Audiophile Repurposes Vintage Cassette Decks into Digital Music Players

Audiophile Artur Mlynarz has a thing for old Hi-Fi players and the engineering involved in designing them so much so, that he collects and restores those pre-digital marvels to full working order. In some cases, there’s nothing that can be done to resurrect them, which led Mlynarz to repurpose those decks into digital music players and thus, creating the Tapeless Deck Project.

While each deck is different- some with VU meters, others with equalizers and various controls, the cassette deck remains relatively constant, and it’s the first mechanism Mlynarz guts and throws away (remember it’s unrepairable anyway). It turns out that deck is the perfect place to house a smartphone, which is permanently mounted within and uploaded with a great looking music app that recreates functioning cassettes.

The phones themselves are electrically modified and connect to the tape deck’s internal circuitry, essentially mimicking the deck’s functions- volume control, level meters, and others depending on the model. Since there isn’t access to the phone’s power button (or anything else for that matter), recharging the phone is done every time you power on the system and continues when the deck is in use.

The app is an MP3/FLAC player with a cool-looking cassette animation (with 30 different skins) that approximates the real thing. Since the phone features a touchscreen, changing songs and other adjustments are done on the display, and you can use the internet radio player of your choice as well, including Spotify, Tidal, Pandora and many more.

Uploading music and management is done over Wi-Fi using any Windows/Mac connected PC and has 8, 16, or 32Gb of internal storage. The estimated build time is about a week but the time can vary depending on how much work needs to be done, the same with prices- to get a bead on costs, the Technics M12 shown at the top has a price tag of $230.