Welcome to Hell, here's your 8-Track

Their advantage was portability. You seem to think that vinyl was better in the 60s. Not for the masses. Few had decent TTs. The LP12 didn’t show up until ’72. Only an Elvis mobile had a turntable in it. (See the Nashville Hall of Fame by a Nudie mobile) That format probably worked worse than 8-track while it was moving If you were there you sure don’t act like it.

Vinyl freaks around here say it’s the best formt. Stay home with your vinyl young chickens Meanwhile I’ll enjoy any music I want while on the go.

You can’t criticize 8-track factoring in the times. I heard some albums then that made me prefer the 8-track song order. To this day.

The worst? Try wire recorders. But they were the best at the time, good enough to fool the Nazi military.

What other audio technology allows you to listen to two songs at the same time? Yes, 8-tracks were portable, but you always needed a matchbook handy to tweak the head position.

The worst consumer audio format ever, and by a wide margin.

Agreed!

Mike

They were primarily intended for use in automobiles and were an enormous improvement over the expensive turntables available for cars that would skip on smooth roads, much less bumpy ones. Those played the bottom side of a 45.

The tape was a continuous loop that came off the inside and then wrapped around the outside. Hard on the tape but an ingenious design courtesy of Bill Lear.

The original Learjet tape housings were assembled with screws and could be internally cleaned. Later cartridges were hard to open without destroying them. Head azimuth was a real problem, very few playback decks had adjustable azimuth to minimize crosstalk and improve treble response. The matchbook system mentioned above was much more common.

They had a pretty short heyday, like many others I switched to a Sony cassette player in 1970 or ’71.

Lear was an incredible guy, struck out repeatedly but hit some homers, too. Motorola and Learjet did pretty well. Motorola made the first car radios; people said they would distract drivers and cause wrecks. The 8 track was a segue from his car radio concept of the 1930s. When he died he was working on a steam automobile project.

The 8-Track was pretty much responsible for me coming close to acing my ACT/SAT tests.

Remembering which matchbook(s) and where to place it/them for each 8-Track (while stoned) was quite a mental workout.

DeKay