Tape recorder head has only 2 pins, which one is for grounding?

I am trying to make my own cassette adapter that will help me play my music on my iPod through my car stereo system that supports only cassettes. For that I've bought a 3.5mm earphone jack and a cassette player head unit. Please take a look at the layout I've attahed. As you see, the head unit has only 2 pins. But the jack has 3 - one for left and right each and one for grounding. Now what do I do in this case? How do I connect three wires into to pins on the head unit? Thanks in advance.

That head is either a monophonic head or an erase head. Either pin can be connected to ground. The other ping can be connected parallelly to the left & right terminals on the earphone jack. If possible get a stereo head - it will have 4 pins. The upper and lower pairs each correspond to the two stereo channels. For the ground connect one pin each from each pair together and to the common or ground terminal on the jack. The other two go to the left & right channel pins.

BTW how do you intend to drive the head from the iPod? I believe you will need a cassette interface for it - basically a dummy cassette that takes its input via a 3.5 mm jack. This dummy cassette will internally have its own head driven by circuitry that will condition the high-level iPod signal to a form suitable to be given to the head.

Hi,

First of all, its nice to be innovative and create your own adapter in some way by using old systems.

Try to check this out, it might help. : http://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-cassette-tape-to-MP3-aux-converter/?ALLSTEPS

But i would greatly suggest you but a assembled one. That way its much convenient and cheaper,

Cheers,
Kevin

To be honest, I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel. There're already cassette adapters out there for very cheap if not free. I've already got one from ebay. The thing is the one I got has very low quality sound. So I decided to make my own because that seems very easy.

bq). BTW how do you intend to drive the head from the iPod?

I just plug the audio jack to my iPod and that's all. Of course, all this set up is placed inside a dummy cassette.(The cassette that I got from ebay ).

BTW, I've already done the job. After a few tries I ended up soldering the L and R channel wires to one pin and ground wire to the other. And it works. The only problem is folks are warning me that shorting L&R channels is not a good idea.