What's so bad about 8 track tapes?

I have DCC player and I think the format might had succeeded had it been introduced a few years earlier. It had a few nice features (such as track skipping, where it would automatically jump to the next track [handy for bypassing commercials] and a much-better DCC tape case than the ones for regular cassettes). One of the main things which killed it was the introduction of affordable recordable CDs at the same time.

 

I wish people would get that idea that vinyl is warmer out of their heads! If you compare the same mastering of both the CD and the vinyl, they should sound about the same, give or take some minor variations.

The other main deterrent to the 8-Track coming back is that change of channels. Some songs were split in the middle. Sometimes the companies repeated songs, and oftentimes, the sequence was reordered.

Oh, and if they snag in the player, good luck fixing it.

 

Those wool pads made a lot of static.

 

For the era, when everything was done just right, 8-track did sound pretty good - better than early cassettes, mostly due to running at double the speed. But 8-track was way more prone to faults than cassette - the cartridges, the tape coming undone at the splice, the players themselves (particularly head alignment issues) and especially the high-speed duplication of pre-recorded material. Not to mention the difficulty one had accessing specific tracks (let alone trying to record an 8-track without breaking up a track accidentally). And once chrome / high-bias tape formulations and Dolby B noise reduction were introduced, along with improved cassette playback and record mechanisms, the cassette stomped the crap out of 8-track. Not only was it more reliable, it was less than half the size of an 8-track and had far longer playtimes.

 

Yes, totally agree with this. I thought DCC was very slick, sounded great and was easy to use - Philips essentially perfected the cassette tape using the best of '90s technology, and even more remarkably the decks were compatible with legacy cassettes and offered pretty incredible performance as such. But by the time they made it to market it was clear recordable CDs were dropping rapidly in price, so I could never bring myself to buy a DCC deck.

There was also a looming format war with the MiniDisc, which truth be told was sexier and simpler if not perhaps as "nifty" a technological achievement.

DCC was a little like RCA's videodisc - by the time it made it to market there was a looming format war with a competitor (laserdisc in the case of RCA's CED, MiniDisc in the case of DCC) and both of them were rendered obsolete by superior - or at least more functional - technology (VCRs in the case of both videodisc formats, recordable CDs in the case of DCC and MiniDisc).

MiniDisc did better in Japan though, since if I recall it hit the market sooner there and Sony gave it a much bigger push, enough to better-establish it prior to recordable CD decks dropping in price.

 

Yeah, I had plenty of vinyl back in the day that was ear-bleeding shrill - not made better by vinyl's tendency toward terrible high harmonics, either. The CD of Kate Bush's Hounds of Love for example stomps the old Manhattan vinyl I had.

I'm getting a migraine just thinking about it!

 

As much as I'm a fan and 40+ year user of cassette tapes, I never ventured into 8 track after seeing, using, and hearing several examples of the "best" 8 track decks back in their day. I gave it a chance and walked, no ran away.

It just had far too many drawbacks and too little availability of any shred of high quality personal recording ability. (Ironically as I type this my Aiwa XK-S9000 cassette deck is playing a Dolby-S/HX PRO recorded Maxell Metal Vertex cassette needle drop I just made of my just opened and played sealed original 1960's copy of Hendrix Electric Ladyland, and I must say it sounds amazingly close to the sound my Empire 698 turntable with Shure Ultra 500 cartridge sounds when playing this virgin vinyl. Next up is the needle drop to my BurnIT CD burner. Should be an interesting listening comparison.

 

A good Dolby S recording sounds incredible. Just a hint of tape saturation is the only real giveaway much of the time (and even that isn't particularly noticeable if the original studio recording had the same artifact, which older recordings often did).

A shame the analog cassette didn't get perfected until just before CD recorders became just about as affordable as a good 3-head Dolby S deck...

 

CD's were slow to catch on which may be the reason these obscure (superior) formats hung in there just a little longer. In 1985, I recall the record stores had a very small CD section (high priced $24.99 to $34.99) and still a complete catalog of titles on LP and cassette. By 1987, one could still buy an LP typically at $7.99 and a cassette at $9.99. It was about 1987 the CD catalog really grew, and prices began to fall. By 1990, the LP and cassette were on their way out.

The eight track died slowly. The early cassettes were so horrible sounding, that once upon a time I hated them, and would have never considered buying one. My first good sounding pre-recorded cassette was Poco: "Legend", 1979. By then I was forced to convert to cassette, and then literally tossed all the 8 tracks. My first cassette deck was a Craig unit, 12 watts per channel, and the very great sounding Radio Shack 40-1265 full range 6 x 9 (high excursion cloth surround, large magnet, whizzer cone) These turn up on ebay once in a while, and not exactly cheap.

 

My "Hounds Of Love" vinyl was on EMI-America. Are you sure you didn't have a re-pressing?

 

Maybe it was a quirk of my high-end Sony deck, but I got better Dolby S results with normal bias ferric tape than with metal.

