um neat-o but like 20 years to late…
you can achieve the same success by taking apart an old tape deck and removing the “head” the magnetic thingy that reads the tape. It conveniently has three wires on most and you can solder it to an eighth inch head phone jack or RCA cables and plug in your device, ipod cd player……. Er um how appropriately eight track

Posted at 10:40 am on Oct 24th, 2008 by kyle007

Sure you can use a tape head but then you may as well be going out and buying the commercially available adapters. I like this because it’s doing it in a much different way than anyone else does it. This is a nice and simple hack that a beginner could do and I’m sure they’d feel like they had accomplished a lot more than just soldering wires to a tape head and gluing it into a case.

Posted at 11:12 am on Oct 24th, 2008 by LaserJesus

Unless I’m mistaken won’t this design just produce a mono signal? I think this design could be improved by using two smaller layered coils, one per channel and maybe lower rated resistors to sort out impedance issues and cross talk. Insulated copper wire strands would be better as they could be positioned more precisely to the alignment of the tape head. Just some ideas if someone wants to develop this concept further. :-)

Posted at 11:16 am on Oct 24th, 2008 by treefingers

I tried making one of these. I took the coil out of a dollar store headphone. It did work, but didn’t sound great. I eventually went out and bought a proper one for $5.

Posted at 11:23 am on Oct 24th, 2008 by atrain

I’d be more interested in making one out of a tape-deck head, seeing as I’ve just taken a tape-deck apart :-)

Any advice on how the leads on the head should be connected up to a stereo lead (i.e. the “pinout” for the head)?

Posted at 11:42 am on Oct 24th, 2008 by loststeve

Awesome, I like the hack.

Posted at 11:50 am on Oct 24th, 2008 by nubie

thick wire with resistors in series, what about independence, most signal will be converted to heat instead of magnetic field. And coil, it should be rotated

Posted at 3:36 pm on Oct 24th, 2008 by therian

http://khakindustries.com/?p=49
Mine was better!!!1one

You get stereo. It’s farrrrrrrrrrr too difficult to create the tiny spacing required for stereo with hand-wound or even headphone coils.

Posted at 5:19 pm on Oct 24th, 2008 by TheKhakinator

why is this even posted really why?

Posted at 3:43 am on Oct 26th, 2008 by jj jerksalot

just to piss you off, jerksalot

Posted at 4:55 am on Oct 26th, 2008 by strider_mt2k

I agree with jj jerksalot. A person who sharpened a pencil with a knife is similar in complexity to this “hack”. It is a BAD project for the beginner as it could break expensive audio equipment connected to it.

Posted at 8:37 am on Oct 26th, 2008 by markps2

@ TheKhakinator. nice work! thats what I was talking about.. hence why this featured hack was a little too late, everyone has made thier version.

@ treefingers this hack “featured” would produce a mono signal

Posted at 8:09 pm on Oct 26th, 2008 by kyle007

ok here’s what I would do… lower rated resistors would increase the power to the coils. smaller coils would reduce the size of the magnetic field produced, shielding between the coils would reduce crosstalk. Single strands of insulated copper wire would be used to produce the coils rather than the thick stuff.

The reason why i’m showing interest in this hack is that it’s basically a beginners guide to a magnetic pickup. Here’s where I see it going…

Once a stereo cassette adaptor works as a proof of concept someone who wants to could create a full sized guitar pickup with separate coils for each string, the output could be fed to some sort of digital filter (al la vocoder) the frequency of the note played on the guitar would pass though the filter and it’s frequency and gain fed into maxmsp and then converted to midi note and velocity data. This could then become an inexpensive polyphonic guitar midi controller so you could play strings. piano, or even drums on your guitar!

What do you think? :-)

Posted at 7:17 am on Oct 27th, 2008 by treefingers

ok here’s what I would do… lower rated resistors would increase the power to the coils. smaller coils would reduce the size of the magnetic field produced, shielding between the coils would reduce crosstalk. Single strands of insulated copper wire would be used to produce the coils rather than the thick stuff.

The reason why i’m showing interest in this hack is that it’s basically a beginners guide to a magnetic pickup. Here’s where I see it going…

Once a stereo cassette adaptor works as a proof of concept someone who wants to could create a full sized guitar pickup with separate coils for each string, the output could be fed to some sort of digital filter (al la vocoder) the frequency of the note played on the guitar would pass though the filter and it’s frequency and gain fed into maxmsp and then converted to midi note and velocity data. This could then become an inexpensive polyphonic guitar midi controller so you could play strings. piano, or even drums on your guitar!

What do you think? :-)

Posted at 7:19 am on Oct 27th, 2008 by treefingers2

no resistors needed.just make electromagnet from a nail and a thin wire and connect them to output.easier to make and quality is very good.

Posted at 11:03 am on Jun 15th, 2009 by darkxray

Its worked !!!(with good quality)

i just make this cassette adapter yesterday.
I tried 3 or 4 times with little modifications.At last, I realized as @darkxray said no need resistors.i used a wire nut , old rca cable(or old ear phone) and 31gauge insulated copper wire.
In rca cable it has two separate wire coming out from the aux end.In each wire it contain main insulated wire and uncover copper wire.
I divide my 30gu copper wire into two same size parts. then i wind that one part of the copper wire on one end of the nail.same done to the other part.Leave 2inch from the nail in each winding.Then remove insulation about 1cm from each end of the copper wires(in my case i have 4 ends coming out from the nail – http://img18.imageshack.us/img18/888/dsc00012vlc.jpg)
More winding levels give good output.
Now i have the nail with winded copper wires.Then sold 4 ends of the copper wires to the relevant ends of the rca cable.(i think you got it).
then congratulations !!! You are done

useful pics of my adpater:

img18.imageshack.us/img18/888/dsc00012vlc.jpg

img18.imageshack.us/img18/7144/dsc00014mhx.jpg

img18.imageshack.us/img18/16/dsc00013vcb.jpg

Posted at 8:08 am on Jul 1st, 2009 by LMR