Children of the 70s know the eight-track as those annoying cassettes that would work for a bit then fail or as we know them as the closely guarded collections of our older siblings.
In part, the eight-track captures the zeitgeist of the 70s, a decade between decades, but they also demonstrate how we should never trust a bunch of suits with our music, mannn.
Before there were eight tracks, one had two options for playing the music of choice. We had vinyl, and something called reel-to-reel. Reel-to-reels were studio set-ups. Some aficionados would use them, but threading the spools the right way was a complicated process, beyond the scope of most music fans.
Before the eight-track group forged their franken-music format, there was a similar looking four-track tape, which was incompatible and even worse. The suits rolled out their new eight-track tapes on September 15, The eight-track offered a more refined quality of sound, killing the category, as it were. Four tracks were almost immediately dead in the water, abandoned by The public went nuts over eight-track.
A number of home players even appeared. Suddenly Bill Lear appeared on the scene, newly world famous for his Lear Jet business plane, and announced in that he had developed a cartridge with eight tracks that promised to lower the price of recorded tapes without any sacrifice in music quality.
Lear's enthusiasm for loops had not faded after the failure of his endless wire cartridge of the late s. In , he became a distributor for Muntz Stereo Pak, mainly in order to install 4-track units aboard his Lear Jets.
Dissatisfied with the Muntz technology, he contacted one of the leading suppliers of original equipment tape heads, the Nortronics Company of Michigan. He specified a head with much thinner "pole-pieces" and a new spacing that would allow two tracks or one stereo program to be picked off a quarter-inch tape that held a total of 8-tracks.
Although a departure from the Muntz player, the technology of the closely-stacked multi-track head was by the early s well established in fields like data recording. Lear in developed a new version of the Fidelipac cartridge with somewhat fewer parts and an integral pressure roller. During , Lear's aircraft company constructed players for distribution to executives at the auto companies and RCA.
Just how Bill Lear got his products from the drawing board to the dashboards of Ford Mustangs and Fairlanes is a little unclear. Certainly Lear carried with him the cachet of his successful business jet project, and had many personal contacts in industry. And in a roundabout kind of way, he already had ties to Ford.
In the s Lear and his partner Paul Galvin had together built Motorola into a leading manufacturer of car radios, and Motorola was now affiliated with Ford.
Whatever the details of Lear's selling job, the keys to its spectacular success seems to have been the backing of both Ford and the recording industry. After getting RCA Victor to commit to the mass production of its catalog on Lear Jet 8-tracks, Ford agreed to offer the players as optional equipment on models. The response, in one Ford spokesman's word, "was more than anyone expected.
The machines were initially manufactured by Ford's electronics supplier: the firm that had pioneered the mass produced auto radio or "motor victrola" -- Motorola. Meanwhile, a number of new contenders rose up to enjoy fleeting moments of glory. Bernard Cousino, arguably the source of much cart technology, has rendered a seemingly endless succession of endless loop technologies.
He had a measure of success with his Echomatic cartridge in the s as a "point of sale" or educational audio-visual technology, largely by adopting Eash's strategy of licensing his designs to other firms.
In the success of the Echomatic spurred the Champion Spark Plug company a subsidiary of Ford to purchase a controlling interest in the firm. Additionally, those who'd purchased a Fairlane or Mercury could add on a "hang-on tape player. Daisuke Inoue, pictured, shows off his invention, the "8-Juke," a wooden box that combined microphone, amplifier, coin box, and an 8-Track tape player. Inoue claims to have sold 25, of the Juke 8.
Sadly, Inoue, the son of a pancake maker, did not patent the device. Today, karaoke is a household word and Inoue hardly sees a dime. Unlike the more common cassette tape, and the bifurcated vinyl LP, the 8-Track featured four "programs," not two sides. A listener would toggle from program to program, which required the tape player to physically move its reading head. This quirky segmentation was a part of the format's downfall.
Image: 8 Tracks R Back. The four-program arrangement meant that album track listings had to be shuffled from their intended sequence. Take Magical Mystery Tour , pictured above, for example. Oh, Columbia House. How did you stay in business for so long? RCA also had a mail-order record club. We can't be the only ones who got that baker's dozen right before moving houses, bailing on that commitment to purchase more.
Image: motleynews. As the popularly of the format took a nosedive in the s, the 8-track tape was largely relegated to such mail-order record clubs. If you were an 8-track collector and wanted hit albums like John Cougar's American Fool or the Beastie Boys' Licensed to Ill , you had to go through a record club.
Image: 8 Track Heaven. While it is not a certainty, most collectors claim that Fleetwood Mac's Greatest Hits compilation in was the final commercially released 8-Track. There were some easy listening collections released by Readers Digest in the following year, but good luck finding another 8-Track from a big name act after Fleetwood Mac. Image: Discogs. Welcome to MeTV! Find your local MeTV station. Where to watch.
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