You have to be born in the land of quality approach, at the time when everyone have nothing to do but talk, and raised by people who don't like to waste their breath for a bad sentence.
Wow... I saw that first cassette player and thought.. "Wait a minute.. that's a CD player." Then he ejected the tray.. I've never seen a cassette player like that before.
hey, nice seeing you here, it was a thing people did at the end of the cassette player to make it seem more like a cd player, to my knowledge. most dcc decks used this kind of cassette loading system.
@@Alpine_Wanderer My dad had a Pioneer CT-F8282 Stereo Cassette Deck when I was a kid and it has this curved clear cover over the cassette that I thought was the coolest thing growing up. Found a TH-cam video of someone showing one off. th-cam.com/video/W7pypr0e5us/w-d-xo.html
To be honest there aren't many people on TH-cam who are the only people doing it, that's what happens when you have 1,000,000's of people using the same thing. What sets @Techmoan apart is the way he delivers the content, works very well for me being from the UK. Thanks for yet another informative video, keep them coming!
I had figured out how the power gets to the adapter decades ago, and as you covered it the cobwebs very slowly cleared from my mind. I remember buying a used car that had an 8-track and one of these adapters under the seat. Retrieving that cassette adapter and slamming it into the 8-track put a huge smile on my face.
We need to get a device to allow playing of 8 tracks in grammophones. A voice coil driving the needle should do it. Also at the other end, a wifi card to go into the SD card slot and play from a streaming music service. Then we can have Spotify playing into an MP3 player pretending to be an 8 track driving a grammophone.
Syncopator It works with both SD and Mini SD cards. On the back, it says up to 8 GB, but if you use 16, 32 and 64 GB SD card, it will have more songs to go with it. Along with the earlier capacities like 256 MB, 1 GB and 2 GB will also used for box sets like a Reader's Digest or a Longines Symphonette boxsets from original instrumentals to compilations.
"Finally we can play mp3 in an 8-track player"...all the 8-track users will be really happy now. Great video as always Mat! Thank You! Also really smooth ending with the music and credits...
1:58 - "Unsurprisingly, I don't have an 8-track player in my car..." Maybe not but did you ask the dealer when you bought it if you could get it with that option? LOL Whenever I buy a new car I always ask that question just to see the "deer in the headlights" look from the salesperson. LOL
I always threaten my car dealers that if they don't include a plush toy I'm walking out. I've waited over 30 minutes for a Peugeot dealer into including a stupid plush Peugeot lion plush into my last purchase, he was probably just idly chatting away with his manager all that time but I don't care. I got the plush. It's cute. Retails for about $40... absolute ripoff.
I got the Toyota 2020 Olympic plush (some robot masco thing) with my car just before lockdown. The salesman was saying Toyota has millions of these it can’t do anything with cos the Olympics were looking like being postponed.
I have my 1972 Panasonic RS-802US 8-track player/recorder where it plays and records music on 8-track. So I use my Sparkomatic 8-track cassette adapter to play MP3’s on them, and it plays regular cassettes where it plays way too fast.
The intro you use to your videos is immensely satisfying. Short and sweet, sounds wonderful, and the LEDs are a great visual touch. I think it's way better than the generic After Effects Tech Demo intro used by so many channels.
I'm at a point now where I've watched so many of your videos, I cant remember for sure if I have already seen one or commented on it before. A testament to how good your videos are. In any case its pretty interesting the way the cassette mechanism was powered in the Cassette to 8 Track adapter. If I hadnt watched this, I never would have known, lol.
you could measure "vinyl records eaten by the scratchy vibrato-stylus per minute". also imagine the vibrations of the stylus (mainly because of the motor, but also the road) amplified by your car stereo. you might just go deaf from that by listening to the music at conversation-volume.
they actually have car record players. I saw a DeSoto Firedome at a show with a record player installed in it. Slid in like a CD, It plays the record upside down in a gyroscopic type springed enclosure, the owner of the car said it never skipped.
Probably not, since records use physical grooves rather than magnetic pulses, although maybe with some very fancy and expensive technology you could create those grooves...
I had a neat little device in the early 90s called a "Sound Sender". My first car just had an AM/FM stereo with no cassette deck, and certainly no CD player, and this was before MP3s existed. With this device, you plugged it into the cigarette lighter, tuned the radio to a specific frequency, and plugged it into a portable cassette player or portable CD player, and the sound came over the radio. It actually worked pretty well. I don't know alot about the specifics with electronics, but it seemed kind of like a similar concept to an R/F adapter for a VCR or video game console for a TV, where you selected channel 3 or 4 and the signal of the device went over that channel. Similar concept, but with audio rather than video.
I actually just got a cassette adaptor with bluetooth to use in my car since I always wound up breaking the older, cheaper adaptors with the headphone connection. Even has a little microphone you can pull out of it to dangle from the car's tape deck to use all the fancy hands free stuff, and the quality seems identical. I've been using cassette adaptors for years, even in the early 2000s for a CD player and my first mp3 player and always assumed they never got any better. Had no idea this MP3 reader version existed, but I would have sprung for it super quick back 12 years ago since I only ever used my MP3 player in the car with my silly wired adaptor. Great video!
Hah, that tape mp3 adapter was pretty cool actually, never knew they existed. And putting it into the 8-track cassette adapter was some Inception level material.
possibly one of my favourite videos of yours ever! if you EVER for some reason, needed to play a specific track, and it had to be in MP3, and you needed to play it on an 8 track player, youre covered. I love it.
12:09 You can actually hear it playing before you even pressed play. It must be close enough to the play heads to actually pick up the audio without even being engaged?
This brought back memories from high school when I was driving a 1979 pickup with an 8-track player. I found one of these 8 track to cassette adapters at a rummage sale, got the cassette to 1/8" jack and plugged into a discman so I could listen to cd's in my old truck. Worked well if I held the CD player, but having to shift gears and hold a disc man didn't work too well. Good times.
There is not a generator in existence small enough to fit in a cassette that would generate any meaningful energy at the comparatively slow speeds a cassette plays at, nor do I think it would be possible to make a generator so small in the first place, but it would be a cool idea.
