- YouTube Julius Makes Creates Live Bluetooth to Tape Converter
- Adds instant analog audio to streaming music playlists
- It’s just a unique case
Here’s something we (unfortunately?) won’t see at CES 2026, but that I love: YouTuber Julius Makes has created a device to offer “Bluetooth streaming on real cassettes.” This is unique entertainment rather than a product that can be purchased, but for people of a certain era it might be tempting if it 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 analog like any of the best Bluetooth speakers or best wireless headphones, except it then sends the analog signal to a tape head and writes the sound onto a short length of cassette.
The tape loops to a second tape head for immediate playback, either on the (suitably tiny) built-in speaker or via the headphone jack. Now you have the authentic sound of a compressed analog cassette. In fact, you can decide to distort the signal along the way, if you want to bother with that.
The creator himself says it’s 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, bright VU meter that runs almost the entire length of the set.
Look on it
For a home project (even a sophisticated one), this is very cool technology, in my opinion. You’ve got the classic cassette player controls that look like piano keys on one end, plus that huge futuristic VU meter on the side, the cassette body that’s part of it, and the orange strobes, which is very popular for 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 – running the tape outside the cassette body with visible supports – and I think he’s right to do that. That’s half the fun!
The device has a volume dial for tape output, but it also has a recording volume dial, so you can record the level it is at when written to the tape, and you can turn it up to distort the sound if you want.
The whole exercise is frivolous in some ways, but there’s a specificity to the sound of old formats that’s fun to bring back into your music. This is partly why the best turntables have remained popular in recent years, and the vinyl revival has not proven to be a fad.
Of course you could buy something like the Fiio CP13 Or the We Are Rewind GB-001 boomboxbut then you would also have to buy cassettes. This solves that! For better or for worse.
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