The 8 tracks were a bad technology. The sensing foils that were responsible for changing tracks  usually broke and the felt pads that help the tape make contact with the heads deteriorate. The tapes can be repaired but it's a headache. I never used the machines back in the day  but there was one in the house.

More recently I found some radio recordings and obtained some players. The clunking noise when the tape changes tracks is annoying and a lot of album had to have their playing order changed or tracks were interrupted by the change of tracks.

Last edited by Fitz (December 8, 2018 8:07 pm)

8-tracks were a four-program / two-channel cartridge that allowed an album to be split into four channels.  It was a home and auto medium that gained a lot of traction in the 60s and 70s.  My dad bought a shit-load of them.  They were notorious for head alignment issues, so bad in fact, that you could hear dull audio from the other program.  To this day, whenever I hear "Goodbye Stranger" fading off, I can hear the end of "Take the Long Way Home" in my head, because that's what I heard whenever Dad played his "Breakfast In America" 8-track.

Just Awful!

As for carts, they only had three tracks: a cue track, and left and right audio.  Carts ran at 7.5 IPS and 8-tracks ran at 3.75 IPS.

 

thanks Jody and RA. i can't recall exactly, but with carts, if you made the splice either too tight or too loose, it would not pick up the cue and keep cycling in the player. good fun... 50 cents for a 30 and a buck for every 90 second cart i could produce.  still have my razor blade and grease pencil.

To conclude, 8-track tapes are to quality audio what former CFRB asset Doug Ford is to public service.

Here's more on the PlayTape, which until this post, I'd never heard of. 

Museum of Obsolete Media



 

I have 8 track tapes.  Maybe 25 to 30 of them?  Nothing to play them on and no desire to hear a song interrupted by a switch-over to the next set of tracks.  This 8 track show would be nothing but annoying.  For all of the ballyhooing over vinyl [and I know that if it's the right vinyl the sound can be warmer] the snap, crackle, pop and click, click, clicking is not something I 'pine' to hear.  They ain't, after all, the fjords.

What I don't like are low quality, information deprived mp3s.  Wave files/c.d.s are superior.  But the days of demanding quality seem to have passed in favour of the sound of what amounts to a cheap transistor radio.

Fitz wrote:

I listened to one of the archives of the 8 track show. He had some really bad 8 tracks to work with. Just for a laugh and lark I recorded some material from 8 tracks.My selections mostly from the classic free form radio era by Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Pink Floyd, The Ozark Mountain Daredevils and McGuiness Flint plus easy listening extras by Ann Murray and Herb Albert.In a Lossless Wav file because with 8 tracks additional  sound degradation should be avoided.

The tracks by ELP and Herb Alpert are passable. The machine I recorded on is a rare 8 track with Dolby but I did not use it as it takes out the highs.

8 Track Recordings 

I will say that your 8-track examples are above average.  That deck had relatively low wow and flutter and noise (relatively speaking).  The only Dolbyized cartridges I remembered were from RCA and Columbia.  If you had a well calibrated deck (again, very few did), the upper response may have rolled off a bit, but it was flat to 12 Khz at least, but you were lucky (very luck) to get a S/N ratio of 58 db (similar to a cassette deck without NR applied.)

It would be fun to have a car deck to play old tapes in a Caprice or something like that.  But what a horrible format.  It's amazing that it was as popular as it was.  The last new 8-track I ever saw at a store was at Woolco, in Eastgate Mall in East Hamilton.  They had Blondie's Autoamerican album there in 1981.  Dad wanted it for the Tide Is High, but Rapture was split into two channels.  So he passed on it.  Good Man!

I think the last 8-tracks he bought was John Lennon's Double Fantasy (which he returned because it was defective.)  I recorded a copy for him from my trusty LP.