Thread: Wiring up to tape head circuit.

You'll never get a good sound from that because a tape head picks up magnetic pulses from the magentic tape and then sends them down a wire. This kind of signal differs from the type you'll get out of your line out from the PC, which is a much more fluid and fuller signal.

Imagine, if you will, two pipes carrying water, the pipe representing the tape gets spurts of water as a someone chucks buckets of water down it. The pipe representing your PC is fed directly from a mains hose allowing for your pipe to be constantly filled. Now with the two pipes you still have the same collection method at the other end, imagine someone is fuilling up buckets and moving them along. Works fine for the tape, but for the PC you will get overspilt water whilst the buckets are moving. (Had enough of analogies ?!?)

So your music will sound compressed and hollow.

Get a tape adapter whilst you wait for an amp.

Let's see, what's in a tape adapter? A 1/8 stereo plug, wires and a stereo tape head.
(I built one loooong ago, before they were so common). The sound is then coupled magnetically from this head to the head in the car's tape assembly. Then, the sound is processed ("equalized", usually with a capacitor and a resistor network) and amplified using an IC. After, the sound is just a "regular" sound going to an audio switch. It's at this point where an AUX input is fed in in H/U that come with such an input.
The idea for this mod is to avoid all this coupling and processing and feed the audio from the pc to the audio switch. It takes some tweaking but it can be done.

Also in a tape adapter are 4 very important resistors! well in mine there is anyway, I have my clarion head unit in bits on my desk! the is a little circuit board attached to the tape head but it doesnt seem to do much before outputting the 3 wire for the audio to the head unit so it just seems to be a osme kind of bridge for the two sides of the tape head. There is also a mysterious green wire but i ahve no idea what that is - maybe an earth - dunno. Nice little soundcard pcb type connector tot he head unit so worth a crack anyway. If not i will get an el-cheapo head unit off ebay with CD in and mod that.

I hacked a tape HU to take aux in last month. it's a 96 altima hu which i believe is a clarion branded. acutally it's giving me a pretty good sound, much better than tape and radio.

open the head unit and look for "left out " and "right out " on the PCB

Good Luck

Why not using an FM transmittor?
No need to open your HU, with all risks of getting it not back working.


You can get them for cheap @ ebay, i've seen them for 10-15 GBP including shipping.

This is what I did to my AM/FM/CD/Cassette HU on my Matrix made by GM/AC-Delco/Delphi. Cut the CD audio from CD Player module and wire a relay to control the source feed to internal amplifier. You can do similar thing with cassette unit. Google for Alpine, people did that with their alpine cassette unit to have aux input.

no name FM modulator....

Originally Posted by DJSmiley

Why not using an FM transmittor?
No need to open your HU, with all risks of getting it not back working.


You can get them for cheap @ ebay, i've seen them for 10-15 GBP including shipping.

/Me WEE on the RF Xmitter... The sound quality is infierior and its the easy way... If you want to do things easy, then get a walkman, and a paid of computer speaks for your car.. your done.. (Shrugs) Last I check (And have been for 4 years) This site was about those of us who wanted to geek out our car to be different and to make our rides more fun and personalized then just a sony, alpine or pioneer....
But... Thats just my opinion...

I remember what brought me to the site was a MP3Jeep wrangler. Back in like 1999 or 2000. The guy bungee corded his computer on top of a pillow and on his rear wheel 'hump' Had a small LCD (Non- Monitor) readout to tell what song was playing and or time left, external keypad to manually enter the number of the song on the playlist and a power inverter.. That dude wasnt thinking of easy way nothing... He was thinking of I want my computer with me every second.. even when I go to the store... or a 4 hour drive. Access...
Alots changed since but the idea is still there... No easy way... Tear open that HU... See whats up.. After you trash it... get another... There is no right way to do this. The ONLY right way, is not to settle for the easy way. Okay.. I wrote my book

First of all thanks Andy. Your post is old, but yet it made me do it.

As you said there's a pre-amp right after the head unit. In mine, (01 Elantra H250) after the pre-amp, the signals go into a hell of a mux circuit controlled by a micro-controller. I tried hooking up wires directly after the pre-amp. But the micro-controller wont turn on the mux channel connecting this output to the main amp - It wants a cassette in there. There's a switch that determines if the cassette is in there and I hardwired it to make it look a cassette is in there always. I thought I was done, but no. The thing wants a cassette in there, AND it wants both the reels to spin! There are optical encoders on both reels that detects the speed and make sure the speeds are same. Otherwise it goes into eject mode and back to radio. I hard wired the two signals and made it the same. So when one reel spins, it gives an effect of the other spinning at the same speed. It worked! The amp finally turned on. Now I have noise free HQ music blasting through four speakers!

There are easier ways - I could have just put a dummy cassette just to keep the amp on, but somehow, it violated sections of the geek's manual

Shanker.