@@stephanschmidt2334 im not really a mechanical engineer, but i dont think torque would be a factor in this case. energy generated in an electric motor comes from magnetic fields rotating around copper wiring, moving the fields faster moves electrons through the copper wiring faster. you want torque in a motor for something like a drill, where you need to apply more rotational force, not faster rotational force but that's just from my knowledge ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@@Templarfreak the speed doesn't matter that much, its trivial to design a gearbox to make it spin fast enough, the problem comes when the motor spinning the cassette doesn't have enough torque to spin it up.
Now that's a serious audio mash-up. I own one of those cassette-8 adaptors & yes, I have inserted a line-cassette adaptor connected to a discman. Compact disc to 8 track in 3 clumsy steps. Very happy to see someone else on the internet daft enough to do this!
Two reasons why I chuckled: 1) He's visibly struggling with the button 2) and once he succeeds, it lets out a horrible noise that only later begins to sound like a guitar
Yo Techmoan, I just gotta say, when I first watched this video and saw the device at 6:00, I bought one off Amazon right away - my car only has CD and Cassette players, but I listen to a lot of things straight off of TH-cam. About a year later I'm still using it every time I drive, and my friends use it too whenever they're in my car. I was a little skeptical at first, but as far as I can tell it sounds about the same quality as a CD. So thanks a lot for the info!
I played CDs thru my car's cassette player for years with an adapter, it was a fantastic cheap alternative. Also had one of those cassette mp3 players, good times. Thanx for bringing back these memories 🤓
the limitations written in manuals are just a list of what SD cards it has been tested with. some companies like Canon or Nikon make extensive tests with basically every SD available atm. others will just test a couple of basic ones. it's the writing speed and format which is important here.
So Carl, How do you listen to music? Me: Well, I download it off the internet onto my micro sd card. Then I put that into a micro to standard SD card translator, then I put that into an SD to cassette player. I then put that into my cassette-to-8 Track adapter, which I put into my 8 Track player. How odd. Me: Well how else would one listen to music?
if you rip out the recorded audio from your own youtubevideo from just about 12:10, transfer that piece of digitalaudio on the SDcard, put the SD card in the cassette adaptor and play that with the 8 track adaptor in an 8 track player, the universe will implode. Great video. Made me smile. Thanks
Fantastic video! It made me smile. I installed a 4-track in my car, then when 8-track came out I swapped it. I bought one of those pinch roller adapters so I could play my 4-track tapes... 👱🏻
this is my new favorite youtube channel it mixes my love for music electronics and mechanics....I bought a Technics SL-6 because of this youtube channel !
Instead of taking off the piece of plastic, you should have made an even bigger monstrosity by plugging one of those headphone-to cassette-adapters into the device and put that in the 8-track player.
To those complaining that Techmoan "stole" this idea from databits, I suggest that you actually watch both videos. Same idea, yes, but they each have a different take on it. I'd also point out that databits has several videos that were quite obviously inspired by Techmoan's. As a sidenote, I recently used a similar series of adapters to connect a mid-'80s portable TV to a modern cable box. Much like in this video, it was completely pointless but I enjoyed proving to myself that it could actually work. :)
16gb is probably the limit of what it can read. Once you get into 32gb you're talking about SDHC. More than likely 8gb was the most widely available size at the time.
The only difference between SDHC and SDXC is that SDXC comes formatted as exFAT. You can just reformat it to FAT32. I use a 128GB card in my 3DS this way, even though Nintendo lists the maximum card size as 32GB.
We still have one of these running around here somewhere. I remember going on vacation with my family and listening to cassettes with this contraption hanging out of an eight track player in a 1981 Cadillac Fleetwood. My parents want us to listen to their eight tracks like Lynn Anderson, John Denver and "Torn Between Two Lovers"... Over and over again. This device saved us so we could listen to Springsteen, Zeppelin and the Dead.
a new problem now is having a car stereo with only a CD player and radio. how can I play my music from my cell phone. if it had a tape deck I could use the wired tape audio adapter that was shown in this video. the car is from 2008 so there is no audio in jack or blue tooth. new cars come with these options now. I am better off changing the while deck.
I have the same thing in my car - I just listen to the radio. Those personal FM transmitters are generally a bit rubbish...and I have enough things plugged in.
I had that same problem with a car I used to own as well. My solution was to purchase an aux in jack that I wired into the car stereo. At the time, the solution was kind of crude, being that I had to splice a few of my radio cables and also use a power switch to turn the thing on and off, but it worked great, and sounded MUCH better than an FM transmitter. I did a quick search on Amazon for "aux in adapters", and it seems that they've gotten better, as you no longer have to splice them in. Instead, you can just plug them in. They cost around $25-$30US. Hope that helps!
I have the same problem. 2007 Astra only has radio or CD. I now have a huge stack of burned CDs in the car since empty discs are cheap as dirt nowadays.
Usually there is a port on the backside of car stereo unit to connect the cd changer. I have Yatour mp3 player that simulates the changer and it works perfectly in this situation. Sometimes you need a special Y adapter cable to put inbetween. Everything depends on the stereo model.
Yes, I did have a look at the referenced 'original' video. But as always, I prefer your video even if you discuss the same devices. But you go more into depth on the devices and even open up on of them. That is more than just a simple review and THAT is why your way of reviewing does it for me... Keep up the good stuff !
5:47 - "But let's move the same problem on perhaps 20 years or so later, if you've got an older vehicle with a Compact Cassette player, but you want to play MP3s on it." Yup. I actually bought two adapters for doing that. The first is the cassette adapter you showed right here, and it worked pretty well, but I'm surprised you didn't mention the second: an FM transmitter that attached to an MP3 player's headphone jack and played on any of several channels on the car's FM radio dial. The FM transmitter definitely had a sound quality advantage -- when it worked, that is. That, of course, was the problem. There were several things that sent me back to the cassette adapter. First, in places that have a lot of radio stations, like the city where I live now, it could be hard to find an FM frequency that wasn't being used by a commercial radio station, which the radio would pick up more readily than my little transmitter. Second, my FM transmitter tended to go through batteries quickly, and while it had an adapter that would plug into the cigarette lighter power plug, the car I bought this thing for didn't have a cigarette lighter. (On that car, the cigarette lighter and ashtray were optional, and since nobody in my family smokes, we didn't want to pay extra for it.) Third, even if there weren't any FM stations interfering with the signal, we found the range of the FM transmitter to be quite limited, and also very sensitive to where in the car it was sitting. So, while it sounded great when it worked, all too often, it DIDN'T work. So, back I went to the cassette adapter. That is, until the tape deck in the car broke, at which point I gave up and just listened to the radio.
