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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?

 

128x128hilde45
dadork
632 posts
 

I'm old enough to remember listening to 8 track but never on anything good enough to make it memorable except the hiccups,

edcyn
1,876 posts
 

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!

fuzztone's avatar
fuzztone
5,502 posts
 

Compared to preceding tech the 8-Track was great.

Home recorded ones even better. As far as I've gotten in this rag.

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