- YouTube Julius Makes creates a Bluetooth-to-band live converter
- Adds instant analog crunch to streaming music playlists
- It’s just a one-off
Here’s something we (sadly?) won’t see at CES 2026, but that I love: YouTuber Julius Makes has created a device to offer “Bluetooth streaming on real cassette tapes.” It’s a one-time treat rather than something you can buy, but for people of a certain era it could be tempting if it was a real product.
He explains the whole process in the video below (via Hackaday), but it works by receiving the Bluetooth signal and converting it to analog like any of the best Bluetooth speakers or best wireless headphones, except it sends the analog signal to a tape head and writes the audio to a short length of cassette tape.
The tape passes through to another tape head for instant playback, either on the (suitably gentle) built-in speaker or through the headphone jack. Now you’ve got the authentic compressed analog cassette sound – in fact, you can decide to distort the signal along the way if you want to get nasty with it.
The creator himself says that this is essentially “a tape delay with extra stages” – but it’s less about the function and more about the style of it – including the fact that he added a giant glowing VU meter that is almost the length of the whole thing.
Look at
For a home project (albeit a fancy one), it’s a very cool piece of technology in my opinion. You’ve got the classic tape player controls that look like piano keys on one end, plus the huge futuristic VU meter on the side, the cassette housing as part of it, and the flashes of orange that are all the rage in hi-fi right now – just look at the Kanto Ren or Audioengine A2+ speakers.
Julius says he could have made the tape section more compact, but he wanted to show the mechanism – making the tape run outside the cassette housing with visible brackets – and I think he’s right to do that. That’s half the fun!
The unit has a volume knob for its output from tape, but it also has a record volume selector so you can record what level it’s at when it’s being written to tape, and you can turn this up to distort the sound if you want to ‘distress’ your music on its way through the streaming-to-old-school analog pipeline.
The whole exercise is frivolous in some ways, but there is a specificity to the sound of old formats that is fun to add back to your music. That’s part of the reason why the best turntables have remained popular for the past few years, and the vinyl revival hasn’t turned out to be a fad.
Of course you could buy something like the Fiio CP13 or We Are Rewind GB-001 boomboxbut then you also had to buy ribbons. This fixes it! For better or for worse.
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