I felt the same when I went to an antique store and most items were from my childhood. I was like excuse me these aren't antiques... They looked at me in that way and reality slapped me
My dad was an audiophile and when I turned 13 in 1973 I asked for an 8-track player for my birthday. My dad already knew that 8-tracks were inferior to cassette tapes and would soon be on their way out and convinced me to go with cassettes instead. My parents bought me a portable cassette player and my first cassette - Dark Side of the Moon.
That is cool, your Dad was cutting edge. I vividly remember being 4 or 5 and getting that first Sony Walkman, the one without rewind so you had to FF then flip whenever you wanted to hear a song. I believe my first was Men At Work. Great format, the portable players really did last for a longtime before the CD-man came... and went
I'm 57 and still love listen to my 8-Tracks on my Sears 8-Track juck box (holds 5 8-Tracks) through my 40 year old Pioneer home stereo system. When the weekend rolls around, I love listening to the Eagles, Doobie Brothers, Journey and so on. I'll never stop listening to my 8-Tracks.
Those old tube stereo amps are awesome. 8 track sound was inferior to vinyl but quality reel to reel could smoke vinyl. I'll be 67 in 3 weeks. I worked in a record store/headshop in 78-79 and had some friends with more money than I did. They'd borrow my vinyl and record it on reel to reel. Hearing it back was like being in a studio. But prior to cassette and then CDs, there wasn't anything available at the record store but vinyl and 8 track. So, for the era it was ahead of its time while driving down the road.
As a teen in the mid 70s, my cars had 8 track stereos. They would occasionally unwind inside my players. I guess I was cheap, and liked a challenge, so I began opening up the cartridges to see how they worked. It didn't take me very long to figure them out, and begin repairing my tape cartridges.
Same here. I went on to repairing the playback decks as well. A lot of dirty heads and drive parts, broken drive belts, burned output circuits and so on.
My first 8-track player (bought for way too much money!), was a used unit from a friend. I stuffed it into my glove-box. One day, rollin' down the road, it started sounding funny... then... a thick plume of smoke poured out of my glove-box. Both player and tape were now toast. And that's history that IS remembered!
I knew about the four track, have actually seen and heard them. But I had mistakenly thought Lear invented them, had no idea Muntz was the actual inventor. I stand corrected.
I was born in ‘58 and my first car was a ‘68 Pontiac LeMans, bought in 1975. I immediately bought an 8 track player and installed it on the hump between the bucket seats, on a wood base I made to fit the contour of the hump. I LOVED that player and that car. The only drawback is that I still remember the exact spot on several longer songs where you heard the “clunk” as the machine switched tracks. They just became part of the song in my brain 🧠 and my brain still expects it!
I too, was born in 1958, & my first car, in 1974 was a 1968 SS 396 Chevelle. My friend's mom owned an electronics store in our little town. He sold me a new Craig 8 track player for $10. Installed it in the knee beater position, & had some great tunes! I hated the pause & clunk right in the middle of 'The Bitch is Back.'
The mastering of 8 tracks was pretty spotty back in the day. Sometimes they would re-arrange the song order into 4 even groups to fit the 4 channels, which ruined concept albums where the songs, in order, told a story. Sometimes they would just fade a song out in the middle, change channels, then fade it back in, which pretty much ruined whatever song got chopped in half.
It was difficult to record your own 8-tracks if you had OCD because the 3 breaks per tape meant it would be nearly impossible to avoid having a song cut in two. Those of us who used them still hear some of those breaks in our heads when we hear those songs today.
For example “For You Blue” from The Beatles “Let It Be” 8-track. Right after you hear George say “Elroy James got nothing on this thing” it starts to fade out and switch from 3 to 4. Today i can’t listen to the song without half-expecting that.
@@eddieboggs8306 it wasn't that bad. You need to clean head and a good fine tuning on the head. After all it was basically a reel-to-reel. No they didn't hold up too good I used to take them apart and splice them with Scotch tape and they would work forever.
When I was a kid all my friends had 8-track players in their cars, mostly that really cool Craig floor mount player. Me? I had an 8-track, but instead of buying tapes I bought a Radio Shack tape splicing kit. When my friends' 8-tracks ate the tape they'd give it to me when they bought another tape. I had a great collection of free music, thanks to a sharp eye, a Radio Shack splicing kit and the ability to resurrect dead tapes. Some of them worked for years after I fixed them.
