8-tracks: Sound good or awful?

I don't remember how they sounded because there were so many issues with them back in the day, at least installed in vehicles: azimuth (mis)alignment, bouncing (which caused tape warble), tape chew and getting the tape all tangled up inside the transport mechanism. They were huge by today's standards, so you needed a vinyl covered brief case to store them. The ultimate was a beater van, converted to a shag-a-delic mobile stoner center: you had your shag rug on the walls, the waterbed (if really deluxe), the 8 track player with tons of kludged together speakers (this was in the days before car audio got serious). There were other accessories that weren't necessarily legal.
You'd see such vans parked, often shaking or rocking back and forth, music blaring out of them. The Sean Penn scene in Fast Times sort of captures it, if memory serves. So does Dazed and Confused. Popular material: Black Sabbath Paranoid; Deep Purple and Grand Funk.
A former mobster I once knew-- had been given a period Caddy Eldorado with pin striping, the de rigueur "Brougham" roof (vinyl cladding to make it look like a convertible) and those tufted deep leather living room chair type seats after he got out of prison. He proudly showed me the car as well as the collection of 8 track tapes that came with it- Frank, Dean and a few other tapes of the genre. Men of respect.
And, don't forget the plastic wedge speakers that could be installed in a jiffy on the rear window ledge- they totally sucked, but were pretty common. I had forgotten entirely about those for, like 30 years or more, until I read the great George Pelecanos' King Suckerman, a period crime novel (that I highly recommend).
I forget everything else. Probably not worth remembering.
Oh, there is an 8 track tape museum in Texas I haven't visited yet.

Historical footnote: The 8 track player was shortly eclipsed by---

get ready for it:

The CB radio. Which was a whole other thing.
Man, I don't really want to go back to those days.

 

This reminds me of a tape I had years and years ago. Deep Purple. The bizarre thing was, the drums were maybe a half-second behind the rest of the music. But only on the 8-track, the album was fine. How could this have happened?

 

Unfortunately I think the museum is now defunct. Bummer, I always wanted to check it out. The owner (Bucks Burnett) seemed like an entertaining character.

 

This! Once high bias tape became available and Dolby became commonplace the 8-track was left to eat the cassette's dust.

Nope. 8-track still had insurmountable wear and speed stability / wow & flutter issues, not to mention a plague of crosstalk and alignment problems. Even if an 8-track started off sounding as good as a cassette from a frequency-response standpoint, that wouldn't last.

They always sounded ridiculously warbly to me. A joke format with those confusing programs, it's amazing they were as successful as they ever became.

 

Only the 70's, sunspot42

 

All true, But just in perspective, it's not the continuous loop that was so bad, nor the cartridge.. Radio carts had been around a long time. They are nearly identical to the 8 track cart. This was a superior format though, 7.5 ips, the pinch roller contained in the player, (not inside the cart) and it was 2 track. The broadcast format produces 20-20,000 full frequency range, wide dynamic range, low noise, there was no crosstalk, wow and flutter was not a problem. If the 8 track format had remained 4 track, and had been developed as a 7.5 ips format... (3.75 ips for longer play albums) and a little more costly to manufacture, then it would have been not such a joke.

Then again, some "nitwit" develops a lower cost, cheaper product. The mass market goes for the cheaper, lower quality one.

 

I disagree. Head alignment and noise were huge problems, and I had enough carts fail live on the air to tell you that it was not a fun format. The double-speed and quadruple-track-width did help a lot, but the other problems were still very real. Many companies made attempts to improve the radio cart by doing esoteric things like having a sum signal on one track and a difference signal on the other, or using various noise-reduction systems, but I think everybody was glad to see carts go. You can't give them away on eBay; even the top-of-the-line ITC cart decks are maybe ten bucks these days.

A consumer format based around the Fidelipac standard was done solely to make a cheap format. When I interviewed Mad Man Muntz for a magazine piece in 1977, he made a good case that his 4-track "StereoPak" format had much better sound quality than 8-track (because of the double-track size), but he admitted that reliability was a problem as was dubbing tapes in mass quantities. Cassettes were ultimately a better solution by the mid-to-late 1970s. Sound quality alone will not make one format succeed over another.

 

Disagree? You can't do that! (jk, haha!) The radio station I worked for, 1220 WGNY/ Sunny 103 FM back in the early 90's had problems with the Revox B77 decks. They were breaking down right and left, old and rickety... but the faithful cart player never hiccuped even once. I recorded a few extra songs to add to my playlist on carts in the production studio, and my closing music as well, never a problem. The fidelity was equivalent to the Otari MX-5050 half track at 7.5 ips.

 

I don't recall what brand of cart machine they used at WABC in the latter part of the 60's and 70's - Gates? But they ran nearly their entire tight and fast-paced format with them (music, spots, jingles, etc) with extremely few on-air problems. Those engineers must have had the manual dexterity of concert pianists to keep it all going so incredibly well.

 

Probably closed when the last of the carts broke and jammed inside the last of the players.

 

In 1976, I had an Eico power inverter that we hooked up to a Pioneer power amp with an 8-Track unit (home versions) along with two 12" 3-way speaker cabinets which we installed in my friends Ford van. It totally rocked. The player had to be a DC motor type though due the inverter frequency was unstable.

