Homemade CD Cassette Adapter

I was frustrated after a number of tech stores sold badly overpriced adapters. I looked on the web but didn't find much useful information, so after realizing how these adapters work, I made this adapter. Its so easy to make your own CD-cassette car adapter its not funny. This is all you need:

• Old cassette tape held together with screws
• 1/8" phono (stereo) plug
• A tape head (don't have one? Scroll to the bottom)

Steps:

1. First you need to find a tape head. I used one from an old 14 year old walkman that I took apart years ago to see how it worked. A tape head usually has 3 wires from it: a ground, right channel and left channel. More expensive ones have more wires so they can record to tape. You'll have to figure out which wires are the left and right channels - the thick odd looking one will be the ground.
   
   
2. Cut the end of the stereo plug and strip it to expose the wires. You now have 4 wires coming from the plug: a ground for each channel, and a left and right channel. Wire the ground from each wire to the tape head ground, and the right and left channels to the corresponding left and right channels of the tape head.
   
   
   
3. Take apart the cassette tape, and discard all removeable parts. You need to break off and sand down the plastic bits that held all the parts that you just removed so the tape head will fit. Not all cassettes are created equally - you'll need to experiment with them, as the first one I used was too thick and didn't work very well.
   
   
   
4. Place the tape head in the cassette case. The vertical alignment is crucial to the sound quality. If the alignment is a little off, one channel will be very quiet. You'll have to try it in a tape deck, and adjust the head up and down using spacers until it sounds right. You also want the tape head close to the edge of the case - the closer the tape head is, the 'louder' and better the resulting signal will be.
   
   
5. Once you are happy, Put some heat-shrink tubing around the exposed wires, put all the screws in and glue the head in place and voila - a cheap alternative for a CD adapter.
   
   

There are many good explanations of how tape heads and magnetic media work, and how four audio channels (two for each tape side) are recorded onto a tape so I won't get into that here. Time to make the adapter is less than 30 minutes, though it may take significantly more to align the tape head.

No Tape Head?
If you don't have an extra tape head lying around, you can make your own. The tape head basically creates a magnetic field based on the signal from the music. By putting two heads together, the magnetic field created from the music signal from the modified tape head assembly induces the same field in the tape head of the cassette deck. A music signal is created from this magnetic field and processed by your tape deck and you hear music. You can simply make wire loops (an inductor) which creates the magnetic instead of using a tape head. The method, as well as an explanation of how it works can be found here.


Last Updated: November 2/01