Thank you, Techmoan! I've out-hipstered the universe. (No surprise, really, since I'm no hipster but I DO live in Brooklyn, so I have that in my favour/as a strike against me.) After you convinced me to own a luscious Sony TC-D5M field recorder, I stuck my faboo "UPDATED Tape player" into that monster, slung its strap over my shoulder and I now have a ca. 1980, five-pound MP3 player with dancing VU metres and giant vintage headphones. Taken to class and slapped on the desk, it gives even more of a WTF moment than to be seen listening to a white cassette through a headphone wire stuck in one end of the thing. Better yet, a Bluetooth transmitter plugged into the "phones" jack of the Sony can pipe tunes through a Mega-Bass wireless headset OR (points for weirdness) the Bluetooth unit on my motorcycle helmet with the Sony slung across my back. Better-better yet will be when I dismantle the Bluetooth XMTR and rig it for permanent power inside the TC-D5M with signal leads to the headphone audio circuit: Invisible Bluetooth in a vintage field recorder. Alternate better better yet: Embed the "UTp" MP3 player AND the B/T XMTR beneath the seat of my motorcycle with continuous USB power, so any time the helmet is powered-up, instant music. Except the controls of the "UTp" suck wind. On the remote, one can punch the number of a given track and play it on demand, but there is no random-repeat-all capability at all. The "RPT" button on the remote just makes the current track repeat until you want to take a can opener to your own skull, extract your brain, and carry on jumping on it in the street to make the horror stop. Goodness knows what the "MODE" button does. Make it stylish? Cover it in ice cream? Force-play Depeche?
Talking about cheap power adapters: Could you tell us which car cigarette to usb adapter is worthwhile? i found many create a lot of HF noise and my radio reception drops.
Just pay a decent amount from a recognisable brand - or a company you trust. E.g. Belkin, Griffin - perhaps pick one up in a proper electronics or phone store, even an Apple store.... just avoid unbranded or cheapo devices from a market stall or a random ebay seller. Too many people buy a dash cam or action cam for £100+, then cheap-out on the SD card and charger and blame the device.
Anker. Hands down, the best USB charging solutions (including cables) I've ever come across. Readily available on Amazon. Maybe slightly more than some of the alternatives, but you get what you pay for...
I have never heard of an 8-track media format. Didn't know that people were using these to listen to music in their cars back then. I was born way after it went out of use and never saw a car that can play an 8-track, but I did see a car with a cassette tape deck before. This is fascinating to watch.
That cassette mp3 player is beautiful, cheap but beautiful :D I'm glad you put the mp3 cassette in the 8 track, i would have been disappointed and upset otherwise.
Obviously ignoring the first thing you mentioned (the cassette to 8-track converter), do you know if I could use any of these on an old computer like an apple ii or c64 with a cassette drive? I'm beginning to collect older computers and while I eventually want to get authentic software for them, I want to be able to get programs from "alternate" sources first to see if I like them.
Techmoan Thanks. I recently saw a video from 8bitguy that made it sound like it wasn't hard to find the MP3's, but I haven't searched them out yet, so you may be right about them being difficult to find. Also, with the SD card one, what if I just put the programs on the card without using the MP3 method? Is there a chance that could work?
That should work, but is more complicated than needed. Most people do is just hook up the audio out jack of their PC/smartphone/MP3 player into the cassette in jack on their retro computer - no need for an actual cassette deck.
rjhelms Well I do want authentic cassettes eventually, and a 3.5mm-cassette is about the same price as a male-male cable, and the former is much more noticable in stores.
This video made my night! This is the audio equivalent of running a DOS based Atari emulator thru DosBox in Win10.... Because.. Why not! The first unit shown was sold in the US by Radio Shack (Realistic). Somewhere I still have one! The buttons though are all black. I can attest to it's quality (given it's task). I used it in my 1977 Buick Electra Limited (W/factory 8-Track) all thru the 80's! The second unit I would have bought (actually wouldn't mind one now!) I never saw one! (maybe not available in US) It would be an awesome way to "upgrade" vintage "Boomboxes", ETC!
8 track to tape to micro tape to aux to Bluetooth dongle then back to aux to chromecast to smart TV to external speakers to a wire voice recorder. Do you accept the challenge?
I KNEW you were going to try to play the SD card inside the cassette adapter inside the 8 track adapter! I just KNEW it! That is exactly what I would have done as well. LOVE this kind of stuff! Well done. I totally enjoyed this video. Thanks. PS, I had an 8 track to cassette adapter back in the day and used it ALOT in my 1962 Corvair!!! LOL!
Spoiler, it's a microphone recording that has been compressed recompressed and processed multiple times before it plays through your laptop speakers. You are dumb.
GeoNeilUK Right, the cheap mp3 player sound converted into casette signal, through a cheap casette deck's head, into 8-track signal and to 8-track player's head is fantastic. That's all the microphone, editing software and youtube's fault.
omfg. Look at the picture of the "Car Audio Cassette Adapter" at 6:08 "Mini-Disc" "DCC Digital Compact Cassette" "Compact Disc Digital Audio" "Auto Reverse" Wtf. That's a lot of logos. "Made in China" Oh, that explains it.
I use a Sony WM-FX38 Tape Walkman at work, and the SD to Cassette adapter in this video has been a godsend for me as of late. Higher ups just see me using a tape player, which is allowed, and I don't have to carry my tape case everywhere. Love the Pre-Amp in this old Tape player, as it works wonders with my AKG K550 Mk II over ear cans.
@@munkpuppy Count yourself lucky. Were I King, I'd gladly impose a fee for companies and the waste they create, that'd motivate more recycling options. Here, though, the list of "cannot be recycled" is long.
An lcd uhf tv..what manner of electronic perversion was that!? I used to put lcd monitor screens in overhead projectors, so I'm just as much an offender, I guess!!
Similar? Maybe. Our boy Techmoan went much further in depth as to how it worked. As per always. He improved upon the video without ever seeing it. Bravo!
