Pretty sure I still did that in like 2012?

Two cars ago I had this. I had a MiniDisk player to go with it. I felt like the coolest young adult.

Then I got another car that had a CD player with no AUX port. Had to get a RF adapter. Worked well.

Then the FCC put limits in the RF adapters and they sounded worse.

Replaced my radio after that one with a shamcy one. Got my AUX cable back!

... Now they took my AUX cable away from my phone.

We were using this well into 2010 or so. Better audio quality than an FM tuner as long as the electromagnet wasn't overheating.

The best option though was to get an inline FM injector and plug it in where the antenna plugged in. Perfect audio.

Magnets, how do they work

We’re still using one of these haha.

Like how did these even work??

Yeah, it worked much better than our current USB bluetooth dogle that lags every 30 seconds. Just because we could not get radio wit cassette player. I still have the cassette adapter.

That, plus a portable CD-MP3 player, was the bomb.

I still have my iRiver iMP-350, a portable CD player that could read mp3 and wma files off a CD-R or CD-RW, allowing way more than 74 or 80 minutes of audio. Damn thing still mostly works 22 years later too, thanks in large part to them including a 2x AA battery dongle in addition to the gumstick-shaped rechargeable batteries in the main unit which have long since leaked.

When they started selling head units with aux in ports, I had to have one in my car. And when they started putting iPod connectors in head units, perfection.

They are still around. They even come in Bluetooth flavour now so you don’t need the cord.

I did this last in 2020. RIP my old mitsubishi.

The best thing about the 1997 Volkswagen Jetta I had was it had a 12-disc CD-changer in the trunk. Why it was in the trunk, I don't know, but I had updated the front side deck (which was also cool because it was just a box you could plug into the front and not have to get deeper into the wiring or anything) so it could read MP3 CDs, so 12 of those in the trunk basically held almost everything my iPod could.

Worked? Mine works perfectly!

These adapters were perfect... The only problem was that personal CD players of the same era skipped when you looked at them wrong.

I’m gen z - though on the older side - and I remember using these

Same setup I have now just plug the rca jack into a Bluetooth receiver instead of a CD player.

i was using one of these to connect my laptop to my "speakers" (an old stereo set) as recently as 2019, lmao

I would have had to reach forward, because I never understood them until this thread. Now I can pretend to understand them and just frustratedly say, "It's basically electromagnets, to oversimplify it" next time someone mentions these.

Please. I had a cassette with built-in storage, that could play in a cassette deck player AND had an headset jack plugged in for music on the go.

I had that same one!

I'm 22 and I remember this

1995? We were still using these in like 2008.