I’m looking at some old photos from 1978 ish, and there it is–an 8-track tape player.*
Why did anybody ever think that 8-tracks were a good idea?
If you wanted music on tape, cassettes had been available for several years before 8-tracks.
Cassettes were better in every way: they were smaller, more convenient, and, for og’s sake, you could rewind/fast forward them.
So who thought up the idea of 8-tracks, with a continuous loop that you had no control over? And why did anybody buy it?
(the 8T was not mine, of course–I was a true audiophile . My music was on vinyl, and I had a turntable with anti-skate compensation that tracked at 1.4 grams… .)
Although it was a little before my time, based on the fact that they didn’t exist for very long I don’t think anyone with a brain did buy them. There’s always the “people without a brain” market that you can’t underestimate.
There were no commercially available high fidelity cassette players once upon a time. I first remember decent car cassette players coming into play in the late 70s. Before that if you wanted to buy something that actually sounded good then 8 track was the way to go. The tape speed was faster and produced much better results, until tape technology improved.
Are you sure you’re rembering correctly. I was 10 in 1978 and remember my Mom having a box full of 8 tracks from the 60s and 70s. I don’t remember casettes really taking off until walkmen showed up.
ETA: Now that I’m thinking about it, I remember getting a portable 8track player one Xmas. Oh and what do you mean by continuous loop. The “Track” in 8 tracks referred to the songs being on different tracks pressing a button changed the song/track.
I think you’re also understating the continuous loop feature. This was decades before auto-reverse became common on cassette players. If you were working in your shop or driving a car and wanted to play your music and didn’t mind listening to the same album a couple times in a row, hands-free, an 8-track was the way to go.
Yep, cassettes were readily adopted when they came out, but that was well after 8 tracks. Believe me, we weren’t crazy about them either but it was the best available at the time. Two gripes; you couldn’t record and they got eaten… a lot.
I came across a box of 30 or so just last week as I was cleaning out the garage. While I did put them in the trash, I placed them on top in case anyone wandered by in the hopes they could wax nostalgic too.
I think they were primarily for cars, with a secondary home market. Easier to operate for cars, plus there were no easily available car cassette players at the time.
Aw Contraire mon brothah. I remember in about 1970 recording onto 8-track. I was not yet in Kindergarten and Dad was teaching me the cutest little song about three Irishmen digging in a ditch.
Really? Y’all had much nicer decks than us then. I never ever had one that could record. You could buy blanks? I remember what a big deal it was with cassettes in that we finally could make our own tapes.
I also remember always having a matchbook or piece of paper handy with 8 tracks. You often had to wedge it in the top of bottom just to get it to play correctly.
I could be wrong, but I thought I read about 8-track recorders. I know Wikipedia mentions them, but it doesn’t go into detail. If they did exist, however, my family didn’t have one.
See, now there’s a shame. I would have grabbed them from you. I used to work next to a thrift store and for some time in the mid-'90s, you could still find quite a few tapes. I think I have about forty or fifty of them stacked away in an old Sony stereo cabinet; I’ll occasionally play one for friends, but yeah, each time I pop a tape in I know it might be on the last leg of its journey.
I could be wrong, but…
I think 8 track pre-recorded music albums came first, as more portable form of music than record albums. It was a way you could play your music in the car stereo or take to your friends house. I don’t think pre-recorded cassette albums were released until the late 70’s or early 80’s, although blank cassettes and recorders were certainly available before that. My hazy childhood recollections of people replacing their 8 track collections with cassettes seem to support this. I know that by the time I started collecting music in the early 80’s albums were no longer released on 8 track, at least not in my area. Everything was on cassette and record albums.
Oh yeah, a book of matches jammed under one side to keep the pressure on certain tapes was a must: almost synonymous with the quarter taped to the tone arm on your record player.
Darn it, on preview, I see that almost everything that I had typed out has been covered.
Wikipedia agrees that 8-Tracks came before pre-recorded cassettes, but not by much. I don’t know what their relative popularity was; maybe 8-Tracks were just more popular until the late '70s.
I wonder if it wasn’t a competetive marketing thing like Beta/VHS or DVD/Bluray or Mac/PC?
Clearly 8-track didn’t suck too bad at the time because it was a marketable medium. Perhaps the fatter & faster tape provided better quality than the skinny cassette tape and so 8-track’s other shortcomings (Let’s not forget the 2-3 second pause in the middle of a song while the player switched tracks!) were worth working around. Eventually cassette prevailed in a big way when they were able to at least approach sound quality?
Having lived through this time period, and having owned an 8-track, I can tell you flat out that it was quality that drove the market. 8 tracks came first, and cassettes in the early days were suitable only for voice recording. It wasn’t until the Walkman era that cassettes really became a viable music medium.
eta: Hell, I owned a 4 track player! With the hole in the bottom of the tape cartridge where the drive wheel went. Match that!
