What's so bad about 8 track tapes?

all in all it was a bad product...IMO.
I was happy to move onto cassette!

 

Just because vinyl made a comeback doesn't mean everything has to. And that includes CD (when and if it ever really goes away, which hasn't happened yet).

 

It's like 8-tracks were made to wear out. Once I took one apart to see how it worked, I understood. The tap slides out of the spool and the friction inevitably grinds the tape particles off. Look at the tape. You can see diagonal slide marks across it. That's from being pulled out of the spool.

And the size, and the songs being cut interrupted, and the bad players...

I will say the original portable players that came in different colors were pretty cool to me though. (I was in grade school...) That big plunger on top that served as a handle and the way to change tracks was cool as heck. - I've changed my tastes since then. But for a short while I thought they were cool.

 

Every one of your objections is a gross over-generalization.

90% of my tapes have not self-destructed. Only the earliest rubber rollers deteriorated (and of course, the plastic ones don't "age" at all. I have not found graphite shed to a problem on all but a few tapes, and the heads on my player are bright and shiny, and haven't been cleaned in quite a while.

Why does any mention of this format have to deteriorate into the cockroaches crawling out of the woodwork with uninformed, inaccurate bashing? My 8Ts have an ongoing place in my listening, along with vinyl, CD, cassette...no reels, though, since I sold my last R2R some years back. Where's Rodney King when we need him?

 

The first line of my previous post was directed at The Pinhead...don't know why I can't edit to reflect that.

 

Seeing as how 8-track and other continuous-looped cartridges incorporate some sort of internal tape lubrication, if the tapes become to tightly wound, sitting them on or placing them in some sort of vibrating machine should help to loosen them up. Be careful of magnetic fields which may erase them. Back in the radio stations which used recording tapes, R2R and 4-track-like cartridges, when they needed to be erased, we would place them on a bulk tape eraser and moved them around. The bulk tape eraser created a pulsing magnetic field and vibration. I don't ever recall having a problem with tapes becoming to tightly wound. In the broadcasting business, you couldn't have a slipping or sticking tape. Just like records, if there were problems, they went into the trash.

 

@AutomatedElectronics : You're mostly correct, but I'll add the fact that most radio station carts only had a minute or two of tape loaded, since most were used for commercials - although there were longer ones, of course. Not as much potential for dragging or binding. I also think the carts themselves - most of which were Fidelipac or Telex, in my experience - were designed to a higher standard than your average 8 track shell. It's also been suggested that the elimination of the locking pin that kept the platter from moving was a bad idea...but only a very few 8Ts kept that locking lever.

 

are there seriously ppl that still collect and listen to 8-track tapes? other than a small niche of nostalgic novelty?

 

and will not happen anytime soon...just because. ; )

 

There surely are. I don't use FB, but if you go there and search "8 track" you'll find more than a few groups collecting, talking about, and buying and selling them.

I'm playing Emmylou Harris' Roses In The Snow on my Akai CR-81D right now.

 

That's really cool! well I have to say I am impressed and baffled at the same time...thanks.

 

They are 8 track tapes.

 

Every single tape I owned died early deaths.

 

ha ..haha! .. HAHAHA!!!
That’s exactly how I laughed .. HAHAHA!

 

My problem with the tapes wasn't the wheels binding, after 45 years it was the pressure pads dissolving into some weird 1970s foam powder.

 

Ta-Da...
Kate's Track Shack Foam Replacement Pads for 8-Track Tapes

 

The carts used at radio stations could come in almost any length. Before the digital age, and because of the downturn of record quality, many of the larger radio stations switched to also playing all their music on carts. One local station I knew had 3 of the 3-cart player stacks. All music, jingles and commercials were played on them. Included on them were long cuts like "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida", "Stairway To Heaven" and "Roundabout", etc. Bathroom-break songs were still necessary.

The one disadvantage, it seriously limited the number of songs available to the DJ's. For the big Top 40 radio stations, the current hits, or songs in rotation, used to fit in a couple of boxes, the "oldies" stacked on tall spindles. After 'cart' music, it now would take an entire wall, and they still didn't have as many songs available!

It's true that carts were originally used for commercials and jingles, but their convenience quickly became apparent, as was their reliability. No more sticking, skipping or worn-out records. Plus, many radio stations made their own shortened versions of songs and put them on carts long before music carts were common. Songs like the Chambers Brothers' "Time Has Come Today". After CBS realized the popularity of the song, and what the radio stations had been doing, they made their own shortened version and issued it to radio stations as well as to record stores. It became a huge hit because of that.

One of the reasons that the carts radio stations used sounded so good was because they ran at 7.5 ips, while the conventional hissy 4 and 8-tracks ran at 3.75 ips.

I remember the automated radio stations. All the music was on multiple R2R tape machine, time was on the over-sized Muntz carts and all the commercials were on carts in multiple carousels players. Muntz and Lear-Jet were responsible for introducing the continuous loop carts, originally 4-tracks. Later they evolved into the self-contained 8-tracks. They used the same tape, but less of it.