Tape has become something of a lost art except for aficionados who keep the format alive. As an electronic technician and (very) amateur guitarist I still think that a tape echo device such as an Echoplex, Eccophonic, or Roland Space Echo are the coolest sound processing devices ever built. Where would rock and roll be without Scotty Moore using a tape echo device for the slap-back sound on all those old Elvis Presley records?
We didn’t always have money for family trips, but when we did they were memorable. One such trip found us driving to New Mexico, three teenagers in the back seat of my dad’s Bonneville, and the 8-track of Dueling Banjos stuck in the player. It was either us complaining, or the 8-track; that was it. After two days, and my father basically disassembling the dash as he drove, the tape ejected! It was the only time I saw my father litter. Somewhere along I-25, near the Colorado border, I’d like to think that bit of our family history, is just waiting for its next family. Love the car history stories; my day is already better because of this one.
Yes, something you used to see frequently back in the day, was yards and yards of audio tape on the sides of roads. Although I seem to remember they were usually attached to cassette cartridges, as opposed to 8 tracks.
I can remember my Dad getting an "Auto-Reverse" cassette player and gleefully junking his 8-Track. He let my friends have whatever 8-track tapes they wanted. He had a Kenwood cassette recorder on our home stereo, and made all of his cassettes. It was MUCH better.
Auto-seek was a massive feature for cassettes when it became cheap. But for all our autoshuffle technology these days there's something to be said for pushing the listener to just play an album in order.
My older brother had a 4 track. Odd lever to pinch tape between rubber roller(in the machine) and drive capstan. Had about 8 tapes. Wish I still had it.
No it wasn't "MUCH better." People trash 8-track because it's ugly. All those freaky colors and the bubbling glue just makes it ugly. But the sound quality was excellent and sounds better than a type I cassette (with or without Dolby). It moves twice the speed as a cassette and has much less hiss. The main weak point of wow and flutter inherent in a never ending loop was FAR less an issue back then because the tapes were new. There are several inches of difference between where the tape pulls off and where it is pulled back onto the reel. This differential causes the tape to tighten, which is why they had a graphite lubricant on them.
@@tarstarkusz Cassettes were much better. Most people did not get the high frequency bias adjusted for their tape. Wow & flutter was always crappy on 8-tracks and since there was no rewind trying to adjust the bias was nearly impossible.
At 51 years old, I was weened on 8 track. My older brother cranked lots of Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath etc, in his old Torino. I still listen to 8 tracks today! Definitely a nostalgic format but I still love that analog sound. Great video History Guy!
You don’t get weaned ON to something. The definition of “wean” (the correct spelling) is: Wean is also used figuratively to mean to acclimate someone to doing without something that they have become dependent on.
I still have my 8-track collection, many of which came from the Columbia Record Club. My 75 Malibu, which I am restoring, still has the Sears AM/FM/8-Track stereo. My favorite tape was a mix tape I recorded on my Soundesign 8-track recorder. Those were some great days.
I had a Chevy van when I was in high school. The radio didn't work, and I installed an 8-track with speakers in the front and back of the van. I eventually had three big 24-cartridge boxes to hold all my tapes, and always had something good to play. I bought a new car at 19 that had neither a radio or tape deck, installed the deck but never messed with the radio. 8-track tapes defined my music life as a teenager. There are songs I listen to today, 50 years later, where I still anticipate the fade-out-*click*-fade-in of the track change that I was so used to back then.
It wasn't a click but a CLUNK on the 8-track player I had. Never did develop a tolerance for it. In fact, it actively irritated me that the companies who recorded them couldn't be bothered to tweak gap times so switching occurred between songs instead of the middle of them.
In cold Michigan winters. If you had left the tape engaged in the player when you started the car the player would eat your tape:) extracting it from Player was a challenge:)
@@BlasphemousBill2023 I bought a Motorola unit in 1967 and installed it in my Barracuda Plymouth. I lived in Iowa, so winter was indeed a problem. I had a tape carrier that fit between the bucket seats, and took it into the house to keep the tapes warm. When I came out and the car was cold, I had a small flexible tube I stuck in the heater vent on one end, and stuck in the 8 track door on the other end. When the player was warm, the tape went in. Never had any problem with that warm up system..lots of great memories riding along with my music.
