So most of us know about the Nack hack. if you don't search for it.
Well if you are like me and your CD changer doesn't work at all, you know that hacking the cd player input does us no good, because there needs to be a working changer attatched for the head unit to play the signal.
well, I really wanted to listen to my ipod, so i decided to go another route.
I successfully hacked my tape player and now you can too without the days of experimentation I had to go through.
I had to solder, it may be possible to get away without soldering, but I cannot think of a good quality/reliable way not to.
Do this at your own risk. I am not responsible for you breaking your headunit. consider this as informational only. I am simply saying what I did.
if you need help/have any questions just ask.
***THIS WILL CAUSE THE TAPE PLAYER TO NO LONGER PLAY TAPES***
***I have the non nakamichi head unit. while i would guess the tape part is the same on both of them, please realize I have not seen inside of one****
someone can confirm if it looks the same later.
first I got one good 'ol USDM SC 300/400 cd player. non nakamichi pioneer.
Then I popped the top off carefully, taking care not to break the plastic tabs at the front of the faceplate
Now with the top off you will see the whole unit w/tape player attached.
The red circle is the 2 capacitors that are of interest to us.
another angle with the tape player part actually removed.
These two capacitors are for the left and right signal line.
I traced these myself from the dolby digital op-amp pinouts I found online from that IC chip in the bottom right corner. these are after the processing of the line level which means these signals have some amplification (dolby processed at 24db's if i remember correctly) right before they hit the amplifier.
Perfert for our ipods.
you dont want it before this because it will go through the processing circuit and sound like carp. believe me, I tried it.
so now you're wondering, thats great, what do i do with these 2 capacitors???
Dont remove/throw away the capacitors!! you need them. You are only removing one terminal of the capacitor from the board. see post 9 for a picture.
the side with the blue dots is the side of the capacitor I disconnected from the green board. I did this by heating up the solder and pulling up gently with a plier. One could also simply cut the wire, but I just pulled it so there would be no chance of the 2 halves touching.
once I had these disconnected, I soldered a wire onto each one, and ran the wires out of back corner of the head unit. I then routed these wires down to the console area, where I attatched them to a female 1/8 stereo plug. dont forget the plug will need a ground so I found a suitable one for it (like the side of the radio case or somewhere in the console).
do not connect it to any ground inside the stereo. Now I simply got a male to male headphone jack for my ipod and I was enjoying crystal clear mp3's in my car.
I would recommend getting a cable that has a line level out via the dock connector. I got one which had that and a usb line for charging. I will warn everyone though that when charging the ipod and playing the stereo at the same time there is the slightest hum sound, which comes from the processor circuit inside the ipod contaminating the signals. It doesnt bother me cause its not very loud.
solution is to ignore it like me, or always have your ipod charged.
you canuse a ground loop isolator at the cost of alot of sound quality.
***when not charging and just playing everything is crystal clear***
There needs to ba a tape in the tape player. Remember it thinks its playing the tape still. I hardwired my usb charger into the acessory line behind the console so all plugs are hidden.
I figured out a way even to trick the tape player so that it never flips over. dont bother cutting your motors like other forums may say, its not necessary. I will post pictures of it later cause its way too hard to describe.
the only side effect is that whatever you have playing on this line will come through on all head unit modes. so lets say you are playing you ipod on tape mode, then you hit fm mode. your headunit will play both. the solution is to simply press pause or if you cannot stop it simply unplug it. a very small sacrifice for crystal clear mp3's. oh and the headunit looks cool in tape mode. the buttone light up all different. I kind of dig it myself.
enjoy. I think thats most of it anyways.
Tape Hack (Aux input)
Linear Mode
