Heh-when I was little, our stereo had an 8 track with it. I remember borrowing my neighbor’s copy of Thriller when I was six years old and my dad copied it to an 8 track tape for me.
Ahh8-tracks…I seem to remember these thinsg shooting out tape from the dash! But the best thing was my Dad, trying to fix his (he spratd WD-40n into the inside of his-in an attempt to het the thing running…and the WD-40 dissolved the rubber roller that drove the tape! Cat-like wailings issued from the player-untill the whole thing seized up!
Haven’t seen 8 tracks for years, even in yard sales.
One other reason to have an 8-track: It was the only pre-recorded medium that featured discrete quadraphonic sound! Quad 8-tracks featured 2 “programs” instead of the usual 4, with 4 channels per program. The folks who are into multichannel music are searching for quad 8-tracks which they capture on computer then encode into DTS for distribution. That’s how I got my quad version of Switched-on Bach. All the LP systems (QS, SQ, CBS) were matrixed into stereo systems (Dolby Pro Logic was a variation of these systems), and getting 4 equal quality channels was very difficult.
If you have some still-sealed quad 8-tracks, there are collectors out there.
You made me think long and hard about that old system and I believe mine had a record player, too. I ended up giving mine to a friend who took all the electronics out of the cabinet and converted the cabinet to an open top bar.
True Quadrophonic recorded tapes were amazing.
Mono - okay
Stereo - much better than Mono
Quadrophonic - blows stereo away.
sitting in a living room set up for one and listening to things seeming moving all around the room was way cool.
Given how much technology has changed and electronics are now nearly a disposable commodity cost wise, I am suprised quad hasnt made a comeback.
A little incedental 8 track/cassette story.
My cousin graduated high school in 1979. She was my best friend at the time and I wanted to get her something special for graduation. She had just bought a red Nova SS and was talking about getting an 8 track for it, so I thought ‘Ah ha! Perfect!’ and off to Radioshack I went.
The clerk there talked me out of it. He said that CASSETTE players were the new, up and coming thing, and in just a few short years, 8 tracks wouldn’t be available at all. So I splurged the extra $$$ and got the cassette player for her. She was delighted with it, and we spent the next couple years cruising in that Nova, listening to The Eagles, Billy Joel, Rod Stewart and all the rest. 
Ah… the good old days…
Not to nitpick, but you misspelled “A horrible idea, but, unfortunately, brilliantly executed.”
You do know that we have discrete systems that go all the way up to 7.1 channels now, right, Gramps?
Ah yes. I had almost forgotten, but now I recall:
I can see para- … KACHUNK … -dise by the dashboard light!
Heh.
You know how you think of songs sometimes when you’re not doing much or whatever, like playing them in your memory? There are lots of songs I learned as a young girl that, when I play them on my memory radio, have a pause in the middle because I listened to them on an 8 track as a kid, over and over.
It was always in weird places, too. One of them is “Stairway to Heaven” and on the tape I listend to, it goes…
“If there’s a bustle in…your hedgerow (etc.)”
Thanks, now I have a pausing earworm.
I bought an 8-track player way back when, and I’d rather not say how many people have accused me, for a variety of non-8-track-related reasons, of not having a brain. But 8-tracks came before cassette players. And I actually scoffed at this new-fangled cassette fad and held onto my 8-track for quite a while before admitting defeat. Kind of wish I still had it; museum pieces sometimes bring in some bucks.
I do sort of miss that KACHUNK. Like the needle sounds on a vinyl record.
The closest I have to that is in my cassette copy of The Wall, there was a crunch in Hey You right before the main theme came back in, so when I’m playing the leadup to it in my mind I hear a fadeout and a crunch in what’s one of the top ten musical parts of all time. (Of course at least 3 of the other top ten are also in The Wall so it’s not as bad as that.)
Not unlike the delay while the changer switched 45s. When introduced to compete with 33RPM LPs, the manufacturer supposedly said no one would notice the 7 secs that repeatedly chopped up a symphony.
I remember when 8 tracks were first introduced. Getting anything like hifi sound in a car was wonderful. BTW, first there were 4 tracks (endless loop, but a totally different cart design). I believe Lear was the inventor of those.
