Not that new cars have cassette players anymore, but in HS these were top notch and often worked better than early day Bluetooth receivers but how did they work?
In: Technology
Audio is recorded to cassette tape by creating magnetic waves in the read/write head the tape passes over witch imprints the pattern onto the tape. When you play it back the head reads those waves to recrete the sound.
Cassette adapters contain a identical head that is set to write right where the tape would be and the tape deck head reads it as if it were tape.
If your talking about an adapter that you insert into a cassette slot that has an aux wire protruding back out of the slot for connecting to your phone, etc, the cassette “module” takes the aux signal sent by your phone and mimics a magnetic tape so the cassette reader can understand the data.
If you’re a visual learner, [Technology Connections](https://youtu.be/dH4n8fUjtLQ?si=UI392l4nRcS8ByRz) has a great video explanation
Other comments have given good written explanations so I won’t try to outdo them
Casette tapes worked by encoding the audio into a magnetic strip of tape. Those audio signals were then passed through wires into your speaker system where the signal was converted to sound through your speakers.
A casette adapter would take the signal from the audio source and convert it to a magnetic signal that the player can read. Because the player didn’t need a tape it just needed the signal.
It’s actually incredibly simple.
Sound is a wave, a simple tone is just a sine wave, and you can make complex sounds with complex waves.
A cassette simply records that sound with tiny magnetic fields on the tape, and it passes the pickup inducing a small amount of current, which matches the sound wave, which can then be amplified and when the speaker vibrates like that, it creates the sound dictated by the pattern.
Your headphones do the exact same thing, but your phone is already putting the signal out as electricity.
The 3.5mm (headphone jack) to cassette adapter just has the singal produced by your phone pass through an exposed price of metal right where the pickup would touch the magnetic tape. The electrical signal creates a magnetic field which triggers the pickup much in the same way the magnetic tape would. This transfers the signal to the pickup so it can then be amplified and played through the speakers, just like before.
These adapters were basically the write heads of tape players in a plastic cassette chassis.
The heads in the cassette were in the place were in a real cassette the tape would be read.
So the heads in the cassette were directly against the read heads in the car cassette player.
You would do the signal to tape and tape to signal without the tape, skipping that and reading and writing at the sane time.
You would think that passing the analogue signal back and forth so many times would make for a lot of noise and poor sound quality, bit it worked surprisingly well and not much worse than directly wiring the out port of your device to the input of the car stereo.
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