8-Tracks recorded on an Akai deck we had sounded very good from vinyl. You had to know how to whip the tape back into the cartridge back then if it got ate. Ah, what memories.

 

That is a bummer.

 

Either there was a problem with the duplicating machine on which the tape was recorded, or more likely it was a problem with the master from which your tape was duplicated. It doesn't seem that your playback machine would cause the problem, but did you try playing the tape on different machines to see if the same effect was there?

To some extent it's reminiscent of a consideration with open reel tapes from the early (two track) days of stereo recordings. There were two formats, one with "stacked" or "in line" heads, the other with "staggered" heads, references to the relative placement of the recording and playback heads for the left and right channels. Playing a tape recorded in one of these formats on an incompatible machine would yield a very noticeable delay between channels.

 

All of what you listed is true, true, true! However, when you were driving down the road in your noisy, rattly car with the primitive stereo system, all those other issues didn't seem to matter that much. I was an 18 year old in hog heaven with my own car and my own sounds and I was going places. Not too many complaints from me.

 

What did we have then, 4 watts of power? Coax speakers in the rear deck? Or, buy a power booster? There weren't a lot of options.

 

No, more like 800 watts, according to the specs listed on the amp. Fed through an 18-gauge power line. Kraco. Gotta love it.

Did Pioneer make an 8-track supertuner? I had a cassette supertuner in my car. And Jensen co-axial 6x9 speakers. It was awesome.

 

I got started indirectly into my audiophile obsession through 8 tracks. I had the top of the line Kraco 8 track unit, FM stereo tuner built in, and the very first 12 VDC power amplifier by Craig. It wasn't 800 watts. It boasted 12 watts RMS per channel. I had it connected to the highest power speakers I could find by "Spark-O-Matic", then later upgraded to Radio Shack 40-1265 full range 6X9's. I never liked the coaxials, but preferred a full range whizzer cone type of speaker.

My system produced a big sound, except for the lowest octave from about 20 to 40 Hz. For the lowest octave, you do need lots of power. For everything above, efficient speakers and only 20 watts of power will produce very high levels of sound in a car... or van. Even 8 watts would be quite loud, but again just not at the lowest octave.

A friend admired my car system, invited me over his house to demonstrate his Sansui system. He played "Who's Next" and I was forever hooked on vinyl. Bye bye 8 tracks! But I still listened to 8 tracks in my car until about 1977, when cassettes had taken over.

 

The vintage 8 track players for the car were low power, usually anywhere from 2 to 8 watts. An 8 watt player was top of the line.

I understand today how someone would think with such feeble power, that you'd get nothing out of the system. But that's untrue! The little 5 inch door mounted speakers (with chrome bezel) were efficient, and converted those 8 watts into loud acoustic power. Some 8 tracks were anemic, that is true, and so were some of the speakers. But some better quality systems existed, and did sound very good.

 

I had a Craig Pioneer 4/8 track player that boasted 15 watts RMS. I still have hearing damage from player that believe it or not.

 

A friend had a component 8-track player back in the day that sounded really good. It was a Pioneer. Had none of the typical issues like cross-talk, speed warble or lack of high frequencies.
The only thing it couldn't do was prevent your typical songus interruptus. Some really bad ones on Jethro Tull Passion Play.

 

Those were good decks, but I'd never choose them for the abuse of day-in/day-out playback on a radio station. They're just too plasticky. A used (well-maintained) Ampex AG-440B or 4440C would last for decades and never break down. But of course, it weighs about four times as much and has very little plastic in it.

There's something to be said with just having the whole station library on a hard drive and run the thing on a computer, provided all the segues and start times are configured well. On the other hand: in an all analog studio, if one thing breaks, you can limp by; heck, I know of a guy who had 4 cart machines fail in one day and wound up with just 3 turntables and did several hours all from vinyl and his voice. He sang the jingles himself and read all the commercial copy out loud, until an engineer could get in and swap out the cart players. But with a computer set up, if one thing breaks... chances are you're dead in de water.

 

Back then, it was before the FTC clamped down on amplifier specs. There were no rules. You didn't have to disclose anything. So you could derive a totally insane power spec (like hundreds of watts) by listing instantaneous peak power at 1 kHz with 15% THD at 1 ohm. Nevermind the fact that such a wattage rating, if REAL power, would melt the wiring!

Ah, selling audio by the numbers. Those were the days. NOT.

 

When I was selling audio back then (mid-70s), we used to call that "ILS Power" - If Lightning Strikes.

That said, four watts into efficient speakers - in a car - was plenty, and who cared about 5% THD? You still had control over what you were listening to. Remember that cars back then usually only had an AM radio - FM was an add-on. 8 Track was the first format that offered a choice; cassette was the second, but didn't really get rolling until a few years later. It was never designed to be a high fidelity source, just a convenience for the car. Never made much sense for home use.

Cheers,
Larry B.

 

And don't forget, you need to wedge a match pack between the player and the cart to get any highs from it. My dad had a 1972 Impala with an 8-track in the dash. It never got used.

 

Thank God for those match packs!