A good use of the factory cassette player

[alpac]

Today I decided that I wanted to be able to connect an MP3 player to my X5 factory radio. I wanted something neat with no visible wire and a good sound quality. I wanted to keep my CD changer so I did not go for the Icelink solution. I thought about the FM modulator, tried it and did not like the sound quality. Since my X5 2000 radio unit was equiped with a cassette player which I do not use (the last tape I listened was more than 10 years ago) I decided to give the cassette adaptor solution a try. 15$ only the adaptor at Target was worth trying. Well, to my surprise the sound from my Rio player came out excellent. Much better than with the FM modulator and about the same as from a CD but I had to hide the wire. For that I removed the radio unit to pass the wire behind and then thru the central column up to the central column box where the player is now located. The only tricky part was to unsolder and solder the wires back inside the cassette adaptor. I had to do that because the jack would not pass thru the little intertices I needed it to go. No visible wire, a great sound and only 15$ spent. Now I have the mp3 played when I select TAPE. Sometime simple solutions work great.