8-tracks: Sound good or awful?

Awful. And that's being nice about it.

 

I can remember recording my own 8-tracks for use in the car. The recorder was a Wollensak*. You had to carefully set up recording levels and time your tracks to get clean sound and avoid that cha-chunk in the middle of a song. Then carefully drop the needle on the record, quickly set the recorder in motion and bring the recording level up from zero to your predetermined level to avoid unwanted pops and such. Difficult to do well. If you got lucky you got sound far better than commercial tapes. But it still sucked.


Wollensak is not a social disease.

 

I haven't listened to an 8 track in over 25 years, but I remember that the wow and flutter was so bad that the tapes sounded out of tune! As a kid this caused me endless amusement . . .

 

The matchbook shim brought back great memories!
Who can forget how you pulled out about 8 inches of tape on one end and then let it slap back in to tighten up the tape. Of course when that didnt work, only an 8 track tape made a good mess when throw from the car window at 60 mph!

 

...and Wollensack is a member here.

 

played a lot of them. some great sound, some not. great for their time

 

Was was either radio or 8-tracks and at the time when you were driving, they were ok, now trash.

 

That's about it.

 

I'll say they sounded ok for time period.
What I did like was the track changing in the middle of a song.

 

Sorry I meant did NOT like

 

What I did like was the track changing in the middle of a song.

Sorry I meant did NOT like

Oh sure, you thought it was pretty cool when you were stoned.

 

They can sound good if the duplication was done well from a good "master". Even then, they can still be a finicky format. I almost only buy the Quad tapes (I have an old Lincoln w/factory Quad), and have a relatively small, but good collection of them. I try to buy ones that look to be nice conditon, sometimes even sealed. Even many of the sealed ones needed at least a little help to sound/play properly, though some of that's due to age/storage.

 

Parents had one of these:



Used to listen to their (ahem) music with it. Mostly easy listening compilations brought in from the car.

This Zenith model was in fact a quad capable player (but sadly was never used as such). Changing tracks was accompanied by a very loud mechanical click! Still runs.

When they upgraded their stereo in the 80's, this item was retained and plugged into the much better new system. Surprising fidelity - a bit hissy, but musical.

The tapes are still around and playable by the way (only the good die young!).

 

Cool picture.
I used to own a Q8 player but it was hard to find the Q8 tapes in the UK.

 

I too owned a Technics RS-858US,which was a quadrophonic & stereo 8-track cartridge player & recorder.I recall transfering Quadrophonic reel to reel tapes & Quadradisc(CD-4) L.P.'s onto Q-8 cartridge.Undoubtedly the RS-858US was the finest 8-track cartridge recorder ever made,but still,the format sucked:static,crosstalk,badly high speed duplicated tapes from the record companies,songs split into "Part One" & "Part Two" Ughh.Let 8-track cartridge rest in peace.

 

As a related note,

Does anybody remember the FM tuners that plugged into an 8 track player?

Back in the 60's most cars didn't have FM stereo tuners, so this was a way to add FM stereo to a car that had an 8 track deck. It's pretty much the same concept as the cassette adapters many use today to listen to iPods or sat radio on a cassette deck that doesn't have an aux input.

 

Likewise in the early 1980s, the 8-track adapter that allowed you to play cassettes in the car. The one my cousins had could only fast-forward, though - you couldn't rewind without pulling the thing out, flipping the cassette over, putting the adapter back in, forwarding to roughly where you thought you needed to be, taking the adapter back out, flipping the cassette back over, reinserting the adapter...and then finding out you hadn't wound the cassette far enough to avoid clipping off that awesome song intro.

Forget complaints about cell-phone usage while driving. That little operation pretty much demanded pulling off the road.

On topic: yeah, good for the era, at least until cassette formulations caught up a little bit. I had decent sounding copies of Joplin in Concert and Fleetwood Mac's Tusk (except program 4, which had some annoying crosstalk from program 3 that practically obliterated the fade-out ending of "Never Forget"). That matchbook trick got quite the workout in our 1978 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, I'll tell you that.

 

8-tracks were pretty much just a North American phenomenon, though, right? I don't believe they were ever very popular in England, and I've NEVER seen one from Europe or Japan.

 

Everybody in my neighborhood had one of these and while wandering around the hood in the evening, someone always had one in tow. Then of course someone else in the group had to be the DTBC (designated tape box carrier)

The I-pod of yesteryear. We had some really good times listening to those crappy boxes. Probably since music was social glue back then, not the individual cocoon is seems to be now. I think I still have mine in my Dad's shed...

 

A friend of mine had a Loudmouth II. Mine was a III.

 

So the "III" was the audiophile edition???

 

My brother drives a '79 Cutlass Supreme as his daily driver when there's no salt on the roads (he's in Cincinnati). It has a LS1 and a 700R4, but, no 8 track player any more.

 

I have a Heathkit GD-28 8-track I built in the 70's. At the time, Consumer Reports stated the sound quality was better on 8-track than cassette.

I guess I bought the wrong format.

I've since rebuilt it (new belt,...) and played Made in Japan by Deep Purple for my guitar-learning son. Turns out he is more interested in Clapton and Dylan.

<cha-chink>

rick

 

I have a Roberts 8-track deck that is built like a tank, and suffers less from the crosstalk problem than any other deck I've owned. The right tape can sound pretty good when played on this unit. I have an 8-track of Bowie's Station to Station that sounds pretty amazing.

 

At the time, they did. A few advancements in cassette tech mostly surpassed 8 track. Remember Elcaset? If the R&D money went into 8 track instead of Elcaset it would have probably lasted longer.

Record companies were too cheap to do simple things like do a better job of rearranging songs so none were cut. There was a Michael Nesmith tape, for example, that there are two versions of: the first issue (on Pacific Arts, I think) had no songs cut. The reissue, on another label, had them resequenced and two were diced. Simply allowing a longer tape length would have helped immensely.

It's funny and ironic that the later tapes from the 80s sound so much better than earlier ones. I had Iron Butterfly's "In-A-Gadda_Da-Vida" on the Ampex issue, really clean, and the 80s Columbia House issue and the CH sounded ten times better than the first issue. Go figure.