My favorite LP was A Fifth of Beethoven. I had my own wooden cabinet stero from the 60s in the basement but turned it up to 11 on my father's forbidden Solid State wedge shaped player when left alone at the house. Almost 50 years later and they still have the same stereo.
While I born in 1982 and grew up with cassette tapes for music, I distinctly remember 8-tracks because my grandmother had an in home 8-track player that she'd keep immaculate, and we'd listen to her collection whenever I visited her for the weekend. There was something about listening to music from before my time on a system that was popular before I was born that fascinated and stuck with me throughout my life.
Plug in a good (heavy means quality) 80'/90's turntable, plug it into the AV or phono connection on your mean sterio and chuck on 'Dark side of the moon' or 'Another brick in the wall record, It's way... better than anything digital.
OMG dude 😎!!!!! Dad and I had an 8-trak player in every car, truck, camper, travel trailer, and motorhome he owned as well as a "BOX" of tapes....!!! What a crazy Time! I had a stash box of recorded and custom tapes when my buddies and I blasted away from the house on our own!!! I still have the car player and I gave one of the house units to my brother (his was broken...) , and the older brother found a retired electronics specialist that repaired his and our brothers unit, just to keep the music going!. I led the change though and bought a serious AM/FM cassette unit and then another and both brothers followed the trend....CD players next, and so on. However, we kept our maintained 8-Trak car players in our HotRods, just for the sake of nostalgia. Nothing says "Tunes" like that big ole tape! Of course we all bought quick release slide mounts, plugs and a fitted box for taking them out of the cars, along with the tape box. Keeps them working and safe. This is a blast! Thanks for doing this episode big chunk of our lives!👍👍👍
I added an 8-track stereo player in my first car (post HS) an 8 year old dodge. I remember having to mount it under the dash along with the two speakers. The build in AM radio only had one speaker that opened thru the top of the dash. I ran the 8-track system for four years all that time I only had eight tapes (the tape box had ten slots and one slot held the cleaner/demagnetizer cassette and another held the cleaning fluid bottle.) Most of them were compilation/greatest hits albums I bought at yard sales. I learn quickly to bring the tape box inside if parked at home/school/work anytime when outside temps were below 40*F or above 90*F. Also in winter I learn to run the car heater at least twenty minutes before even attempting to insert a tape.
@@dave3657 I've never heard of cassette to 8-0track adapters, but it makes perfect sense and I can see pictures on EBay. I wonder if the cassette is the most-adapted format? Might be a worthwhile bit of history for our host to explore.
In the late 1970s, I put an adapter in both my AMC cars -1968 Javelin and 1968 AMX 2-seater. It connected to the AM radio and converted it to FM. I also had separate Cassette players under the dash.
@@dave3657 I had an adapter myself for my 66 mustang. I loved the cassettes as they could hold more songs, but I did not like the fact that unlike my 8 track, I could not skip to a different track, but had to listen to a whole side.
I installed an 8-track player in one of the vehicles we owned in the 1970's. I loved it. As long as your speakers were decent it played great music. The only problem was the occasional eaten 8-track tape when required a lot of fine needle nose extraction of consumed 8-track tape.
Ah, the time and money I spent recording albums to cassettes, cds to cassettes (for car use) and so on. Finally have everything on a $10.00 usb drive that fits into my truck stereo. Sad? A bit but also amazing!
I only use android phones so I can stick a 256 gb micro SD card in it with 900 CDs worth of music on it. I still have 3 nice cassette decks & a couple turntables but I'll take the quality of CDs & 320kbps mp3 files over them both
@@neilschlemeel5751 I have a Ipod classic 160 GB with 18,000+ songs. It is still going strong. I like collecting music. I try not to think how much money I have spent over the last 13 years on I-tunes. Now when I put a want list together on I-Tunes and spend too much money buying the music I swear I need to stop buying music. I wait a month or so and get bored. I go on I-tunes just to check it out and before I know it I have another want list with 200 dollars worth of songs again. I think I have an addiction. But an addiction buying music is a lot healthier than if I was addicted to drugs or alcohol.
No doubt about it. Top 40 hits with LOTS of commercials gave way to Bob Seger Night Moves, or The Cars first album without interruption. Or Billy Joel’s 52nd Street… So pleased with my player in 1979!
@@urbanurchin5930 Pirates by Ricky Lee Jones may have soon followed, it was an all digital recording, Ry Cooder I believe one of the first artists to use digital.
