Friday, June 21, 2024

Kebidumei Car Cassette Player Tape Adapter from Aliexpress

Bought this shit on Aliexpress. It’s worthless junk. One good part in it is plastic case. Seller didn’t publish my review, but I had to write smth at least here. It has low quality tape head. You can get better from broken player or tape recorder. 3.5mm jack cable is very cheap and GND is soldered to one channel which produces only mono. Plastic wheels squeak and crack while playing which irritates. Also it catches interference from car electronics producing background hiss.

I took better quality 3.5mm jack cable from old broken headphones and soldered it to tape head dividing GND line equally between R and L channels. Now I have proper stereo without interference. Also I threw away all moving parts and have no cracks (BTW some players won't work without gears because they need tape load), but still sound quality is not great - rather tolerable. I need to try better tape head. 

Do not buy this adapter, because it’s basically scam. Better try cigarette lighter Bluetooth mp3 player. At least you will have battery level checker and USB charger, if audio will suck, lol. Easy to use with flash drive or phone and sounds tolerable but also produces background hiss, not loud enough... 

Main cause of noise and hiss in car audio is bad grounding. Why do you get lot's of hiss? Because car audio unit may have one GND point and cigarette lighter has another GND point. In ideal situation you need two points: GND and + (line). Ground all audio components to that single GND point and connect supply to single + line. This way even diagnostics will be easier in case of issues.

CONCLUSION: After lot's of soldering and testing I can say - all these adapters are junk. If you can't add AUX to your radio, you won't get good sound. Adapters are ok for audiobooks, but not music.

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