- YouTube Julius Makes creates a live Bluetooth-to-tape converter
- Adds an instant analog touch to streaming music playlists
- It’s just one time
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 diversion rather than something you can buy, but for people of a certain era, it might be tempting if it were a real product.
He explains the entire 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 the best wireless headphones, except it then sends the analog signal to a tape head and writes the sound to a small cassette tape.
The tape is fed to a second head for immediate playback, either into the (appropriately small) built-in speaker or via the headphone jack. Now you have 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 this is essentially “a tape delay with extra steps,” but it’s less about function and more about style, including the fact that he added a giant, shiny VU meter that’s almost the length of the entire set.
Look
For a home project (albeit a fancy one), it’s a very attractive piece of technology in my opinion. You’ve got the classic tape player controls that look like piano keys on one end, plus that huge futuristic VU meter on the side, the body of the cassette as part of it, and orange flashes, which is very trendy in hi-fi at the moment; 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 (the tape passing outside the body of the cassette with visible supports) and I think he was right to do that. That’s half the fun!
The device has a volume control for the tape output, but it also has a recording volume control, so you can record the level at which it is written to the tape, and you can turn it up to distort the sound if you want to “distress” your music on its way through the old-school analog transmission channel.
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 the reason why the best record players have remained popular in recent years, and the vinyl resurgence has not proven to be a fad.
Sure, you could buy something like the Fiio CP13 either the We Are Rewind GB-001 boomboxbut then you would also have to buy tapes. This solves that! For better or worse.
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