Bought the Muntz 4-track and a carrying case of all the top songs - installed it in my 64.5 Mustang with four speakers. Later, I moved it into my 67 Camaro RS and added 4 headphones.What a party-mobile. Those were the daze;)
That brings me tears as I think of my happy youth of freedom and fun. Now a happy day is one that doesn't start with an aching back and an aspirin. Then again, I've already out lived most of my peers.
@@FeatnikSF That's long time to go without money. I'm going to assume her children took care of her as should happen in a family. After all, if you had no mother you wouldn't be alive and she assumably took care of you first. Hopefully she also had many friends.
Those 8-tracks were the "thing" when I was in high school in the 70's The better quality ones had felt instead of a cheap piece of foam on the heads. The iconic "click" between channels was cool....I've come across them at estate sales, along with 78's.
@@RonSparks2112 I play keyboard and sing (Definity NOT professionally, More like high-level Karaoke,LOL) I once recorded a song and while editing it, I faded the audio about 2/3rds in, Then I dubbed in the sound of an actual 8-Track deck switching the channels with a nice, healthy ker-chunk. Then a faded the remainder of the tune! All for my own silly amusement! I wonder if any REAL recording artist thought of that or even has done it. Would be perfect for a 70's tribute band!
We had a Chevy Nova with an 8 track and the click was more like a "thud" that actually shook the car! My sister had a Sears at home 8 track tape player and when you would pull the tape out it went "wing" because it felt so cheap.
That brought back a lot of memories! I lived through the revolution. I was a teenager to early 20's during the rise and rule of the 8-track and my father was a early convert to the medium. I went through after-market players, to built-in types, and through home recorder/players. Thanks for the nice episode.
I had a Pioneer 8-Track player in my 1968 Mercury Montego MX station wagon. I had quite a selection of 8-Track tapes too. To this day, I have no idea what happened to my tape collection. Of course, once the cassette player was introduced, that was the end of the 8-Track.
My first stereo (a Soundesign unit - there's a name you rarely hear nowadays) had an 8-track player/recorder in it; I used to record LPs (sometimes a whole LP, sometimes specific songs) onto 8-tracks I could then play in my car or at home when I felt like listening to a mix. The thing I remember about 8-tracks is that from a physical design point of view, after many playings one of two things had to happen: (1) the tape had to stretch, thus affecting (negatively) the sound, and/or (2) the tape had to break. The reason being that as the spool of tape spun to let out tape from the spindle, it was taking up more tape on the outer edge of the wound tape with each revolution. I think the record companies would wind them loosely so as to lengthen the time before that would happen, but if played enough times the stretch and/or break would occur. I fixed a number of 8-tracks where the tape had broken by opening them up, splicing the tape, and reassembling the case. (My splice was really high-tech: scotch tape on the back side of the 8-track tape where it was broken... LOL).
😎 I figured Techmoan would be mentioned here! Among other things, he does videos about old audio formats and players/recorders, including some _extremely_ obscure ones.
Came in here for this... Great timing that they both put out videos in the same topic, seemingly unaware of the other's... Techmoan went into how Japan was basically the only other country to widely adopt 8 track, but not in cars, for karaoke 🎤
Bill Lear and friend Elmer Wavering of Quincy, Illinois developed a car radio just for their own entertainment . Lear was from nearby Hannibal MO. The two approached Paul Galvin with the concept. Wavering remained with Galvin and eventually became president of Motorola. When you listen to radio in your car today, chances are the radio broadcast equipment was developed in Quincy Illinois. In the early years of radio the cost to enter the manufacturing side of the radio business was relatively low. Few big companies initially saw radio broadcasting as anything than a fad
@@timothykeith1367 Motorola deserves a huge place in history for doing things nobody else even thought of, and yet once it had been invented, nobody could imagine not having.
absolutely. Bill Lear could comprise an entire series. I have a forward nose hatch cover hanging in my shop from a 23 that was born in the same time frame i was. 😁
My first experience with 8-track tape was riding with a neighbor to church in his Cadillac, listening to Johnny Cash. It was a marvel to hear stereo music for the 1st time… in an automobile!
Bonus: There were also 4-Channel Quadraphonic 8 track tapes. This was the ULTIMATE car audio experience. There were FOUR different sources of music for the same musical piece. This did mean that there were 1/2 as many songs/selections on a single 8-track tape…but it was worth it!!