Many thanks. I just bought one of these 8-track adapters off eBay - it didn't seem to work, so with the help of your video, I took it apart and found that the belt has disintegrated. I was about to write it off as yet another eBay failure when I wondered if it would still work with a cassette-to-3.5mm jack adapter. Guess what, it did! Even without any of the mechanism turning the head was still reading the cassette and passing the output to the 8-track. Result! I guess it would also probably work with a cassette-to-bluetooth adapter.
The one my parents had was far less bulky. It was longer than a typical 8-track, but not by much. The compact cassette actually mostly fit inside the machine when you played it. I'm also pretty sure it has this small roller at the end. I don't know if it used it to power the cassette, but I do think it was what was used against the heads in the actual player.
the natural wow and flutter that occurred when you used the 8-track to cassette converter was beautiful lol. not even being sarcastic. I just love that shit.
"I'll be damned if I am having my stupid dreams of doing something completely pointless dashed by a piece of plastic."
Yes!
Still can't believe how he can churn out such gems without a script.
You have to be born in the land of quality approach, at the time when everyone have nothing to do but talk, and raised by people who don't like to waste their breath for a bad sentence.
Fab
He is truly the messiah!
I was so happy he held this opinion.
Wow... I saw that first cassette player and thought.. "Wait a minute.. that's a CD player." Then he ejected the tray.. I've never seen a cassette player like that before.
The 8-Bit Guy hi
I've never seen one like the pioneer that played one upright either.
hey, nice seeing you here, it was a thing people did at the end of the cassette player to make it seem more like a cd player, to my knowledge. most dcc decks used this kind of cassette loading system.
It's a TNT Player. Apparently they were pretty successful as a cheap portable 8-track player.
@@Alpine_Wanderer My dad had a Pioneer CT-F8282 Stereo Cassette Deck when I was a kid and it has this curved clear cover over the cassette that I thought was the coolest thing growing up. Found a TH-cam video of someone showing one off.
th-cam.com/video/W7pypr0e5us/w-d-xo.html
MicroSD-to-SD card adapter in a SD-to-cassette adapter in a cassette-to-8-track adapter. Adapter-ception!
I'm afraid not.
@@CaveyMoth I'd like to see 8-track to vinyl adapter. There must exist something like that.
I cant wait for the floppy to cd adaptor for all my old dos games
MicroSD-MiniSD-SD
Add Bluetooth to the cassette adapter, you need Arsvita.
Ingenious exploitation of those sensor contacts.
This is the kind of content only Techmoan can provide.
Actually, I've seen at least two other youtubes previously that did the same thing.
databits did it first...
This is the kind of content only Techmoan (and at least two other youtubers) can provide.
To be honest there aren't many people on TH-cam who are the only people doing it, that's what happens when you have 1,000,000's of people using the same thing. What sets @Techmoan apart is the way he delivers the content, works very well for me being from the UK.
Thanks for yet another informative video, keep them coming!
Pretty sure Databits did a video of the same thing.
That's actually really impressive inside, them full solder tracks are insane and will last a life time. Nice big flywheel too
Next up, the MP3 to cassette to 8-track to tefifon to wire recorder mega adapter.
... and back to the Tefifon.
because he can.
Why stop there? Let's take it back to clay pots and straw.
That whole archaeoacoustic pottery thing is a myth.
You just need hi-fi straw.
I had figured out how the power gets to the adapter decades ago, and as you covered it the cobwebs very slowly cleared from my mind. I remember buying a used car that had an 8-track and one of these adapters under the seat. Retrieving that cassette adapter and slamming it into the 8-track put a huge smile on my face.
We need to get a device to allow playing of 8 tracks in grammophones. A voice coil driving the needle should do it. Also at the other end, a wifi card to go into the SD card slot and play from a streaming music service. Then we can have Spotify playing into an MP3 player pretending to be an 8 track driving a grammophone.
...nigga wot
Better yet an adapter to play blue-ray disks on a gramophone ;)
Phonographs do play MP3
You need to use an SD to mini-SD to micro-SD adapter here as well... :-)
if you noticed that thats what he did 8:11 at least i think he did
nah, he used an sd to micro-sd adapter
my mistake then
Syncopator It works with both SD and Mini SD cards. On the back, it says up to 8 GB, but if you use 16, 32 and 64 GB SD card, it will have more songs to go with it. Along with the earlier capacities like 256 MB, 1 GB and 2 GB will also used for box sets like a Reader's Digest or a Longines Symphonette boxsets from original instrumentals to compilations.
get a 128gb in there. played for days
You need to go deeper, find a way to get the longest train of converters you can think of.
Some sort of audio centipede?
That's the "true hacker" spirit. Do because you can.
Choosing awful music enough might even lead to this [shit to each others input] phenomenon that allegedly is depicted in the movie.
Yes, please!
Something like this: atomictoasters.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Adapter-Chain.jpg
Except with audio equipment.
I love how your videos don't just talk about the product, and what it is. You breaking them down, and showing us whats inside keeps me intrigued.
"Finally we can play mp3 in an 8-track player"...all the 8-track users will be really happy now.
Great video as always Mat! Thank You!
Also really smooth ending with the music and credits...
1:58 - "Unsurprisingly, I don't have an 8-track player in my car..." Maybe not but did you ask the dealer when you bought it if you could get it with that option? LOL Whenever I buy a new car I always ask that question just to see the "deer in the headlights" look from the salesperson. LOL
Pure comedy XD
I always threaten my car dealers that if they don't include a plush toy I'm walking out. I've waited over 30 minutes for a Peugeot dealer into including a stupid plush Peugeot lion plush into my last purchase, he was probably just idly chatting away with his manager all that time but I don't care. I got the plush. It's cute. Retails for about $40... absolute ripoff.
I got the Toyota 2020 Olympic plush (some robot masco thing) with my car just before lockdown. The salesman was saying Toyota has millions of these it can’t do anything with cos the Olympics were looking like being postponed.
I have my 1972 Panasonic RS-802US 8-track player/recorder where it plays and records music on 8-track. So I use my Sparkomatic 8-track cassette adapter to play MP3’s on them, and it plays regular cassettes where it plays way too fast.
