on it that fortunately hasn't perished and then we have the controls on the end there and then This cable goes from the playback head of the cassette deck to the circuit board at the bottom and of course ultimately to that device which connects to the playback heads on the 8 track player .

You can see the circuit board here. I just pulled this out to show you what's underneath, not much, but there is a variable potentiometer. There I wonder if that would adjust those output levels anyway. I have to put it all back together because I'll still want to know exactly what those two metal prongs on the inside of the 8 track player touch, so let's have a Look inside the door now, if you look towards the center of the picture you'll see a piece black plastic with a red wire coming out of the bottom, it has metal contacts, on the other side, those two spring loaded arms attached to those two contacts and draw power from it now what is that?

Well it's an idea of ​​the original purpose that it is supposed to push against the tape inside an 8 track cartridge, when the tape has gone through a complete cycle it brings up the piece of metal tape around which it completes. the circuit between those two senses and that's what lowers the head to play the next program, so it's just a sensor, but surprisingly there's a lot of voltage going on, it's between 11 and 25 volts, which is enough to power a DVD player. compact cassettes and since those sensors are in the same place on every 8 track player, they can make a universal 8 track to compact cassette adapter, it's actually quite ingenious if you think about it, that's how some people manage to play compact cassettes on their old 8- track players, but let's still have the same problem maybe twenty years later and now you have an older vehicle with a compact cassette player but you want to play mp3s on it.

The most common way to do this would be to plug the headphone output of your music playing device into one of these

adapters

and put it into your cassette player, but that's a bit boring and simple. I want to show you something a little more interesting that you might not have seen before: it's an mp3 player that's inside. a cassette and you can put it in your cassette player and it will play your mp3s without having any cables hanging around. Let's take a look now. This is a cheap device costing around £10 and look at all the things Getting to work now tells me these power supplies aren't worth keeping around, plus they feel unpleasant.

I always recommend that people don't use cheap Chinese power

adapters

that come with dash cams or anything else you might notice like that just for the fact that you can separate them with your hands, just throw them in the trash and go and use them. a proper power supply, a proper USB charging that you have from somewhere else now. I was trying to get through a year when this came out, obviously not. a new device is for when people had cassette players. I wanted to play mp3. It says here that it supports Windows 2000 and XP, which put it somewhere after 2001 and also mentions that the maximum SD card size it will support is gigabytes now, whether that was the case. a Mac, sorry I wasn't too sure at the time, but you got the idea sometime in the early to mid 2000s.

I think we have the same type of head mechanism as the other one, it has the head deck. on a piece of plastic so it doesn't scratch the head of your machine and that pushes against it and sends magnetic pulses through your memory card that goes in the back, your full size SD card and we have controls here so operate and we have an on/off switch on the other side, it has an infrared receiver, a USB charger and a headphone port because you can use it as a separate mp3 player and take it with you without having to use it. in a vehicle so turn it on it has some power it has a little remote control with this also with a button cell battery and of course the idea with that remote control is to point it at the tape player sticking out of the edge of your machine like in this image here so you can jump between tracks and things, but I'm going to use this on a different machine.

I don't have a car tape player again. I have a home tape player quite a few of them, so I'm going to use that to put this SD card in here, which I'm going to put some music on from the YouTube audio library and play it on this cassette player now, of course, when it's in here. We won't have access to that infrared remote receiver, so we'll have to see how it works. It's a bit tight too, that weird off switch sticks out of the side a bit, which makes the cassette a bit wider than a normal cassette, so I have to shove it into the tray here to get it into the machine.

Notice the red lights flashing there, that happened as soon as I turned it on. Turns out that means it's playing as soon as you turn it on. it starts playing so when I press play on my machine the head goes against the tape and plays whatever the mp3 player is currently playing. The instructions here state that the mp3s are played in random order and of course as I mentioned as soon as you turn it on it will start playing them one after another, it sounds pretty decent although there is absolutely nothing wrong with the sound quality, much better than the eight-track retrofit cassettes used previously, this simply sounds like any old mp3 player. now I'm putting it on a different machine so I can test the infrared remote because I'll have access to it from the side because the infrared port is on the left side of the cassette here and I can point the remote at it, let's see if it works, like this that everything works fine.

So I wanted to know if the transport controls on my cassette player would have any influence on which mp3s are played. Initially, you seem to think that. something is happening because when you press stop they stop when you press play they play again but it doesn't do anything at all. What is happening is that the mp3 player is still playing the music in the background. You can see the red light flashing all the time. Everything that is happening. Are you moving the playback head further away, meaning you're not hearing the sound it's producing anyway? Let's take a look inside this to see if there's anything clever or interesting here because if I don't take it apart someone will definitely ask me so I might as well do it there so there you go you can see it has a circuit board which is a little and simple mp3 player and of course an SD card reader.

You have some gears here that are there to convince your tape machine that you have a cassette. Some will stop, of course, and stop playing if they think they've reached the end of the side. You do all this by hooking up a load of gears back and forth just to keep your cassette player happy thinking it's actually playing a tape that's still going, but that's it, those are there because you don't press any buttons or anything. like that, there is no connection to the circuit board and here there is a small rechargeable battery that powers the mp3, no power is drawn from the cassette deck, it is not for 200 milliamp hours, that is not right, because if you look at the specifications out of the box, 450 milliamp hour lithium-ion battery, well, of course, it's not something expected, right? this is just a bit of a cheap thing, it's probably a copy of an original, but it's version 1.0.

From the looks of it, I don't think they did anything after this, so we have an mp3 player on a cassette that we have. a cassette adapter for an 8 track player, you can guess what I want to do now, that's right, I play an mp3 on an 8 track player and I'm not even having much luck because the cassette doesn't fit inside the adapter, that's all. with that weird off switch on the side, makes it too wide to fit in there every time i put it in it turns itself off again. Well, I'll be damned if I'm having my stupid dreams of doing something completely useless. a piece of plastic there we're going to take it off the side of there we can still operate the on/off switch.

I'll do it with a screwdriver or something and now we can finally try to play an mp3 on an 8 track player. Look, it's flashing, although that doesn't mean it's playing, so let's listen to it. Okay, it was a complete waste of time, but maybe you'll be happy anyway and it works fine. The next thing I want to try is to see if we can turn this into a portable device, so now we want a portable 8 track mp3 player, plug it into the side, look how stylish and easy to carry, the problem is that it doesn't work and the reason is that this particular 8-track player does not have an automatic switching mechanism, which means that there is no power supply to the 8-track cartridge or the cassette player that follows it and therefore the circuit does not activate .

If you wishcarry this mp3 player with you, you can do it in a traditional way like this. I guess it's a newfangled mp3 player, everything works fine, it has a seemingly six hour battery life, but they spent about eight gigabytes max on SD card support, which will be annoying for some people, so let's see if it works. you need a bigger card. I have a 16 gig here, I put 10 gigs of mp3 in it, which is still quite a few tracks and it works fine, so yeah, I don't know if that's a real limitation or just something that's printed. the documentation but anyway in this video we have gone from a snare to a compact cassette to mp3 and I hope you enjoyed this little game with the story if you want to get an 8 track player or an adapter like many of them on eBay , the speaker I reviewed separately, the link in the video description, and the mp3 cassette adapter.

I'll also have links to that in the video description, but that's all for now, as always, thanks for watching.