What's so bad about 8 track tapes?

Fair enough. Thanks for elaborating

 

A better question - and I suspect we raised this upthread an eon ago - is could 8-track have ever been good? Like, what technological advancements could have been made to make 8-track suck less than cassette? Could the format have somehow survived?

 

Culture killed the 8 track, more than its flaws did. Western culture thrives on (competitive) new technology, smaller packages, and lower cost. The word "new" has always attracted buyers.. still does!

That aside, the 8 track could have been improved by conversion to 1.875 ips four track stereo format (like cassette but a wider track) and advanced type II tape formulation. The slower speed would decrease tape friction, and increase longevity. The wider track on 1/4 inch tape would beat the audio cassette for higher MOL (maximum output level) and lower noise, less need for noise reduction.

Another tech improvement would be the opposite.. higher speed to 7.5 ips, and the same 8 track format. The problem with this.. it does not correlate to new tech.. the cartridge would be the same old package, and heavier (more tape) more costly to ship to retail stores. The improved sound quality would never offset the inconvenience of longer FF time, and higher retail prices.

The cassette was fortuitous for the introduction of high bias tape. So the cassette evolved into a seriously competitive format vs the 8 track (for pre-recorded tape) and surpassed in making home recordings. Sony developed AMS (automatic music search) as an extra convenience, and of course auto-reverse. Although these conveniences offered zero (or negative) offset on sound quality, the mass consumer loved them.

I have nothing better to do than talk about 8 tracks? Even worse, I could be listening to one! I do have several boxes of 8 tracks, all in nice shape, some of them in need of pressure pads and foils. I have likewise one quad player (Lafayette) and two other 8 track players (Pioneer and Craig) fully operational!

 

8-Track made our music portable, for the first time. Quality was not a priority, but convenience was.

It was a stepping-stone to something better... which ended up being the cassette tape.

 

I'm more thinking about technology that could have made its clunky 4-program hack less confusing and obtrusive, although improving the fidelity of the format to bring it up to the cassette standard in the late '70s would have also helped. Technically 8-track should have been competitive with cassette in that regard even at that late date - the tape moved faster and if memory serves the individual tracks were wider - but alignment issues plagued the format, along with tape handling issues.

I wonder if auto fine-tracking could have been implemented somehow, maybe by locking in on the strength of the tape bias signal? Likewise, could the bias frequency be used to track speed variations?

Looking at this chart, 8-track sales peaked in '78, so the industry had until '77-'78 to rectify some of the more glaring issues with the format.



But I'm not sure who was going to want to work on that. It seems like the Europeans and Japanese put much more effort into the cassette during the early to mid-'70s instead, perhaps because 8-track was an American format. Sony even developed the ill-fated Elcaset during this period as a successor to open reel tape, but its performance specs - great but decidedly below the best reel to reel decks of the day - probably doomed the neither fish nor flesh format. If they'd had metal tape to work with at that time, it might have been more successful...

 

I find it funny, by 1977-1978, cassettes were starting to really sound good. By 1980-1982, is when I'd say people began to "see the light."

 

I forgot about the rollers and the slip sheets, but in my count I was also counting the four screws used to hold the two sides of the shell together. Adding those to the above, it means a total of 15 parts.

 

Some cassettes had more than the 4 screws, didn't they?

 

True. But even in cars, the performance of the tapes/players could be very uneven given the extreme temperatures. If you left them plugged into a player inside an 103 degree car on a summer day, the heat and sunlight would effectively destroy an otherwise perfect tape. Cassettes--at least as far as I remember--weren't as sensitive to the elements.

 

Just a vague early '70s memory -- I remember 8-tracks sounding really good in my parents' car, a lot better than the cassettes I heard in other people's cars. I also seem to remember 8-tracks failing and getting chewed up in players far more often than cassettes.

 

I still have around 200 8 track tapes that I keep primarily for nostalgia. They were never made to complete against vinyl records sonically, but they still have value while listening on a make shift system I have in my garage with a NOS 8 track car stereo I have rigged up. They still sounds pretty good and they will continue to play until I get tired of listening to a particular tape. Unfortunately, I don't have any titles that go past the late 1970's. It's an oldies show for sure.

 

Even if they were made to sound good, who could ever have taken 8-tracks seriously with the horrible packaging? A small reproduction of the front cover of the LP and the song titles. And that's it. No songwriting credits, no musician credits, no production credits, no gatefold sleeve or rear cover artwork, no booklets - nothing but the bare mimimum. And frequently the songs were in the wrong order. (Could anyone who bought 'Tommy' on 8-track made sense of the storyline?) Everything about them screamed that the people involved didn't take them seriously, so why should the consumer?

 

I have two 6ft boxes of them in my garage. I bought a recorder, so I loved them. Cassettes and I never got along.

