They are still around. They even come in Bluetooth flavour now so you don’t need the cord.
Perfect for my Bluetooth Discman.
We were using this well into 2010 or so. Better audio quality than an FM tuner as long as the electromagnet wasn’t overheating.
The best option though was to get an inline FM injector and plug it in where the antenna plugged in. Perfect audio.
Tape adapter should be just as good. If it’s not, you probably have dirty heads or are using it wrong (wrong side, NR on, etc).
The tape adapter is legit just a wire that connects to a tape-head inside the cassette body. That’s it. It’s head-to-head.
Most of the noise and artifacts in tape are a result of the tape itself. No tape, no noise. Consequentially if your tape deck has Dolby Noise Reduction or a similar feature, it should probably be turned off.
Relevant Technology Connections: https://youtu.be/dH4n8fUjtLQ
My nokia n95 had a small integrated FM transmitter.
Tanked the battery but was fun to play with
My 2000s-era cars don’t* have tape decks, unfortunately. I say “unfortunately” because they also don’t have line in, USB, or Bluetooth, so their AM/FM/CD car audio units are, in 2025, objectively inferior to the AM/FM/cassette ones in my 1990s-era cars.
* Present tense because I still own cars from the '90s and 2000s. I refuse to own any car capable of violating my privacy, which is every new car.
I refuse to own any car capable of violating my privacy
Is this you?
No, but he’s right.
*Is this GNU?
Let me introduce you to the Citroen Ami/Opel Rocks-e/Fiat Topolino, where the entertainment system is a literal bluetooth speaker in a cupholder.
Yeah, but we’re talking about cars. I think the Ami is legally something like a dune buggy
I haven’t seen it in ANY of the dune movies though…
Super reasonable. We had a 2004 Honda Pilot at the time, which still had a tape deck.
I swear, even ebikes are starting to get all these GPS tracking features 😅 such a dystopia.
It’s okay. My car is covered in cameras and has a mobile broadband connection to the mothership, so it’s probably tracking your glorious 90’s swag wagons without your consent anyway.
Anyway, sorry about that. I’d tape the cameras up but then the car complains a lot.
Luckily most cars with cd players made after 2007 also included an aux port.
Please. I had a cassette with built-in storage, that could play in a cassette deck player AND had an headset jack plugged in for music on the go.
We’re still using one of these haha.
i was using one of these to connect my laptop to my “speakers” (an old stereo set) as recently as 2019, lmao
Russia or Mississippi?
Switzerland, which probably makes this even funnier
Same setup I have now just plug the rca jack into a Bluetooth receiver instead of a CD player.
Worked? Mine works perfectly!
1995? We were still using these in like 2008.
2025 as well.
That, plus a portable CD-MP3 player, was the bomb.
I still have my iRiver iMP-350, a portable CD player that could read mp3 and wma files off a CD-R or CD-RW, allowing way more than 74 or 80 minutes of audio. Damn thing still mostly works 22 years later too, thanks in large part to them including a 2x AA battery dongle in addition to the gumstick-shaped rechargeable batteries in the main unit which have long since leaked.
When they started selling head units with aux in ports, I had to have one in my car. And when they started putting iPod connectors in head units, perfection.
iRiver= S tier mp3 nostalgia
I’m gen z - though on the older side - and I remember using these
The best thing about the 1997 Volkswagen Jetta I had was it had a 12-disc CD-changer in the trunk. Why it was in the trunk, I don’t know, but I had updated the front side deck (which was also cool because it was just a box you could plug into the front and not have to get deeper into the wiring or anything) so it could read MP3 CDs, so 12 of those in the trunk basically held almost everything my iPod could.
No longer remember the car model but mine had a deck for 6 in the trunk and one in the dashboard
I had an Acura with the disc changer in the trunk, I imagine the moving parts right behind the firewall would not fare well for long in heat. You’re right though, the move to burning MP3 CDs felt like you had almost infinite space for all your bands
These adapters were perfect… The only problem was that personal CD players of the same era skipped when you looked at them wrong.
I remember buying a Sony mp3 CD player with 5-second skip delay for $80.
Everyone was still using regular CD players with their 80 minutes of audio, carefully holding their precious device.
While I was living like a god, playing over twenty hours of music, dropping my player over and over, without losing a beat.
I remember shopping for diskmans that had the longest anti-skip.
You definitely had to keep the cd player in a level spot in your car where it didn’t bounce around a lot
I would have had to reach forward, because I never understood them until this thread. Now I can pretend to understand them and just frustratedly say, “It’s basically electromagnets, to oversimplify it” next time someone mentions these.
Like how did these even work??
Technology connections explains it very well
Great explanation I get it now!
The player reads a magnetic tape. Put the same stuff inside the cassette and reverse it, now the player reads a reader.
Instead of running a magnetic tape over the cassette player’s sensor, you put an electromagnet on it powered by the headphone jack. The cassette player just reads the magnetic field and doesn’t know any difference.
damn I thought it was writing the tape in real time that would be insane
You shoved the cassette into your car radio and plugged the other end into a cd player
Computer Engineer here, studied QED and E&M.
This is the most accurate answer
Magnets, how do they work
Literally no one knows.