Even prerecorded cassettes got better!

 

I didn't like DCC. It was clunky in operation, a bit confusing in track skipping, and the manufacturers incorporated SCMCS (digital serial-copy management). It was often pronounced "scums". The record labels (most notably CBS) "notched" the albums.

MiniDisc was a very good idea. But, I didn't like it because I could hear the ATRAC artifacts. And, again, it incorporated SCMCS. And, besides, recordable CD was already available. It just needed to come down to consumer prices before it took off, and that it did by 1996.

MiniDisc is still marketed in Japan!

 

Hey! I've salvaged tapes as bad or worse than that one. Takes a lot of patience though.

 

I've found that starting around 1979/1980 or thereabouts (still several years before the CD), the percentage of "ear bleeder" LPs seemed to increase. Boosted treble became more and more common, IMO. Is it a coincidence that these LPs seemed to proliferate right around the time that high-compliance cartridges with very high tracking ability levels were increasingly popular? Many of those cartridges could cleanly handle that level of treble with relative ease compared with previous generations of cartridges. I've found that those LPs were definitely not warmer than their subsequent CD counterparts.

 

I remember having to jam a matchbook under the thing or else I was gonna hear two songs at the same time. Totally bogus.

 

Agree, but I don't understand why cassettes are coming back either.. they really don't sound that good.

 

Grant wrote the following as part of a post:

I didn't find DCC that clunky, especially compared to the regular cassette (I could go accurately to the beginning of any song just like with a CD). In operation, the only difference between DCC and CD was the longer time it took to go from one track to another (which was reduced by intelligent track seeking [if you were on Side A of the tape and the song was on the Side B of the tape it would immediately change to the Side B and go straight to the track rather than fast forwarding to the end of the side, changing the side and then fast forwarding to the track]).

The one issue I had with DCC is that you had to bulk erase the tape if you wanted to reuse it. Once, I recorded over a DCC tape and while playing the new recording it suddenly jumped to the next track in the middle of a song. I discovered that I had put a Skip Mark on the tape (when the player hits a Skip Mark while playing a tape it will automatically jump to the next track) and it had not been completely erased. Bulk erasing the tape solved the issue.

One thing that DCC and Minidisc both introduced was the use of lossy audio compression (DCC used a lossy compression scheme that, IIRC, reduced the amount of data to 20% of the original while Minidisc reduced the amount of data to 15% of the original). The one remnant of DCC that remains is its lossy format, which MP3 was based on.

I didn't think SCMSC was much of an issue (it wasn't just part of DCC but all digital recording formats after DAT). It didn't stop you from making a copy of an original, but you could not make a copy of that copy. In my use of DCC it had no impact. The copy protection technique of notching (cutting out a specific narrow range of frequencies of an original recording so that any digital recorder that did not sense those frequencies would not allow you to record it) was a complete flop.

 

With good equipment, good tape, a good source and taking some time to prepare you can make cassettes that sound very good. One of the problems with cassettes is that someone with those items can make better sounding cassettes tapes that most prerecorded cassette tapes (which were usually done via high-speed copying on Type I tape).

 

Well, the CD was introduced in 1982, and 1983 in the U.S..

The reason for trebly-bright vinyl LPs was directly related to music videos. Remember that the sound had to cut through those tiny little 3" mono TV speakers over broadcast TV. It wasn't so much of a worry before MTV, but music television became the primary source for music for a generation, and the producers and artists wanted their recordings to sound just like it. How many times have we read Steve Hoffman's posts about how he had to go in on some 80s album and un-EQ whatever instructions were written on the tape box? When the labels started making CDs, they would duplicate those moves that were meant for vinyl and tape product.

As you point out, even records made in the disco era had the treble boosted for whatever reason. The producers of the band Chic were keen on this and didn't EQ their music for the dance floor.

 

The prerecorded cassette was in production in the mid-60s. They co-existed nicely with the 8-Track until the late 70s when the cassette finally won the battle. The cassette was simply more practical. It had just two sides like a vinyl record, and didn't break up long songs in the middle. And, they were smaller. Not only that, the compact cassette was continually improved, whereas the 8-Track tape couldn't really go much further than quad, which died out in the mid-70s.

 

SCMSC was an issue for many people, including myself. I also didn't like the notching. I did wind up buying a consumer DAT in the early 90s, but avoided consumer consumer CD-R. I went the computer route because there was no copyright management whatsoever. I wanted to make unadulterated digital clones of my CDs and didn't want any restriction.

 

My big issues with cassettes were:

1) azimuth differences between players
2) pitch variations

I had no tolerance for either. The better my decks got, the more I noticed them.

 

other than the horrible loss of music and/or bad fades at track changes and the sometimes unbearable tape hiss....nothing.

 

No, I had an original pressing. Maybe it was EMI-America. Long ago stolen, whatever it was...

 

The next one that comes in is all yours.