Since cassettes were originally designed for dictation, mono, not-continuous loop, they didn’t look like a direct competitor until the technology improved. When that happened, it looked stupid to me to put an 8-track in a car if you could get a cassette player instead. However, [ul][li]The auto consumer after-market didn’t offer cassettes as much[]Car dealers only offered 8 tracks as standard equipment for a long time[]Since pre-recorded music was more readily available on 8 tracks, and few people had hifi cassette recorders at home, 8 tracks looked like a better deal.[/ul][/li]
8-tracks were designed from scratch to be a read-only medium, so recorders weren’t the first things offered. Personally, I stayed away from 8 tracks because you couldn’t back the tape up to replay a segment, absolutely required in my work. Also, Hollywood didn’t put much short-run material on 8 tracks, using acetates (single copy of a disc), open reel tapes, then cassettes.
You caused a rift in the space-time continuum, probably.
I had an egg shaped 8-track. Looked like the one on this page.
http://www.retrothing.com/2007/06/phil_collins_no.html
A few years ago, manufacturers introduced several competing (of course!) multichannel formats. Sony had SuperAudio CD, and Panasonic introduced DVD-Audio with different players for each. Later, “Universal” players appeared that played both. There are also DTS CDs and DVDs with up to 7.1 channel audio. None of them really caught on, and only a handful of record stores (if you can still *find *a record store) still has a Multichannel or “Advanced Audio” section. But there is a ton of multichannel music out there. For instance, Dark Side of the Moon is available as a SACD/CD combo disc. And most DVD-Audio discs will play in multichannel through any home theater system.
Why didn’t it catch on? For one, far too many artists took a “wait and see” attitude towards the new formats and never re-mixed their music for it. (I fear I’ll never hear “Hounds of Love” or “The Dreaming” in surround). But the main thing is how people listen to music these days - MP3 players and computer speakers. Compressed MP3 and AAC are apparently enough for the heavily compressed pop and rock of today. Also, quad came at the tail end of listening to music as a communal experience; people these days rarely get together for an evening of listening to records like was common in the 60s and 70s.
no, you young whipper snapper, I did not know that 
but I am really not an audiophile…as a mater of fact I’ve almost never driven around with a radio in the car or a boom box or walkman or a mp3 player or inflatable dolls for that matter
Uhhhhh…how do you get Seven point one channels?
The seven part I can understand…if you have seven speakers for the seven channels to make sense.
But how does the point one part work? Is that kind of like a knob that goes to 11 rather than just 10?
I’m too young to remember they heydey of 8-tracks, but I’m a neo 8-track enthusiast. I’ve got two players and a whole stack of cartriges, including stuff like Stevie Wonder’s Songs in The Key of Life, Transformer by Lou Reed, Armed Forces by Elvis Costello, real classic albums that I probably would never have bought if I hadn’t have found them being practically given away by the box full.
I love the 8-track precisely because it’s so crappy, the thunk of the program change, the cross talk, the hiss, the squeak of the motor, it’s wonderful.
That said, I can’t imagine ever thinking of that sound as ‘Hi-Fi’. Maybe I’ve just got crappy players and bad tapes, but early cassette tapes must have sounded really dreadful if the 8-track was in improvement. Was there a price factor involved too?
I do know that 8-tracks were not as popular here in the UK as they were in the US. I think the Cassette may have got a hold in the market earlier, there’s certainly a wider range of cartriges available on Ebay USA (yes my love of 8-tracks is so great that I’m thinking of importing them)
The .1 refers to the bass put out by the 8th speaker. It is referred to as .1 because it is much easier for a (sub)woofer to make a sound that appears to come from nowhere and everywhere at the same time, whereas regular fullrange speakers (and especially tweeters) make higher pitched sounds that are easier to pinpoint their location based only on hearing.
You can read more about the effect, LFE, here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-frequency_effect
Was it made by Akai? My buddy in Vietnam had one in 1968-1969.
Cassette tapes weren’t any great shakes when they first came out. You were relatively safe with a C-60, but anything longer than that tended to stretch or break in short order. I used to splice my own reel-to-reel tapes, but it was tougher with a cassette because you had to take the whole thing apart. I missed the whole 8-track scene, as I was overseas for much of it. I went from r2r straight to cassette.