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They were never state of the art, they were simply a convenient and portable lo-fi solution to LPs for a few years until cassettes took over. Yeah I had 8 tracks and the car player, the home recorder, etc. I remember the promise of quadraphonic sound. Could never ever get over the low fidelity comparison with LPs and even cassettes. Later 8 tracks were really made cheaply.
Long live LP discs, I still also have a cassette player also. But my 8 track player and the 8 tracks themselves are long gone...and good riddance.
I had many of these in the 1970s. Some of them had an annoying thing, a song would fade out in the middle, the track would change, the song would fade back in. I forget what artist or song it was, but on one tape the song faded out, click, fade in, only to fade out and end about 20 seconds later. When I started recording my own 8 tracks from albums, I was careful to fit the songs in between the track changes.
No it was NOT easy to splice them and fix them. Although I could get one working again most of the time, no one else I knew could. I moved on to cassettes around 1978 and never looked back. Then one day in the 1980s I got nostalgic and dragged the box of 8 tracks out and played some of them on the old stereo in the basement. Every one got jammed up or broke when they got to the splice where the track changed. That box went right into the trash.
Before 8 track cartridges became the standard, Madman Muntz pioneered the 4 track cartridge.
Not only did they sound better (half the number of tracks on the same 1/4 tape width), there was no shiny conductive strip to interrupt a recording. The entire album side was on "one side", and you flipped a switch to hear side 2.
Before 8 track cartridges became the standard, Madman Muntz pioneered the 4 track cartridge.
Not only did they sound better (half the number of tracks on the same 1/4 tape width), there was no shiny conductive strip to interrupt a recording. The entire album side was on "one side", and you flipped a switch to hear side 2.
Reading through this thread I was going to post this same thing, oh well ). I can remember cruising around with my friend and his older brother who had a Muntz 4 track player. I can still clearly remember the blue light that was on while it played.
As a sideline, my dad had an audio/radio repair shop. In that timeframe he made a fair amount of money repairing and properly tuning CB radios. A couple people brought 8-track players in for him to look at. After looking at them he refused to even look at any more. His assessment of the whole concept was that it was complete and utter junk, and that the sound quality it was capable of was at best just above two tin cans and a string.
It's 2024 now and I still see 8-track cassettes at thrift stores and yard sales, for pennies, but I have NEVER seen a player of any kind along with them.
Where did all the players go? They can be found on ebay and such for higher prices, so I think it's come down to an 8-track online cabal.
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