- YouTube Julius Makes creates a Bluetooth-to-tape live converter
- Adds instant analogue 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 tape”. It’s a one-off bit of fun rather than something you can buy, but for people of a certain era, it might be tempting if were a real product.
He explains the full process in the video below (via Hackaday), but it works by receiving the Bluetooth signal and converting it to analogue like any of the best Bluetooth speakers or best wireless headphones, except then it sends the analogue signal to a tape head and writes the sound to a short length of cassette tape.
The tape loops through to a second tape head to play it back immediately, either on the (suitably tinny) built-in speaker, or through the headphone jack. Now you’ve got the authentic compressed analogue cassette sound – in fact, you can decide to distort the signal on the way through, if you want to get nasty with it.
The creator himself says that this is essentially “a tape delay with extra steps” – 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’s nearly the length of the whole thing.
For an at-home project (albeit a fancy one), it’s a very cool-looking piece of tech, in my opinion. You’ve got the classic tape-player controls that looks like piano keys on one end, plus that huge futuristic VU meter up the side, the cassette body as part of it, and the flashes of orange, which is very in for hi-fi right now – just see the Kanto Ren or Audioengine A2+ speakers.
Julius says that he could have made the tape section more compact, but he wanted to show the mechanism – to have the tape running outside of the cassette body with visible brackets – and I think he’s right to do it. That’s half the fun!
The device has a volume dial for its output from the tape, but it also has a recording volume dial, so you can record what level is at when it’s written to the tape, and you can crank this up to distort the sound if you want to ‘distress’ your music on its way through the streaming-to-old-school-analogue pipeline.
The whole exercise is frivolous in some ways, but there’s a specificity to the sound of old formats that’s fun to add back into your music. That’s part of why the best turntables have stayed popular in the last few years, and the vinyl revival hasn’t turned out to be a fad.
Sure, you could buy something like the Fiio CP13 or the We Are Rewind GB-001 boombox, but then you’d have to buy tapes too. This solves that! For better or worse.
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