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Re: [ARSCLIST] On the beaten 8-track...
Richard, as usual, threw out a ton of good info here.
A couple of more points:
1. 8-tracks were hated by dupers. That's 8 electronics to keep tuned, complex headstacks to keep
somewhat aligned, complex loading machines, etc.
2. 8-tracks were hated by car makers. Road-wear got the heads way out of alignment because they
weren't fixed. Cartridges didn't work well in cold weather. Trying to figure out where to allow
storage for those big old cartridges. The playback machines needed a somewhat hefty motor to torque
up that loop in cold and hot weather, etc.
3. 8-track recorders were indeed made but you had to be midnful of 15 minute limits per "track" for
60-minute cartridges and 22.5 minutes for 90-minute carts. Otherwise, there would be a cutout while
the loop switched direction and the head moved on its cam.
4. cassettes were a much more efficient thing to mass produce and had less to go wrong. That's why
even some of the earliest cassettes still play A-OK.
5. someone said before that it was the 80's before cassettes were the choice home-taping format. I
think it was actually the mid to late 70's. Audiophiles still preferred quarter-track reel decks --
and some of the best Japanese decks ever made were made in the late 70's and early 80's -- but
really good-sounding cassette decks could be had by 1975 or so. I am still amazed by how good
cassettes sound that were made on my 1979 Sanyo deck. The reason I bought it was that it was rated a
superb value by a couple of stereo mags. It was relatively bare-bones but had great electronics and
head and a good execution of the Dolby circuit. Plus, it was the cheapest deck to do metal tape.
6. 8-tracks were pretty much dead by 1982 or so when the Sony Walkman came out, but that device
killed all other consumer tape formats and revolutionized how music was listened to and purchased.
Pretty soon, pre-recorded cassettes were out-selling LPs. And cassettes lingered long into the CD
era. Remember C-100's and C-110's, made to accomodate the longer playing time of CD's. Computer
drives that readily/cheaply/easily copied CD's didn't come around until the late 90's for most of
us. CD burner drives spelled the end of home taping for most people. And now iPods have spelled the
end of "mix tape" CD's for most people.
Finally, 8-tracks seem to linger on in the netherworld of cult status. I must say I've only had one
person ask me to transfer an 8-track, and I talked him out of it since the content was readily
available on commercial CD. But if I ever get a person with a homebrew 8-track that actually holds
valuable content, I'm sending him right to Richard!
-- Tom Fine
----- Original Message -----
From: "Richard L. Hess" <arclists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, September 25, 2006 4:55 PM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] On the beaten 8-track...
Rob,
I wish that there were no 8-track recorders, but, unfortunately, there
were enough around that people actually recorded important things in
the dang medium. I've done a fair amount of work -- including having
JRF make me a custom head assembly -- that allows me to get the most
out of these things. I play them on a pair of Sony APR-5000
reel-to-reel machines as even the high-end Akai 8-track recorder
(quad) that I have doesn't sound nearly as good as the reproduction
off the APRs.
With that said, I think the ease of use for recording and playback of
the Compact Cassette (cassette) and its ubiquitous nature and the
ability to put it in cars reliably spelled the death knell for the
8-track. The format itself was flawed and I'm not sure how well it
stood up to the rigors of automotive service. Alignment probably was
not much more critical than an auto-reversing cassette machine, but
the head steppers could presumably wear out and the lubricant needed
to be just right to keep the endless loop running.
Then there were the recordings that split songs between tracks --
nothing like the aluminum sensing tape causing a dropout as the music
went, ummm round and round, in the middle of the song -- and the
solenoid that ran the stepper would, on many machine, couple into the
audio with a click.
Cassettes were portable and by the mid-late 1970s exceeded the
fidelity of the 8-track, even though using 1/2 the speed and tracks
essentially the same width--cassette stereo tracks are about 23.5 mils
while 8 tracks are about 21 mils for the actual track width.
The cassette was less bulky and most people (though I met a few who
couldn't grasp the concept, telling me my cassette had become
confused) could grasp the properties of handling the cassette. Few,
however, paid any attention to breaking out the record-enable tabs,
sadly.
By the early 1980s, the LP was becoming a "tweak head" thing and the
new generation was listening to cassettes for their music. We had the
Walkman and car players. And mix tapes became easy to do, yes, I'm
sure that was part of the factor.
Also, many people considered LPs extremely fragile -- those of us who
had handling rituals didn't help the perception, I guess <smile>. To
this day, my wife won't play LPs.
I think the crossover came about 1982 (I could be off a few years)
where more pre-recorded cassettes were sold than LPs. About that time,
quality improved on pre-recorded cassettes--some were actually almost
good. They didn't suffer ticks and pops.
The CD came along about the same time, and in the beginning, was the
ultimate "tweak head" thing with $1K players, but that didn't last
long and certainly the ability to share music by CD and download made
the cassette an anachronism. I recall sharing cassettes with a few
friends in the mid 1990s as we were introducing each other to various
music -- it was a good format for that as it ensured we wanted to buy
the CD if we liked the music. There is less impetus to do that if you
share CDs with friends in the same way. I bought (for me) a lot of
music in the mid-90s on CD -- exploring folk music and supporting
favourite artists.
I never got involved with Napster as I thought from the get-go it was
wrong, and few of my friends did, either, but obviously there were
many who did.
That certainly hastened the demise of the cassette.
One thing that we miss today is a ubiquitous, easy-to-record format
for non-commercial copying. For example, the local church still has a
cassette recorder to record services for shut-ins. A wedding party was
very disappointed when they found there wasn't a CD recorder, but the
shut-ins have cassette players, and re-equipping them with CD players
would be a chore -- and introducing them to new technology would be
even more difficult. Generally, shut-ins are older people. Also, there
aren't that many good CD recorders out there today outside of a
computer. Sony, for example, has discontinued their range of
stand-alone CD recorders which I liked. I haven't looked into consumer
models, but for the casual, non-commercial recording, we'd like to
avoid SCMS and audio discs if possible.
Other than CD, the up-and-coming formats seem to have problems in that
while they will produce excellent results, some amount of
post-production is needed. You don't want to give the wedding party a
Compact Flash card of their wedding.
But...back to the original question. I think many of use audio folks
thought that the 8-track was a doomed format from the start, and
marketing muscle won out for a while. It must have been a nightmare
for the labels to keep triple inventory...and it certainly was a
nightmare for manufacturing. Of course, with Ford, I think, originally
sold on the idea, it was bound to go somewhere.
Obviously you know about the 8-track heaven Web site. I forget the
URL, but not hard to find.
Sorry for the length, but it's an interesting question with lots of
twists and turns.
Cheers,
Richard
Quoting Rob Bamberger <rbamberger@xxxxxxxxxxx>:
Is my recollection mostly correct that there were few, or essentially no
consumer market 8-track decks that permitted people to record their own
8-track compilations for use in the car (or elsewhere)?
When acquaintances remarked to me in the 1990s that they did not see
the cassette being displaced entirely by the CD, my response was that
the introduction of a recordable CD would be the end of the cassette
once the economics became comparable to cassette feedstock and
technology.
Similarly, is it correct to surmise that the ability (eventually) to
make reasonably decent recordings of one's own LPs to cassette, or
custom compilations, was the major reason for the format's disappearance
in the early 1970s?
(The 8-track format had a number of things going against it, and would
have passed from the scene at some point. The question here is why did
it disappear when it did.)