 

I thoroughly enjoyed my several years of delving into 8 tracks. My opinion of the format was not high when it was a going concern but when the bug hit like 50 years later, it became obsessive.

I developed my own method to make replacement pads, learned how to open pretty much every shell type out there, corrected all manner of tape pack problems and exhibited patience re-spooling dumped tape back onto hubs. For some reason reconditioning them fascinated me. So much so that I consider myself the local expert on 8 track cartridge repair.

It gave me an excuse to visit thrift stores and something specific to search all manner of used goods sources for.

The need arose for accessible storage so there became need of creating what became a system of trays which could be stacked on top of each other (and with a clear acrylic top) or lined up side be side along a wall. Storage limit is about 1,000 cartridges and I’m only 10 or so away from being full. I totally enjoyed conceiving and constructing it myself.

The quest for tapes has been diligent enough that I consider some of my finds remarkable. Perhaps not monetarily but interesting at least to me.

My focus has been on rock and blues primarily. Once I had on hand a fair number of bands/album titles, I could afford to be selective.

Not a steady diet, but my 8 tracks get listened to. Some I’ve seen on no other format and it’s gratifying to some degree, being able to hear albums that would normally be ignored.

The urge now to acquire 8 track tapes has all but left. I shall still play them, most I’ve not listened to except for play testing. But I’ll not be intensely hunting for them.

There are no heirs to me and absolutely no one to bequeath them to. I’d love be around after I’ve kicked just to hear an estate assessor (if there is such a thing) on the bank’s behalf exclaim “WTF are we supposed to do with those?”

 

Convenience always wins. Every tape format began very well, but ended up sounding like a tin can.
edit: ok, cassettes did improve with better tape formulations, type II and Metal, however 8 track (or the better 4 track) .. 3.75 ips reel to reel would have improved correspondingly.

 

Our FM station "Sunny 103" (WGNY) was automated with Revox B-77 machines running at 7.5 ips. Our AM studio also ran on Revox B77's but manually controlled from an old RCA console with huge rotary knobs (loved those) I played around with carts too as my program director was easy going and didn't mind that I had added some of my own music to the program (with pre-approval) One day I played "Spirit in the Sky" (without pre-approval, on a cart) and was immediately chastised for playing an inappropriate song for senior citizens!

 

With a 4-track, it was similar to playing a record album. One side of an LP would be on 2 tracks and the other side would be on the other 2 tracks. I don't remember any 4-track players which had a fast-forward feature, but later 8-tracks did. With the 4-tracks, you could tracks instantly, like form going side to side on an LP, but if you wanted to hear that one particular song again, you had to wait for it to come around again. With the 8-tracks, with an album being split up into 4 stereo channels, you didn't have to wait so long. With the manufactured 8-track albums, they were always trying to save expenses, so they only used so much tape as necessary. Because album running order wasn't changed to fit the length of the tape, they did the fade-out and fade-in or just changed tracks in the middle of a song.
4 and 8-track tape cartridges could have held as much tape as necessary so albums could fit perfectly. In the aftermarket blank tape cartridges, there were many different tape lengths available, just like cassettes. If you recorded your own cartridges, you didn't have to split a song up.
Tape formulas improved over the years, but not so much with tape cartridges. The blank cartridges from major manufacturers usually had better tape in them than the pre-recorded ones. The same goes for R2R and cassette tapes, although you could get blank tape which was always several notches above what they used in pre-recorded tapes. High-speed duplication didn't help matters or quality much.
Both 4 and 8-tracks were 3.75 ips, so the sound quality wasn't there. Then again, cassettes were usually 1 7/8 ips, but improved tape formulas let them perform as well or better than the cartridges.
As I stated before, the 4-track based carts that radio stations used ran at 7.5 ips, which allowed them to sound as good as the records they were recorded from. Those carts were either full-tracking or 2-tracks.
I would usually record onto R2R tapes to be played on the radio at 15 ips. At that speed, something magic happens and the recordings often sounded better than the records they were made from. At 7.5 or especially 15 ips, you didn't have to worry too much about the tape quality for broadcast.
The automated radio stations that I was around, ran their R2R decks at 15 ips. Those were Drake-Chenault stations. Of course they were not totally automated. Someone had to be around to rewind and change the tape reels, plus just plain babysitting.

 

Sorry, I have to disagree on this point. While many duplicators did kept the original running order - which sometimes meant splitting a song between tracks - others took different approaches. Some labels would rearrange the songs to keep all programs roughly the same length. Others (A&M comes particularly to mind) would have the same song twice (on the same cart) to make the programs more equal. (Which necessitated more tape...)

These approaches were more-or-less satisfactory where each song had no connection to the others, but the increasing presence of "concept" albums made rearranging almost impossible. With something like Jethro Tull's Thick As A Brick, for instance, there wouldn't have been any way to rearrange. But with an album that was essentially a bunch of singles, re-ordering or doubling was a viable option.

 

As a teenager, I had a quad 8 track in my car. To this day, there are several songs where the fade out, followed by track change (clunk) are still burned into my brain.