The intro you use to your videos is immensely satisfying. Short and sweet, sounds wonderful, and the LEDs are a great visual touch. I think it's way better than the generic After Effects Tech Demo intro used by so many channels.
I'm at a point now where I've watched so many of your videos, I cant remember for sure if I have already seen one or commented on it before. A testament to how good your videos are. In any case its pretty interesting the way the cassette mechanism was powered in the Cassette to 8 Track adapter. If I hadnt watched this, I never would have known, lol.
OMG! This is something I've dreamed of doing years ago. Glad to see someone finally did! Fantastic!
I'm 10 minutes in and I swear if he doesn't put the tape adapter into the 8 track adapter I'm going to lose it.
Oh thank heaven.
Try watching the whole video before clicking "Post".
+wilkes85 ಠ_ಠ
unnecessary experiments are the best kind.
This is the best comment.
now if i want to play vinyl in my modern car, have a solution for that?
John Lennon had a floating turntable installed in his Rolls Royce back in the '60s.
just imagine the vibrations xD
you could measure "vinyl records eaten by the scratchy vibrato-stylus per minute".
also imagine the vibrations of the stylus (mainly because of the motor, but also the road) amplified by your car stereo.
you might just go deaf from that by listening to the music at conversation-volume.
There's a Victrola player for motorcars … called Motorola.
they actually have car record players. I saw a DeSoto Firedome at a show with a record player installed in it. Slid in like a CD, It plays the record upside down in a gyroscopic type springed enclosure, the owner of the car said it never skipped.
That was a lot of fun ... thanks! The mp3 music playing via cassette adapter via 8-track player made me smile.
MP3 to cassette to 8 track. That is what I call backwards compatibility. Although something tells me it can't be taken all the way back to records.
Probably not, since records use physical grooves rather than magnetic pulses, although maybe with some very fancy and expensive technology you could create those grooves...
Actually, you might be able to create some kind of device which pushes the needle up and down to simulate the grooves.
a small speaker or piezo element should do fine.
nrdesign1991 Do records work just like that? The needle moves at the same frequency as the sound? Interesting. Definitely doable if so.
Sounds like a challenge! Anyone up for it?
Something about playing mp3 files in an 8-track player is just amazing and warms my heart.
"Well I'll be damned if I have my stupid dreams of doing something completely pointless dashed by a piece of plastic." XD
I had a neat little device in the early 90s called a "Sound Sender". My first car just had an AM/FM stereo with no cassette deck, and certainly no CD player, and this was before MP3s existed. With this device, you plugged it into the cigarette lighter, tuned the radio to a specific frequency, and plugged it into a portable cassette player or portable CD player, and the sound came over the radio. It actually worked pretty well. I don't know alot about the specifics with electronics, but it seemed kind of like a similar concept to an R/F adapter for a VCR or video game console for a TV, where you selected channel 3 or 4 and the signal of the device went over that channel. Similar concept, but with audio rather than video.
Thank you, this was actually very helpful, I plan on using these adapters in my 1970 Dodge Charger, which has an 8 track player.
I actually just got a cassette adaptor with bluetooth to use in my car since I always wound up breaking the older, cheaper adaptors with the headphone connection. Even has a little microphone you can pull out of it to dangle from the car's tape deck to use all the fancy hands free stuff, and the quality seems identical. I've been using cassette adaptors for years, even in the early 2000s for a CD player and my first mp3 player and always assumed they never got any better. Had no idea this MP3 reader version existed, but I would have sprung for it super quick back 12 years ago since I only ever used my MP3 player in the car with my silly wired adaptor. Great video!
Hah, that tape mp3 adapter was pretty cool actually, never knew they existed. And putting it into the 8-track cassette adapter was some Inception level material.
possibly one of my favourite videos of yours ever! if you EVER for some reason, needed to play a specific track, and it had to be in MP3, and you needed to play it on an 8 track player, youre covered. I love it.
12:09 You can actually hear it playing before you even pressed play. It must be close enough to the play heads to actually pick up the audio without even being engaged?
abigguitar I noticed that too. I was surprised he didn’t mention it in the video
Love that you're subtly featuring the great black artists of our day in this vid. Thank you for that.
This brought back memories from high school when I was driving a 1979 pickup with an 8-track player. I found one of these 8 track to cassette adapters at a rummage sale, got the cassette to 1/8" jack and plugged into a discman so I could listen to cd's in my old truck. Worked well if I held the CD player, but having to shift gears and hold a disc man didn't work too well. Good times.
Love it! MP3 > Cassette > 8 Track playback! This had to be done, nice work!
It would be awesome if the cogs in that Mp3 device spins a generator to charge its battery while being played in a cassette deck!.
Or if it detects the speed of the cogs to automatically play, stop, fast forward, etc...
There is not a generator in existence small enough to fit in a cassette that would generate any meaningful energy at the comparatively slow speeds a cassette plays at, nor do I think it would be possible to make a generator so small in the first place, but it would be a cool idea.
@@Templarfreak It's probably not about the speed but the torque.
@@stephanschmidt2334 im not really a mechanical engineer, but i dont think torque would be a factor in this case. energy generated in an electric motor comes from magnetic fields rotating around copper wiring, moving the fields faster moves electrons through the copper wiring faster.
you want torque in a motor for something like a drill, where you need to apply more rotational force, not faster rotational force
but that's just from my knowledge ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@@Templarfreak the speed doesn't matter that much, its trivial to design a gearbox to make it spin fast enough, the problem comes when the motor spinning the cassette doesn't have enough torque to spin it up.
It's many thing you can learn on Techmoan. More you see on this channel more you learn about the past technology.
You mean I can have an MP3 player that looks like a cassette?! Forget the adapter part, I just want that!
You can find them on eBay or Amazon for about $15.
John Cate The shipping will be from China, and it can take two to three weeks before delivery.
John Cate The shipping will be from China, and it can take two to three weeks before delivery.
Question is; do they make one that is *not* cheap chinese junk...
Now that's a serious audio mash-up. I own one of those cassette-8 adaptors & yes, I have inserted a line-cassette adaptor connected to a discman. Compact disc to 8 track in 3 clumsy steps. Very happy to see someone else on the internet daft enough to do this!
I have no idea why I laughed when he pressed play @ 12:09 lol
Sudden loudness distortion?
