Had a whole lot of fun listening to 8 track in my new car back then. Fond memories listening to Dave Mason "Look at You Look at Me" among others.
Welcome to Hell, here's your 8-Track
Neil Postman once said,
"Anyone who has studied the history of technology knows that technological change is always a Faustian bargain: Technology giveth and technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure. A new technology sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys more than it creates. But it is never one-sided."
I'm pretty sure that we know that the 8-track was more bad than good.
Question for audiophiles here who might know -- was there anything good about 8-track technology that was lost when it went extinct? And what was that good, audio-wise, specifically?
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@akg_ca Thank you so much for your very informative post. I suspected this was the case, but given the relatively larger size of the actual tape in the 8 track (compared to cassettes) I was curious as to whether they had some advantage over other formats -- and I see that question answered in your post. Appreciate the time you took to write it. |
8-track cartridges were perceived as “great” with its convenience factor . One can compare them as such compared to preceding tech options to vinyl but that is a low bar. .Vinyl ruled, survived, and thrives today for intuitive reasons. They were not a mainstream popular home recorder option for the masses, and were a generally limited audio performer in a continuous tape loop fixed cartridge format, that arose and died in the 70’s (…along with CB radios…). They were primarily designed and suited for fast tunes plunk-in convenience. (Think mostly in your cars and early era portable options) . They were not mainstream home audio performers to compete with or challenge vinyl. They were thankfully quickly superseded in analogue tape format by cassettes an improved tape loop format in all of audio performance, build, features, and utility, Cassettes finally permitted an improved home recording option for the masses and ushered in the genesis of mid-fi and early hi-fi performance level recording and playback machines. The 8-track cartridge audio performance was generally strictly bottom level in its Jurassic era capabilities. It presented an overall uneven and spiky, and poor frequency performance curve with a severely rolled off top-end at its best. The 8-track format popularity and its very existence was short lived (…dare I say thankfully …) that appeals to a limited cohort of purely nostalgia fans.
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I know I’ve mentioned this countless times before, but my dad was an unmitigated hi-fi nut of the WWII generation who always had to have the latest HiFi gadget or tech, from transistor electronics to stereophonic to quad to various media sources. Of course, he got into Four track cartridges and then Eight Track cartridges. Whenever his hifi shelf got too crowded he’d give me whatever he was tired of. In any case, before long I inherited an Eight Track Recorder/Player, and I got to say it was maybe the worst piece of audio technology ever brought to market. Cartridges that never failed to either unravel or stretch their tape to produce nausea-inducing wow. Frequency response made AM radio seem mellifluous. Whew! |
