For Car Cassette Decks, Play Time Is Over

Ask yourself, when was the last time you saw a destroyed cassette tape unraveling by the side of the road? For me, it has been years.

For Car Cassette Decks, Play Time Is Over



I guess I shouldn't be surprised that you can't get new ones from the factory anymore. What does surprise me is that the last car to offer one is a Lexus. I thought that for that kind of money you were buying high-end, cutting edge features. And a cassette deck is definitely not a cutting edge feature.

I have a 1989 Oldsmobile with a sound system based on a an AM-FM stereo-cassette unit in the dash. The tape deck part of this unit died long ago, and I wisely declined the opportunity to fix it. Since I am pretty good with a soldering iron and I can read schematics, I figured I'd add a jack to this unit that would allow me to use MP3 players with the system. Like all my other projects, this one went on the back burner.

Just before Christmas, I had some money, so I thought I'd see what new aftermarket in-dash units had to offer. It didn't take long for me to notice that, no matter how little money you spent, every last unit, even the ones going for $39.99, had a jack that enabled the use of an MP3 player. Pay a little more, and you'd get a USB port. Pay a little more, and you'd get HD radio. Pay a little more, and you'd get XM radio. Pay a little more, and you'd a unit with controls that replicate those of an iPod. Pay a little more, and you'd get Bluetooth. Just about all aftermarket units can play cassettes, but there was no radio that came without an MP3 input.

No matter how much you like working on things, you do reach a point where you figure out that rewiring a 22-year-old radio to make it as advanced as something you can buy new for $39.99 is a waste of your time. I put this project on hold too, at least until the warm weather comes back.

I was truly impressed to see how far things had progressed. Stay away from consumer electronics for two weeks, though, and you're already behind the times.

Tempus fugit.

I would have guessed that this happened many years ago.

:hide:

You can keep the tapes next to your incandescent lights and NyQuil with dextromethorphan.

They'll get my Roxy Music tapes when they pry them from my cold, dead fingers.

:argh:

I thought they gave up on them years ago. If my life ever gets back in order, I am going convert my old cassettes to MP3. I have the device for it, but not the motivation.

That's about all I use it for.

Incidentally, I still use cassette tapes for my business but as soon as I run out I'm switching to a digital recorder. The bulk pack tapes are getting harder to find and if you can the price is going up.

I added that reference to the original post. Thanks.

I think I might have used it once.

I had record players that would skip if a cat walked in the room! Your car must ride smooth as silk!
GAC

And, a really big bass speaker.

because they are more "rugged" than CD's. When CD technology was still pretty new I remember we had to be careful not to get too crazy at parties or the CD would skip. And the car CD players would skip a lot too. And CD's are easy to scratch and then they get ruined.

With cassettes you can much rougher on them. I think the cassette captures the sound better on some things as well because its not digitally clipped into ones and zero's.

They required less care, so back in the 90s I made sure to get a tape deck instead of a cd player and dubbed stuff to tape. Now I have a memory stick and have 8 gigs of music.

Honda Odyssey didn't have a cassette player which disappointed me because I have alot of things on tape. Now I just play things from the IPod in the car if I'm not listening to XM radio.

Except on beautiful cars like levey's Studebaker (OK, potentially beautiful). And, yes, in the Fifties they did actually have record players for cars. Didn't work well.

Today's cars are freaking UGLY!!!

www.darkroastedblend.com/2010/04/car-record-players-other-cool-vintage.html

the dashboard radios with maybe four AM stations, and a sound that was like rabid skunks fighting in a tin can...

and a needle-on-a-string indicator for the tuning.

Hey, wait... Chiclets are gone, too!

had 6 buttons -- four for AM stations, and two for FM !! And, I could be wrong about this, but I don't think my dad's car had a radio at all.

A whole generation of kids asking the question...

"What the HELL are Chiclets???"


:7

It made your car radio sound awesome, at least at the time we thought so..Long before eight tracks or the even earlier car phono....

"...if this had been an actual emergency you would have been instructed where to tune."

I guess it's time for a new car.

Not because I listen to cassettes, but to use an adapter so I can plug in my iPod directly instead of using the FM transmitter.

It's the stock Dodge single-CD stereo. For some reason they just don't put the headphone jack on factory stereos, even though practically all aftermarket ones do. And yeah, my CD player works great, but I'd still rather have a cassette player.

because the Subaru had a casette deck I could use to play my Ipod. The Volkswagon didn't have a cassette deck OR an AUX connection. Those FM transmittor things suck especially if you are like me and live in the city.

But nobody wanted to bid above $4700, even though other identical makes and models were going for ov er $6000. I think it was because mine has a sticky rear window, and no dealer wanted it!

Target of opportunity, you might say.

But I was replacing a Subaru that had a 6-disc in-dash CD player but no AUX or cassette deck, so I had to suffer through an FM transmitter. The car was otherwise perfect: stick, AWD, 27+ mpg, sportwagon, etc.

They don't work that well. Normally in the car I have now, when I'm listening to the radio or a CD, the volume is normally set at "10". For using my iPod via FM transmitter, I have to crank it up to "30".


It only goes up to "38"!

I use my old diskman adapter to play my ipod in it.

I wonder why cars still had tape decks

prior to that, I preferred analog, including in the truck I bought new in '92. There were two that were nearly identical in features on the dealer's lot. One of them however, had an all-digital dash, including a CD player and electrically-powered windows. The other had traditional gauge dash, with needles for measuring the gas, tach, speedometer, and mechanical odometer, and an AM-FM cassette player, with hand-operated crank down windows. I chose that one because I really disliked digital gauges and still had hundreds of cassette tapes, some that were mix tapes that I recorded, and at that time, I had only about 30-40 CDs. Also, the technology and hardware for burning CDs was not available back then.

Apparently digital gauges have not as yet been able to completely eliminate analog in vehicles, and there are many like me who still prefer seeing needles over digital. I especially dislike seeing a changing and glaring LED speedometer displaying for example, 55-56-55-54-53-55-60-67-68-65 in my peripheral vision while driving at night.

I can't really remember, but I'm pretty sure it didn't. My 2005 VW Beetle didn't have one, it had an aux jack, as does my current vehicle a 2009 VW Tiguan.

My very favorite was the way the radio dial on the GM cars was also the door for the 8-track deck. You just shoved the tape into the radio...it was sooo James Bond-ish.

He got it in the 1978 Lincoln Continental. That had some awesome sound

Oh and Mitsubishi stopped putting Cassette Decks in their cars in 1999. That was the whole reason we switched to CDs in 2000.

Now I can probably afford to buy a cassette player and upgrade from my 8-Track.

I need to correct that. No, for the most part they cannot. What they can play is CDs.

In the 70s, you could get a factory eight-track, AM-FM stereo, CB radio from the domestic car manufacturers.

Never liked those new-fangled cassettes anyway. Why, back in my day, you could buy a loaf of bread for a nickel. Get off my lawn!