Car Cassette Adapter

I have a great vintage car (1994 Honda Accord ) with a factory installed cassette tape player in it. I think the car is great plus it gets outstanding mpg on the highway. Recently I received an ipod touch for my birthday, I went on a mad hunt for the perfect car cassette adapter for my car so I could use my new ipod.

My ipod came with it’s own FM frequency transmitter so you can set it to a station and stream music into your radio. Mine was built by Belkin however it did not work very well at all. We live in Houston, Texas and luckily there are thousands of stations to choose from. Occasionally I could get a signal for a limited amount of time, but as soon as I traveled any range, you would need to re set the station to find a better signal. My biggest issue was the shotty sibilant mid-fidelity vocal range this transmitter delivered. This could be semi acceptable to listen to Podcasts in talk radio format that I sometimes enjoy, however this is not acceptable for the sound quality my new ipod can deliver.

Many people have said the car cassette adapters achieve greater fidelity and reliability compared to FM transmitter units on the market, so I bought a Belkin car Cassette Adapter. even though it was white and my car’s interior is deep black (and stuck out like a turd ina punch bowl), my left channel output appeared to be extremely low and had little to no high frequency content. After cleaning the “head” on my car cassette adapter including my stereo’s head deck to no avail. The very same thing happened on my stereo’s Nakamichi BX-300 cassette player (a very eclectic high fidelity piece). however, knowing the level and frequency imbalance may not be a problem in my car’s cassette deck. I returned it for a new one and low and behold the new one had zero response on the left channel too. That made me return it to Belkin which they quickly returned one that functioned much better than the previous two. However, after about two month of play, the o-ring made of rubber, in the car cassette adapter that makes a connection to the pinch roller in my stereo’s head unit, started disintegrating, this made the car cassette adapter eject without notice. After that I decided to head over to Amazon and check out the Sony car cassette adapters.

My Sony Discman CPA-9C and Sony Discman car cassette adapter works really well with my Ipad in my car. I also have a new ipod touch that can get really loud when I have the volume all of the way up. I am really happy with the sound quality it is extremely nice; even better than the Belkin I had before. It is nice having the left and right channels equally balanced and the frequency response appears to be kind of flat throughout the range. The Sony car cassette adapter is much less noisy than the Belkin car cassette adapter I tried before. It was made to use some kind of tape near the take-up side near the looping device, however there is not an o ring made of runner to degrade over time. After several months of using this unit I have not noticed any degradation in sound or device quality. The great thing is it’s black color is hard to notice in my car.

If you are looking for a good quality car cassette adapter I would highly recommend this unit for all types of ipods. Out of all of the car cassette adapters we have seen on the market the only color options are black, white, and gray.