Looking for a 1/2 DIN cassette player...any ideas?

OK, before the flames start... Yes, I know that there is no reason in the world to have a cassette player in the car when I have an empeg, but hey, my wife doesn't understand that--yet. Also, the kids frequently get books on tape or some such from the library and I don't have time to rip it onto a player in time for them to enjoy. Thus my delema.

So I'm looking to install my player and a 1/2 DIN cassette into my 99 Dodge Grand Caravan SE. I'm pretty certain there is room, but I just need to find the package. Anyone know of such a beast? Perhaps there is some kind of OEM player that someone has removed and is looking to get rid of? My searching has not been productive at turning one up.

Thanks in advance for any ideas or suggestions!

Sorry to disappoint you, but I have never seen or heard of a 1/2 DIN tape Deck, in fact the only thing I have seen that was 1/2 DIN was an equalizer. But good luck to you anyway, I hope you find something that will work.

Just a random suggestion, since it is something you will only use occasionally have you thought of just using a walkman, or something similar with a earphone to rca converter and just hooking it up to your aux inputs

I had a really great 1/2-din casette player in my GTI many years ago. It was stolen along with the CD player in the first theft (when they crowbar'ed my rear hatch). It was a Sony as I recall, and it was really good. It had a drawer that slid out and you laid the tape flat into it.

The model is probably over ten years old now, I'm sure they don't make it any more. But I sure missed it.

Then again, all my tapes got ripped off at the same time, so that's when I pretty much stopped using casettes altogether.

I stand corrected about the 1/2 din player, but if that was ten years ago, that was a little before my time with car audio (SInce I was only 11, and still had 4 years before I got my license)

It was kind of neat, this was back in the days when in-car CD players were still young. The CD player mechanics were in a DIN-sized unit, but the tuner, amp, and electronics were in an outboard "under the seat" module connected with a thick multi-conductor cable. There must have been fifty conductors in that cable, it was thicker than most SCSI cables are today.

The tape player was meant to interface with this CD player, it just had a couple of simple wires that went high or low to indicate to the CD player that it was the active device. You could fake it out pretty easily if you wanted to interface it with something else. It was pretty neat, because if you pressed play on the tape player, the CD would go off and it would use the tape. And vice-versa.

Sony also sold a 1/2-DIN equalizer to go with the tape player and CD player, all of them were the same style and they interfaced nicely.

The funny thing is that the theives who stole the system didn't get the "under seat" module (actually it was buried deep inside the dash in my installation), so the CD player they stole didn't work for them.

I dont think this is what you were looking for but it says 1/2 DIN Pyle Cassette Player

From the product photo, that looks like a typo for 1.5-DIN.

I guess you are right. I was thinkin it was some kinda ass backwards half DIN. Like half as wide. Here is the real link Pyle Official Site Description I guess you can see where the confusion came about.

Thanks guys! I guess I'll go hit the junk yards for a while...sigh.

sony XK-8D is half din cassette player. do a google search or search ebay. you might be lucky enough to find one. good luck

pinal

Quick search on Google pulled up this site. Looks like they are selling them for $150.

That was it. That was the one I had. The XK-8D. Worked like a charm.

I'll bet there's even a way to wire it so that its control lines hit the empeg cellphone mute, and then you can use Hijack to switch to Aux when the cellphone mute goes high.

Hi Tony.

Except that you can't use HiJack to _reliably_ switch to AUX mode and back to previous mode AFAICT. Even if you find a trick to switch to AUX mode reliably from both MP3 and Tuner modes (using some conditional IR translations or something), there is no way to reliably switch back to the correct mode afterwards.

The wish remains for the original player software to either support virtual IR codes for functions like "push current mode to stack", "switch to mode X directly", "pull mode from stack" or support switching to AUX and back depending on the phone mute line (or even the headlight sense line).
<dream>My ideal would be a player software that supported:

1. virtual IR codes for direct access to all menu functions plus some utility functions like the ones listed above.
2. support assigning specific behaviours to the two digital input lines (headlight sense and phone mute sense), like "hush", "switch to aux", "switch to aux and change volume to X", "pause", "mute", "headlights are on/off"
   

</dream>

cu,
sven

Give me a couple of weeks and I'll look into the input switching in Hijack - probably not the all-encompassing solution that you proposed, but possibly to give a config.ini option that configures Hijack to switch to aux-in whilst the mute line is active and switches back to the previous input when it goes low. I can't see why you;d want the dimmer line to do anything.

The volume adjustment is already handled by the Volboost_AUX parameter.

For other digital inputs, wait to see if Patrick's tuner kit project goes through. He's discussed making other digital inputs available there.

Perfect! That is exactly what I was looking for! Thanks so much, now as you say, time to find one...

Much thanks!

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I can't see why you;d want the dimmer line to do anything

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An extra input for a home dock, perhaps?

Maybe, but adding dimming capabilities to AC mode was already on my agenda (which I believe is more a desirable feature). I had a nearly working version of this a few weeks ago - the dimming worked, but unfortunately it crashed the kernel in the process, and due to work commitments it got left on the backburner. I'll port my changes to the latest HJ and take another stab at it sometime.