Quadraphonic 8-Track tape players in cars ... do you remember this?

From Wikipedia:

I can't recall if I ever experienced this back in the day. I don't think I knew anybody that had Quad-8 in their car.

You?

 

Yes, I installed an aftermarket Quadraphonic 8-Track tape player in my 1973 Mercury Capri. I think it was installed in 1974. My collection included about a dozen or so quad tapes, Nilsson Schmilsson probably got the most play.

 

Yes. A schoolmate had one in his car, and one night another buddy, really messed up on various stimulants, completely freaked out while experiencing The Dark Side Of The Moon.

 

That's AWESOME!

 

Never seen that before. The wrong track order would have flipped me out. I wonder why they did it?

I sold a few car quad 8-tracks at Rat Shack.

 

Hello,

I think I remember having read somewhere, that the discrete Quad-8-track master in fact was sourced from a SQ processed matrixed quad master.
EMI used the SQ system, so they processed the quad mix with SQ, to produce an stereo tape, with quad matrixed into it.
That stereo tape was sent to Capitol, who decoded it into quad again, and record the decoded quad onto 4 track tape.

Of course, matrixed quad never reaches the amount of channel separation than true discrete quad, so the decoded quad tape didn't have the best possible channel separation.

I don't know whether is was DSOTM, or a Pink Floyd album at all.

Best regards

 

Dad had one in his car which made for some great times travelling and certainly was better than the original fitted car radio!

 

I was head over heels into quadraphonic when it first came out. The records were a real disappointment. The 8 track tapes and reel to reel tapes were a much better candidate, but nobody seemed to know what to do when it came to the mixing an mastering. The best tapes that I had were Moody Blues A Question of Balance and Doobie Brothers The Captain and Me.

The problem with quad was that the playback technology was too complicated and primitive and the record companies didn't have the recording technology or standards established before they sold the systems. The whole thing pretty much died by the end of the 1970's.

The 5.1 surround is a completely different animal than early 1970's quadraphonic.

PS: They were trying to create quad cassette technology by recording 2 track going forward and 2 tracks going in reverse to achieve a discreet 4 channel sound, but it never got past the R&D stages. That would have been really bizarre!

 

OMG we had 8-track retrofitted into an old Plymouth and later in a Pinto. Yes, I survived driving that Pinto AND that horrible 8-track monstrosity inside of it! We had the original Toto album on 8-track and it almost never tracked properly, which meant that one song would bleed over another. I still hear songs from that album and ghost-hear them with other tracks from the album superimposed. Terrible, terrible. Oh, the days...

Hold the line! Love isn't always on time!

 

Oh yea! I loved the old matchbook covers wedged between the tape and the player so that the rubber roller would properly press against the capstan and the tape to go forward. Weren't the seventies wonderful?

 

Thankfully our Q8 player did have a Head Adjust control on the front panel to deal with program one and three-quarters and a fairly powerful motor to deal with stiff tapes.

 

Program 1 is shorter than 2 and I suppose the idea was to it was better to have you sit through a few minutes silence then go program 2 so you'd end playing the album on the splice. The UK version apart from using the actual discrete quad master and Dolby, runs in the proper album order splitting Money with a fade out and in on program 2.

 

There were lots of 8-tracks with 'alternative' tracklist order, probably because of running time issues if it wasn't changed.

 

I have a NOS quad underdash deck by Craig that I bought on ebay. I thought it would be cool to put in my Silverado. The thing is so big it wouldn't fit under a modern dashboard so I scrapped the idea. Still sitting in it's original box.

 

Yeah, my parents had an 8-track in Opel car in the early/mid seventies. They had Beatles For Sale on an 8-track and played it constantly. Since then I have been very fond of that album.

 

It had been a long time since I'd thought of this record, I forgot most of the song titles and now that I look I see they really only switched one song from side to side. It was making Side Two into Side One and sticking Side One after the end of Side Two that confused me.

 

Holding the bare player onto the side of the transmission hump with a metal strap and running the wires across the floor with duct tape wouldn't work? Used to.

 

Quad cassette technology seems like a no-brainer to me. Just make the tapes one-sided.

 

IIRC, the SQ master was only used for the US Q8 of DSOTM; the UK 8T was a true discrete 4 channel.

Mind you, this is my rememberance from forty years ago, so...YMMV.

Cheers,
Larry B.

 

The area manager of our local newspaper routes had one in his van. Fly Like An Eagle got played quite a bit.

 

Thank you.
This could be true, I remember similar. Like that, Capitol didn't use the best possible masters for the quad-8 release, but instead the decoded matriced version.

Best regards

 

Just like the Tascam Porta Studio 4 tracks. They used standard compact cassettes, but recorded 4 tracks, while making the tape a one-sided tape.

Best regards

 

I know the US "quad 8" and then "Q8" 4-channel 8 track tapes from RCA were discrete. Because RCA did CD-4 on disc, they never used any matrix system, they prepared only discrete 4-channel masters. I would guess that any other company using CD-4 for disc also made only discrete masters (WEA for example).

 

Philips did not like that idea too well, and they controlled the cassette patents, which then were very strictly enforced. When the patents expired, then there were 4 channel cassette machines. Best known being the Tascam Portastudio.

The system used for Quad LP discs is irrelevant to the 8 track Quad tapes except for Capitol using the SQ processed tape decoded instead of asking for the 4 channel master tape. The Q8 tape would have been way better if Capitol had requested a copy of the EMI/Harvest 4 channel Quad master on 1/2". This was Capitol taking a shortcut. FWIW, SQ was the worst performing Quad LP format.