I cannot even think of a way that digital media can be transferred into cassette form to play in your car.
In: Technology
So I think it’s worth noting that by the time the signal has reached the aux cord, it’s already been converted from digital to analog. Our ears are analog, so any music we can hear is also analog.
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The cassette part of the unit contains an electromagnet which imitates very, very well the same kind of signal generated by tape passing over the cassette player’s play head. It is entirely analog.
Magnetic tape records audio as a change in in magnetic field strength of the tape. As the tape slides over the read head the changing magnetic field gets converted back to electrical signals.
The aux cord adapters are remarkably simple. First thing is that the audio signal from the headphone jack is analog. The digital to analog conversion happens in the device playing audio. The cassette adapters just send the analog audio signal from the aux cord into an electromagnet that sits next to the cassette player read head instead of headphones. Changing electric field into an electromagnet makes a changing magnetic field.
There is an audio head just like the one in your player. It has an audio cable connected to it. There are some gears inside to trick the player into thinking that there’s a tape inside. The heads in the adapter and player touch and the sound is magnetically transferred between them.
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>I cannot even think of a way that digital media can be transferred into cassette form to play in your car.
That’s because it’s not digital at all. The digital audio is converted to analog when you record it to the tape, then on playback it is reproduced in analog form to the aux input, then amplified.
If you’d use a CD player with an aux cord, the audio would be read in digital form, then converted to analog by the CD player before sending it over the aux cable.
If you have a mini disc player (or maybe a very exotic CD player) that outputs over SPDIF/Toslink and a car radio that accepts SPDIF/Toslink in its aux (I don’t think they even exist) then it would go digitally from the disc over the cable, then the radio would convert it to analog, then amplify. Note that essentially all amplifiers nowadays (except for some audiophile tube based amplifiers) are class D amplifiers, those like a bitstream instead of an analog signal, so the radio may skip over the digital to analog step and instead convert it from digital to bitstream.
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