upcycling a cassette boom box

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It’s easy to upcycle old cassette boom boxes into general purpose amplified speakers. Cassettes are mostly obsolete and there are plenty of working used cassette players available for almost nothing. I recently picked up a portable karaoke cassette player for $1 at a yard sale. The seller apologized that the microphone wasn’t working anymore, so it would only play cassettes, but that was fine by me.

Step 1

In theory you can disassemble the boom box and solder wires directly to the circuit board’s audio inputs, but there’s a far simpler solution – a car cassette adapter. These handy devices were originally designed so cars with cassette players but without built-in CD players could use a portable CD player. Now they’re marketed primarily to hook up an MP3 player to a car’s stereo system. They work fine for non-auto applications and you can pick up used ones at yard sales and thrift shops for about $1.

Comments

[SkaterP]

dude ! this is awesome :O

[fzumrk]

Here's an idea: Find one with a dual cassette deck. Put the adapter in one deck and turn the second deck into a dock for your ipod.

[WineSoaked]

It would be sweet to somehow hack out the cassette door and be able to comfortably situate the ipod/smartphone/mp3 player.

[renegadezombies]

The cassette player in OP's picture would not be situated for this, but the larger boomboxes with the fold out door would be perfect for a hack such as this.

[gamemasterful]

Simple and effective. Great for the novice techie that isn't quite comfortable working inside electronics.

[WineSoaked]

Though I guess it would be a different Instructable, since the cassette adapter is in that place.

Dunno, I may have to go do one of these my own self.