kap'n krunch
2K Club - QQ Super Nova
Found a (real) Sweetwater Music article....
NEW HI FI FORMAT, HD8t!!!!!
NEW HI FI FORMAT, HD8t!!!!!
Hey, even if it's April Fool's , the fact that Sweetwater posted this shows that they have a sense of humor ...(and besides, they are an excellent company)..
AND
Carts (used in radio, which played a twice the speed of home versions, IIRC...I used a LOT of those when I was a DJ in the 80s in an FM radio station) were VERY reliable...
During my tenure as a DJ, I NEVER had ANY problems with a cart....and that was 2 years!....now..home stereo ones were another thing....
(EDIT: I must admit I made a mistake...carts in radio stations were "Fidelipacs" and were physically different from home 8 track tapes....apologies)
I have always maintained that if the efforts that were put into developing the cassette system would have been directed to 8-tracks, A very acceptable and superior to cassette system could have materialized.
After all, even the most elementary thing - faster tape speed - was already there with 8-tracks.
Doug
A fellow railfan friend of mine claims that he has a patent on a mini reversable 8 track cart. Not sure if he was pulling my leg but he did work at 3M most of his life.
Finally! Someone who shares my opinion about how much more advanced the 8-track could have been if it wasn't abandoned and all the technological focus shifted to the crappy cassette tape! My music listening experience was at the sweet spot for 8-tracks. Cassettes were a format I skipped almost entirely. Obviously, given my screen name, I've always had a soft spot for the quirky 8-track which has never seemed to get its proper respect. In this day and age of the near extinction of physical media, it's hard for people who were not from my generation to realize that before the invention of the 8-track (and the less commercially successful 4-track cart) there was no feasible way of having your choice of music in your vehicle. You had two options: Listen to whatever radio stations you could get over the air in your area or... and this one was pretty darn unrealistic, install a record player in your car! There were a few attempts at this, but obviously, you don't have to have a vivid imagination to realize the problems with playing vinyl records in a moving automobile. So the 8-track cartridge (and the 4-track cartridge) provided a freedom and practical format to actually take your tunes on the road with you. It was revolutionary at the time. Your choice of music while driving, while at the beach, while parked and making out with your girlfriend, etc., etc.
Was it the perfect format? No. In retrospect it's mainly maligned because of the 2 sides of a record being divided up into 4 programs on a cartridge, which often resulted in the need for a mid-song fade out, kerchunk of the track change, and the song to be continued on the next track. Also there is a lot of talk about carts tangling and being tossed. I seem to recall just as many cassettes strewn along the highway with a twisted tangle of tape coming from the housing, so I don't feel this was unique to the 8-track format.
When it comes to the freedom we have today of taking an enormous variety of music with us wherever we go, we should all remember the 8-track fondly as the pioneering audio format that started that revolution.
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