I laughed a bit because it sounded so horrendous, then he hit play and I was like oh, must not be totally in the player to play correctly.
Just some signal leakage before he activated the amp in the adapter
I laughed because I imagine he was super frustrated when he did it, he smushed that button with such emotion.
Two reasons why I chuckled: 1) He's visibly struggling with the button 2) and once he succeeds, it lets out a horrible noise that only later begins to sound like a guitar
Yo Techmoan, I just gotta say, when I first watched this video and saw the device at 6:00, I bought one off Amazon right away - my car only has CD and Cassette players, but I listen to a lot of things straight off of TH-cam. About a year later I'm still using it every time I drive, and my friends use it too whenever they're in my car. I was a little skeptical at first, but as far as I can tell it sounds about the same quality as a CD. So thanks a lot for the info!
I remember those 8 track cassettes when I was a kid, and the betamax.
I played CDs thru my car's cassette player for years with an adapter, it was a fantastic cheap alternative. Also had one of those cassette mp3 players, good times. Thanx for bringing back these memories 🤓
Dear Mr Techmoan. Could you please review an adaptor to play my 78 shellac disks on my car mini disk player?
the limitations written in manuals are just a list of what SD cards it has been tested with. some companies like Canon or Nikon make extensive tests with basically every SD available atm. others will just test a couple of basic ones. it's the writing speed and format which is important here.
So Carl, How do you listen to music?
Me: Well, I download it off the internet onto my micro sd card. Then I put that into a micro to standard SD card translator, then I put that into an SD to cassette player. I then put that into my cassette-to-8 Track adapter, which I put into my 8 Track player.
How odd.
Me: Well how else would one listen to music?
if you rip out the recorded audio from your own youtubevideo from just
about 12:10, transfer that piece of digitalaudio on the SDcard, put the
SD card in the cassette adaptor and play that with the 8 track adaptor
in an 8 track player, the universe will implode. Great video. Made me smile. Thanks
You just needed a CD player to complete the set :D
what about a record player
Ey Larry!
Hello you~
Use an MP3 CD player and you've covered all the bases.
I had that setup in my 77 town car. 8track..cassette adapter...with a cassette adapter for a sony cd walkman😁😂
Fantastic video! It made me smile. I installed a 4-track in my car, then when 8-track came out I swapped it. I bought one of those pinch roller adapters so I could play my 4-track tapes... 👱🏻
Big seller in the 80's when I worked for Radio Shack. Just made sure they bought the extended warranty.
I've wanted to do this for years. So glad you could demonstrate it with expertly-managed equipment!
"Yo dawg, I heard you like adapters."
this is my new favorite youtube channel it mixes my love for music electronics and mechanics....I bought a Technics SL-6 because of this youtube channel !
I'm so happy I found your channel.
Have you taken your retro hifi apart just for this video?
No - I've been doing some re-organising.
0:37 Nice selection of 8-tracks right there!
Instead of taking off the piece of plastic, you should have made an even bigger monstrosity by plugging one of those headphone-to cassette-adapters into the device and put that in the 8-track player.
Or a simple nail file would have solved it I bet
I still listen to my 8 tracks and have that cassette adapter and still works. I love old technology. Still the best older stuff. Built to last.
Wow. MP3 on an 8-track. Now I've seen everything.
To those complaining that Techmoan "stole" this idea from databits, I suggest that you actually watch both videos. Same idea, yes, but they each have a different take on it. I'd also point out that databits has several videos that were quite obviously inspired by Techmoan's.
As a sidenote, I recently used a similar series of adapters to connect a mid-'80s portable TV to a modern cable box. Much like in this video, it was completely pointless but I enjoyed proving to myself that it could actually work. :)
16gb is probably the limit of what it can read. Once you get into 32gb you're talking about SDHC. More than likely 8gb was the most widely available size at the time.
Oops, I meant SDXC. My numbers were wrong anyway. 32gb would be max. 🤐
I was going to post something about card sizes, but +Techmoan really hates redundant comments. I sure am glad I found yours on the first page.
Yeah, they glitch out. Songs get cut off halfway through, some are completely corrupt, others play perfectly.
One can format a 64 GB card into FAT32, one just needs a special program for it.
The only difference between SDHC and SDXC is that SDXC comes formatted as exFAT. You can just reformat it to FAT32. I use a 128GB card in my 3DS this way, even though Nintendo lists the maximum card size as 32GB.
We still have one of these running around here somewhere. I remember going on vacation with my family and listening to cassettes with this contraption hanging out of an eight track player in a 1981 Cadillac Fleetwood. My parents want us to listen to their eight tracks like Lynn Anderson, John Denver and "Torn Between Two Lovers"... Over and over again. This device saved us so we could listen to Springsteen, Zeppelin and the Dead.
a new problem now is having a car stereo with only a CD player and radio. how can I play my music from my cell phone. if it had a tape deck I could use the wired tape audio adapter that was shown in this video.
the car is from 2008 so there is no audio in jack or blue tooth. new cars come with these options now. I am better off changing the while deck.
I have the same thing in my car - I just listen to the radio. Those personal FM transmitters are generally a bit rubbish...and I have enough things plugged in.
I had that same problem with a car I used to own as well. My solution was to purchase an aux in jack that I wired into the car stereo. At the time, the solution was kind of crude, being that I had to splice a few of my radio cables and also use a power switch to turn the thing on and off, but it worked great, and sounded MUCH better than an FM transmitter.
I did a quick search on Amazon for "aux in adapters", and it seems that they've gotten better, as you no longer have to splice them in. Instead, you can just plug them in. They cost around $25-$30US. Hope that helps!
I have the same problem. 2007 Astra only has radio or CD. I now have a huge stack of burned CDs in the car since empty discs are cheap as dirt nowadays.
Usually there is a port on the backside of car stereo unit to connect the cd changer. I have Yatour mp3 player that simulates the changer and it works perfectly in this situation. Sometimes you need a special Y adapter cable to put inbetween. Everything depends on the stereo model.
Benisteinzimmer I have actually done that too. I feel like I am in the 1990s! I guess we could add a CD changer lol
Yes, I did have a look at the referenced 'original' video. But as always, I prefer your video even if you discuss the same devices. But you go more into depth on the devices and even open up on of them. That is more than just a simple review and THAT is why your way of reviewing does it for me... Keep up the good stuff !
