The 8track
Stereo 8, commonly known as the eight-track cartridge, eight-track tape, or simply eight-track, is a magnetic tape sound recording technology. It was popular in the United States from the mid-1960s through the late 1970s, but was relatively unknown in many European countries.
Development of tape cartridges
The endless loop tape cartridge was first designed in 1952 by Bernard Cousino around a single reel carrying a continuous loop of standard 1/4-inch, plastic, oxide-coated recording tape running at 3.75 in.(9.5 cm) per second. Program starts and stops were signaled by a one-inch-long metal foil that activates the track-change sensor.
Inventor George Eash, also from Toledo, invented a cartridge design in 1954, . The Eash cartridge was later licensed by manufacturers, notably the Collins Radio Corporation, which first introduced a cartridge system for broadcasting at the National Association of Broadcasters 1959 annual show. Fidelipac cartridges were used by many radio stations for commercials, jingles, and other short items right up until the late 1990s when digital media took over. Eash later formed Fidelipac Corporation to manufacture and market tapes and recorders, as did several others, including Audio-Pak (Audio Devices Corp.).
Entrepreneur Earl "Madman" Muntz of Los Angeles, California, saw a potential in these "broadcast carts" for an automobile music system. In 1962 he introduced his four-track cartridge stereo system and tapes, mostly in California and Florida. He licensed popular music albums from the major record companies and duplicated them on these four-track cartridges, or "CARtridges", as they were first advertised.
Introduction of Stereo 8
The Lear Jet Stereo 8 track cartridge was designed by Ralph Miller while working under Bill Lear and for his Lear Jet Corporation in 1964. The major change was to incorporate a neoprene rubber and nylon pinch roller into the cartridge itself, rather than to make the pinch roller a part of the tape player, reducing mechanical complexity. Lear also eliminated some of the internal parts of the Eash cartridge, such as the tape-tensioning mechanism and an interlock that prevented tape spillage. In the Cousino, Eash, Muntz, and Lear cartridges, tape was pulled from the center of the reel, passed across the opening at one end of the cartridge and wound back onto the outside of the same reel. The spool itself was freewheeling and the tape was driven only by tension from the capstan and pinch roller.
The Stereo 8 also introduced the problem of dividing up the programming intended for a two-sided LP record into four programs. Often this resulted in songs being split into two parts, song orders being reshuffled, shorter songs being repeated, and songs separated by long passages of silence.
Commercial success
The popularity of both four-track and eight-track cartridges grew from the booming automobile industry. In September 1965, Ford Motor Company introduced factory-installed and dealer-installed eight-track tape players as an option on three of its 1966 models (Mustang, Thunderbird and Lincoln), and RCA Victor introduced 175 Stereo-8 Cartridges from its RCA Victor & RCA Camden artist's catalogs.By the 1967 model year, all of Ford's vehicles offered this tape player upgrade option. Thanks to Ford's backing, the eight-track format quickly won out over the four-track format, with Muntz abandoning it completely by late 1970.Despite its problems, the format gained steady popularity because of its convenience and portability. Home players were introduced in 1966 that allowed consumers to share tapes between their homes and portable systems. With the availability of cartridge systems for the home, consumers started thinking of eight-tracks as a viable alternative to vinyl records, not only as a convenience for the car. Within a year, prerecorded releases on eight-track began to arrive within a month of the vinyl release. Eight-track recorders had gained popularity by the early 1970s.
Decline and demise
There are numerous reasons for the format's decline. While the cassette offered features that the eight-track lacked, such as smaller size and rewinding capability, it also had disadvantages: 1) Its tape speed was half that of Stereo 8, producing theoretically lower sound quality, and 2) It required greater mechanical complexity of the player. However, constant development of the cassette turned it into a widespread high-fidelity medium and also lowered the cost and complexity. That, combined with the inherent deficiencies of the Stereo 8 format contributed to its decline.
Some of the inherent deficiencies of the format were: 1) high wow and flutter due to the constantly changing load presented by the sliding tape pack, 2) tendency to jam as the tape got dirty, the lubricant wore away, and the tape was exposed to heat, 3) Flattening of the pinch roller, over time, when a cartridge was left plugged in, causing increased wow and flutter, 4) Inability to attain and maintain head alignment due to the movable head design. As time went on, these issues were compounded as later cartridges started using cheaper, lower quality materials, such as plastic pinch rollers. Another contributing factor was an effort by record companies to reduce the number of different formats offered. In the late 1970s, when sales of eight-tracks slipped, they were quick to abandon the format. Stereo 8 tapes and players developed a reputation for unreliability, mostly because of failures of splicing tape and the phenomenon of having the player "eat" the tape. The automobile environment, with its temperature extremes, vibration, dust and so on, caused many failures as well.
When the sliding tape pack would pull itself tight, for whatever reason, a jammed 8-track cartridge was the result. A quick solution was to hold the cartridge in one hand, facing down, while pulling out a section of, about 4-6' in length from the outer winding side. A quick tug on the tape would cause the it to immediately wind in and the result was a loosend up tape pack that would play correctly.
Failing that, another solution was to open the cartridge, cut the tape at the splice, and relieve the excess tension by manually unwinding one or two sections from the outer edge of tape, while keeping the reel stationary, then re-splicing the tape, with a fresh piece of foil (since the old foil was usually caked with built-up graphite reducing conductivity and making it difficult to change tracks). Another, simpler fix was to shake the cassette in the plane of the tape reel with a rotary motion, sometimes this would cause the windings inside to rotate and loosen. As a result, the eight-track eventually developed a reputation for being finicky and unreliable.