ELI5; Scientifically, how do cassette players work?

Question

I mean it’s just strips of plastic

Edit: What I mean is how does the VCR machine/walkman read the strips of plastic to make the video/souund?

In: 0

Answer 1

In a radio or cassette player the circuit has many different pieces of components that can convert changes in electrical and magnetic fields into sound.
The cassette tape basically has variations in its stripe, such that when run through a reader, the pattern on the stripe becomes changes in the magnetic field, that ultimate become changes in sound wave and that’s sound.

Same principle with CD player and DVD player, and even Hard Disk Drive in computer. There’s a disk that encodes the information in some way, and there’s a reader that can transform the encoded information into changing electrical current, which then drives the electronic that produce sound and images.