 

If the tape cartridges had been better made, in terms of mechanical precision (think TDK or Maxell grade construction, Maxell UD or TDK AD tape used more often and small improvements made, Stereo 8 would have been very good. The old Roberts/Akai machine which pulled the tape out of the cartridge and that was a good sounding machine, and took the pressure pad out of the equation. Your Pioneer machines are very good performers and well made.

 

Horrible sound, short tape life.

What else does on need to be wrong with them?

 

Stairway to Heaven.... sigh....

 

Sorry, that's not true. The Roberts/Akai machines played an 8T just like any other machine. I know, I own one. You may be thinking of the Elcaset, I seem to remember that's how they worked. Or VCRs, also. But not Akai 8Ts.

And, for the record, my hundreds of 8Ts play just fine, fifty years down the road.

 

Go to the databits channel on YouTube and see the one exception to your rule in actual action with the cover off. Yes, there's a Roberts (The Model 848-X) where the machine pulls the tape out of the cartridge and bypasses the pressure pads. It's a very rare machine, very uncommon. Many of my 8 track tapes play well too, and sound better than average.

 

I've seen this video before. It's pretty wild how it works. Here's the video you were referring to...

Insanely Rare Roberts 8-Track Player - YouTube

 

Well, I stand corrected. BUT: I don't believe that's a commercial product. Akai stuff was sold under the Roberts name until mid-1971, when the marketing agreement expired and Akai came in under their own name. At that point Roberts was basically out of the tape business - reel, cassette or 8 track.

There were several Akai models. The original CR-80D (also sold as the Roberts 808D), the CR-81D and the GXR-82D were all basically the same. The CR-83D was totally different, and not built as well as the other three.

Roberts never commercially sold anything like that as far as I know - that one on YouTube has to be a prototype (or a one0ff of some sort). Lord knows what it would have sold for.

 

• 8-track is what, four programs, about 10 minutes each? So the heads switch four times in 40 minutes? Who wants a song to be interrupted? Compact cassette and LP needed only one flip, and CD needs none. Flash media has orders of magnitude more storage capacity than a CD, and streaming is practically limitless, but now comes the issue of gaps between tracks, although it seems that most devices that can play FLAC can do it without gaps. Gapless MP3 playback is still a much rarer feature. In any case, 8-track has nothing to offer here.
• No rewind or fast forward. I am not even talking about playing only the certain tracks in a certain order.
• Nakamichi owners like to point out that their decks do not do autoreverse by moving the head, instead they move a whole cassette, because this way the azimuth is kept unchanged. 8-track is no better here, in fact a moving head not only can change azimuth, it can fold the tape so the inner side becomes the outer side.
• The foil would sometimes fall off.

It was an inferior format through and through. Compact cassettes turned out to be a much better product.

Right, in the 1990s. I am buying compact cassettes now for as low as $0.50 and CDs for less than a dollar. In fact, a warehouse nearby has thousands of old media they sell off. Every Saturday I spend a couple of hours there, fishing out the stuff I like

 

Oh pleeeezz! Nobody took them seriously! Not really, it was a cheap, easy way to listen to music in your car, smoke your doobie and kicking it with your chick. I spilled beer, McDonalds hamburger or taco residue and whatever else you could think of on them and despite their reputation, they were pretty hardy except when left directly into the baking sun. For the most part the fidelity was good enough and when you got tired of them, you could trade them in toward buying some new ones from stores that had that program. Never, never, never did anyone try to compare them to lp records. You had to have a decent system other than a 20 record player to enjoy them plus you had to take good care of them. Not 8 track tapes, I assure you. You can't judge them by looking through a modern lens. They were a product of the past and for a number of years, they served that purpose fairly well.

Also, many people who bought them, bought the bootleg versions at the swap meets and gas stations because they were much cheaper than the legitimate factory versions. So much for having the the best sonic issues available. It was a completely different time and attitude.

 

It's obvious that the poster that started this thread never grew up in the 8 track era. They were abandoned by most as soon as newer technology came along. They were awful!

BillWojo

 

So were vinyl records when they thought that CD's were superior and eventually now CD's due to the buying public wanting everything on their smart phones. Don't tell me that that all new technology is a sonic improvement. New technology doesn't necessary translate to a better product, it's just what the public embraces at a certain moment in time. Some things you like and others you don't.

8 track tapes are a one trick pony that does that trick pretty well. They had their con's but it was a useful format for a while until someone else came up with something that was a better choice. That's how technology evolves.

 

It is very interesting how they got it to work..... It comes out the middle and rolls back up on the spool.... Truly ingenious!!

When they work they are beautiful...... I love analogue and the fact they did not put dolby on many 8tracks is awesome!!! (Some cassettes I cant find w/o dolby so I get the album on 8track)

Me and many others do indeed take them seriously!!!