The mp3 cassette would have been more clever if they used the tape deck motors to recharge the battery.
or skip the middle man and have it self powered
5:47 - "But let's move the same problem on perhaps 20 years or so later, if you've got an older vehicle with a Compact Cassette player, but you want to play MP3s on it." Yup. I actually bought two adapters for doing that. The first is the cassette adapter you showed right here, and it worked pretty well, but I'm surprised you didn't mention the second: an FM transmitter that attached to an MP3 player's headphone jack and played on any of several channels on the car's FM radio dial. The FM transmitter definitely had a sound quality advantage -- when it worked, that is. That, of course, was the problem. There were several things that sent me back to the cassette adapter. First, in places that have a lot of radio stations, like the city where I live now, it could be hard to find an FM frequency that wasn't being used by a commercial radio station, which the radio would pick up more readily than my little transmitter. Second, my FM transmitter tended to go through batteries quickly, and while it had an adapter that would plug into the cigarette lighter power plug, the car I bought this thing for didn't have a cigarette lighter. (On that car, the cigarette lighter and ashtray were optional, and since nobody in my family smokes, we didn't want to pay extra for it.) Third, even if there weren't any FM stations interfering with the signal, we found the range of the FM transmitter to be quite limited, and also very sensitive to where in the car it was sitting. So, while it sounded great when it worked, all too often, it DIDN'T work. So, back I went to the cassette adapter. That is, until the tape deck in the car broke, at which point I gave up and just listened to the radio.
Now what we need now is a way to convert from iPhones to hand-cranked phonograph, that will get you from oldest to newest lol
Daniel Daniels oh but that's too easy now, isn't it?
I suppose you could wire iphone sound through a piezo piece, and have the steel needle sit on that :P
Bruh, if Apple themselves make that, they'll make it expensive as hell lol
Thank you, Techmoan! I've out-hipstered the universe. (No surprise, really, since I'm no hipster but I DO live in Brooklyn, so I have that in my favour/as a strike against me.) After you convinced me to own a luscious Sony TC-D5M field recorder, I stuck my faboo "UPDATED Tape player" into that monster, slung its strap over my shoulder and I now have a ca. 1980, five-pound MP3 player with dancing VU metres and giant vintage headphones. Taken to class and slapped on the desk, it gives even more of a WTF moment than to be seen listening to a white cassette through a headphone wire stuck in one end of the thing. Better yet, a Bluetooth transmitter plugged into the "phones" jack of the Sony can pipe tunes through a Mega-Bass wireless headset OR (points for weirdness) the Bluetooth unit on my motorcycle helmet with the Sony slung across my back. Better-better yet will be when I dismantle the Bluetooth XMTR and rig it for permanent power inside the TC-D5M with signal leads to the headphone audio circuit: Invisible Bluetooth in a vintage field recorder. Alternate better better yet: Embed the "UTp" MP3 player AND the B/T XMTR beneath the seat of my motorcycle with continuous USB power, so any time the helmet is powered-up, instant music.
Except the controls of the "UTp" suck wind. On the remote, one can punch the number of a given track and play it on demand, but there is no random-repeat-all capability at all. The "RPT" button on the remote just makes the current track repeat until you want to take a can opener to your own skull, extract your brain, and carry on jumping on it in the street to make the horror stop. Goodness knows what the "MODE" button does. Make it stylish? Cover it in ice cream? Force-play Depeche?
Talking about cheap power adapters:
Could you tell us which car cigarette to usb adapter is worthwhile?
i found many create a lot of HF noise and my radio reception drops.
Just pay a decent amount from a recognisable brand - or a company you trust. E.g. Belkin, Griffin - perhaps pick one up in a proper electronics or phone store, even an Apple store.... just avoid unbranded or cheapo devices from a market stall or a random ebay seller. Too many people buy a dash cam or action cam for £100+, then cheap-out on the SD card and charger and blame the device.
Thank you, will do!
Have you ever heard of Databits?
He does content similar to yours.
Anker. Hands down, the best USB charging solutions (including cables) I've ever come across. Readily available on Amazon. Maybe slightly more than some of the alternatives, but you get what you pay for...
Tronsmart has HF noise like crazy on their car (samsung compat fast charge) adaptors fwiw, good and cheap though
Wot, no puppet? I missed that dude. Your banter with him was quite cheeky.
MP3 on an 8 Track... what madness IS THIS!?!?
I have never heard of an 8-track media format. Didn't know that people were using these to listen to music in their cars back then. I was born way after it went out of use and never saw a car that can play an 8-track, but I did see a car with a cassette tape deck before. This is fascinating to watch.
11:57 - 12:35 sd card in cassette in 8 track. Musiception.
That cassette mp3 player is beautiful, cheap but beautiful :D
I'm glad you put the mp3 cassette in the 8 track, i would have been disappointed and upset otherwise.
Obviously ignoring the first thing you mentioned (the cassette to 8-track converter), do you know if I could use any of these on an old computer like an apple ii or c64 with a cassette drive? I'm beginning to collect older computers and while I eventually want to get authentic software for them, I want to be able to get programs from "alternate" sources first to see if I like them.
I suppose it should work - play an mp3 recording of a copy of a tape. Getting the original recording would be the issue though.
Techmoan Thanks. I recently saw a video from 8bitguy that made it sound like it wasn't hard to find the MP3's, but I haven't searched them out yet, so you may be right about them being difficult to find.
Also, with the SD card one, what if I just put the programs on the card without using the MP3 method? Is there a chance that could work?
No chance! The MP3 player has no idea how to convert computer programs into the correct audio format.
That should work, but is more complicated than needed. Most people do is just hook up the audio out jack of their PC/smartphone/MP3 player into the cassette in jack on their retro computer - no need for an actual cassette deck.
rjhelms Well I do want authentic cassettes eventually, and a 3.5mm-cassette is about the same price as a male-male cable, and the former is much more noticable in stores.
An adapter played inside an adapter! That's bloody brilliant, mate!
I would love to jam out in public holding only a cassette tape haha.
Imagine how Starlord would react to that.
I use a walkman on a daily basis and, to be honest, it doesn't sound bad at all, but most people don't really pay it much attention.
This video made my night! This is the audio equivalent of running a DOS based Atari emulator thru DosBox in Win10.... Because.. Why not! The first unit shown was sold in the US by Radio Shack (Realistic). Somewhere I still have one! The buttons though are all black. I can attest to it's quality (given it's task). I used it in my 1977 Buick Electra Limited (W/factory 8-Track) all thru the 80's! The second unit I would have bought (actually wouldn't mind one now!) I never saw one! (maybe not available in US) It would be an awesome way to "upgrade" vintage "Boomboxes", ETC!
8 track to tape to micro tape to aux to Bluetooth dongle then back to aux to chromecast to smart TV to external speakers to a wire voice recorder.
Do you accept the challenge?
Everybody replace this
Nice Video! My first car was a 1972 Chevrolet Monte Carlo and it had an 8-track player in it. This takes me back, thanks for making this!
Adapterception...
Great little tech thing
Very disappointing, where is the green Muppet man at the end, the review was great, as per usual but the end was lacking that certain aplomb, ;-)
Maybe Techmoan has exorcised idiocy from YT, and Muppet-man is no longer needed?
Maybe Techmoan has exorcised idiocy from YT, and Muppet-man is no longer needed?
Your name fits you well but let's hope you are wrong & muppet man was on holiday or at his psychiatrist or something, :-)
Your name fits you well but let's hope you are wrong & muppet man was on holiday or at his psychiatrist or something, :-)
+David Johnson I think he is. We'll just have to see
I KNEW you were going to try to play the SD card inside the cassette adapter inside the 8 track adapter! I just KNEW it! That is exactly what I would have done as well. LOVE this kind of stuff! Well done. I totally enjoyed this video. Thanks. PS, I had an 8 track to cassette adapter back in the day and used it ALOT in my 1962 Corvair!!! LOL!
Spoiler: the sound quality is going to be crap.
Spoiler: your fucking wrong
the music is from the you tube library anyway which means it's mp3 and not the devices shown
+Chainsaw Dude you do realise its possible to record it onto a casette right? this isnt rocket surgery
Spoiler, it's a microphone recording that has been compressed recompressed and processed multiple times before it plays through your laptop speakers. You are dumb.
GeoNeilUK Right, the cheap mp3 player sound converted into casette signal, through a cheap casette deck's head, into 8-track signal and to 8-track player's head is fantastic. That's all the microphone, editing software and youtube's fault.
As usual, Techmoan another great trip down memory lane electronics style!
OMG it's micro SD to SD to cassette to 8 track
Or the Micro SD, to SD to cassette in a Superscope Storyteller kiddie cassette player.
It's always nice to see a lot of adapters. micro SD to SD to casette to 8 track!
omfg. Look at the picture of the "Car Audio Cassette Adapter" at 6:08
"Mini-Disc" "DCC Digital Compact Cassette" "Compact Disc Digital Audio" "Auto Reverse"
Wtf. That's a lot of logos.
"Made in China"
Oh, that explains it.
I use a Sony WM-FX38 Tape Walkman at work, and the SD to Cassette adapter in this video has been a godsend for me as of late. Higher ups just see me using a tape player, which is allowed, and I don't have to carry my tape case everywhere. Love the Pre-Amp in this old Tape player, as it works wonders with my AKG K550 Mk II over ear cans.
Please, don't throw your crappy power adapters out, recycle them
there's so much useful parts on those worth saving, but for sure creating ewaste is not the move.
Where do you live where you can recycle such complex pieces of electronics? I can't even recycle broken glass here, forget about electronics.
@@x--. Canada, where we actually care about the environment
@@munkpuppy Count yourself lucky. Were I King, I'd gladly impose a fee for companies and the waste they create, that'd motivate more recycling options. Here, though, the list of "cannot be recycled" is long.
I swear these are the coolest videos to me.
Possibly the most perverted amalgam of electro mechanical sound formats..that I have ever observed, online..!
Only equalled by Lazygamereviews playing hdmi out games thu a old black and white UHF tv...
now if they'd taken the LCD module from an LCD UHF tv and put it in a slide projector...
An lcd uhf tv..what manner of electronic perversion was that!? I used to put lcd monitor screens in overhead projectors, so I'm just as much an offender, I guess!!
The worst "offense" that I could imagine would be, trying to play doom thru a Baird televisor, someones gotta try that, one day!!
"I used to put lcd monitor screens in overhead projectors"
Thats.... i mean.... eehm.... WHY THE HELL DID I NEVER THINK OF THAT :D
This is why I love your channel.
You missed the opportunity to use a Micro SD in a MicroSD to SD Adapter
But he did though
Oh wow, what a blast from the past! I remember working on a number of those cassette adapters in the late 70s.
I hate to be 'that guy', but there is a lesser known channel called Databits that did this a couple of months ago.
See the info in the video description - the origin of the video was this tweet twitter.com/techfinnell/status/715530074028699648
Ow no, someone on youtube doing the same thing as someone else! How dare they!
Similar? Maybe. Our boy Techmoan went much further in depth as to how it worked. As per always. He improved upon the video without ever seeing it. Bravo!
you for real. he's a very good guys. data bits is snotty
Valentina Farrugia, that’s a bit much.
Many thanks. I just bought one of these 8-track adapters off eBay - it didn't seem to work, so with the help of your video, I took it apart and found that the belt has disintegrated. I was about to write it off as yet another eBay failure when I wondered if it would still work with a cassette-to-3.5mm jack adapter. Guess what, it did! Even without any of the mechanism turning the head was still reading the cassette and passing the output to the 8-track. Result! I guess it would also probably work with a cassette-to-bluetooth adapter.
38 dislikes from iPhone 7 users triggered by no headphone jack...
The one my parents had was far less bulky. It was longer than a typical 8-track, but not by much. The compact cassette actually mostly fit inside the machine when you played it.
I'm also pretty sure it has this small roller at the end. I don't know if it used it to power the cassette, but I do think it was what was used against the heads in the actual player.
Review the Bluetooth cassette adapter
And as always thanks for your time in making this production.
the natural wow and flutter that occurred when you used the 8-track to cassette converter was beautiful lol. not even being sarcastic. I just love that shit.
Techmoan im new to your channel, have seen just a few videos so far but oh God you never seize to amaze me with these gargets