When you said "Fidelipak", my ears perked up. Yes, I remember the old gray-bottom, clear-top "carts" we used in radio stations. For me, it was the late 70's when I first got to use "carts" and I immediately loved them. Later, there were Audiopak carts, and 3M came out with a padless cart. When I went to a station that used stereo carts, I thought I'd arrived in heaven. And, the first time I used an ITC 99-B cart recorder, it was orgasmic. Funny thing is, I never got into 8-track tapes. Some in my family did, but I didn't. Still, a cool idea. Thanks for the memories. There was an episode of the old Mission Impossible where Peter Graves gets into a car, puts a cart in a mobile player, and listens to his instructions. I always wondered if there was such a thing as a mobile cart deck.
65-70 were my college years, I bought 65 Mustang in 68, 4speed, V8, AM radio. The first thing added was a FM converter, FM was the place to get new music and they could play the whole song and it sounded so good. Cassettes, 8 track, CD, etc came later.
Was that like that joke/not joke in the Movie "Auto Focus" (about pervert Bob Crane from Hogan's Heroes and how it just about ruined his career?)... Anyway, his buddy with the cameras shows his new car and brags about 8 watts per channel. I almost broke my neck laughing about that...lol
A bit of terminology that deserves to be remembered: Though we commonly refer to albums by their format (record, tape, CD) an album is the work of the artist, usually in a collection, sometimes meant to be played intact. Thus, an album is not just a vinyl record. It is the work of the artist whether it be on record, tape, CD, or other media - it's still an album, regardless of media.
@traybernThe Truth: “Greatist Hits” albums nullify your scam theory. So do some all-time classic studio albums that were all killer and no filler. But I agree, the earlier albums of the 60s weren’t as consistent quality-wise.
I'm a car buff, and yesterday I was taken aback by a beautiful classic convertible I'd never seen before. I chased it down and took pics and asked the owner what it was. A Muntz Roadjet. And today, this video featuring Muntz. What a cool world.
I have a cool table model BEST ONE 8 TRACK tape player, I thoroughly enjoy listening to.. Lots of cool mixed genre stuff, but my favorite tape is Led Zeppelin., fifty year old tape that has moved someone with a good head many miles down the highway. I found my unit and tapes in the attic of a house I bought 12 years ago. It takes me back to 1969, when I bought my first 8 track portable player.
I really liked the "you shove it in and ya pull it out" phrase, but one thing left out was if you were lucky all the tape would come out with it. Great review. Brings back good memories.
Before the end of 8 track I bought a Quadraphonic 8 Track system for my car. For youngsters out there, that means 4 channels instead of 2. It worked great! Made by Motorola, of course. It still works perfectly. One of the many problems with 8 track was the tendency of the little conductive strip that triggered the switching to the next track, to fall off and get caught inside the machine. I repaired many machines with that problem. And the fact that the tape was pulled from the center of a spool of tape meant that it was constantly rubbing against itself. That wear would degrade the quality of sound and put oxide dust inside of the player. But for a time, if you had an 8 track in your car, you were top cock on the block!
I installed a Quad deck in my 1970 Mustang Mach 1 (in about 1977) and it was great. It had separate volume controls for each channel going through 4 speakers and depending on how the tape was recorded you could often turn off the front 2 channels (speakers) and listen to just the vocals through the back 2 channels (speakers) essentially making the song a cappella which really let you know how good the singers were! The vocals from the group "Bread" were some of the best by far.
@@kevinkennedy7237 A 1970 Mach 1! I’m very jealous! Mine has front/rear and left/right. Back in the 70’s I wanted a Pyle-driver amp/speaker setup and couldn’t afford it.🤣 I didn’t know a lot about audio stuff back then and didn’t realize that that amp used transformer coupling to get it’s high power output. Eventually, when I got a good job, my friend sold me a Pioneer system with two GM-120 amps. That was outrageous power in those days! But by then I had switched to a Pioneer cassette deck with Dolby and a metal tape mode. It had the Supertuner system with remote control. But I never threw away my Motorola 8 track player. Quad tapes are still found on eBay. The quad demo tapes are incredible! Thanks for the memories!😊
@@jrgenholteng1529I didn’t have those tapes. The quality wasn’t great. And as time went by, it got poorer as the oxide wore off. At the time we thought it was great. Then we got cassette tapes, which were an improvement. Then Dolby noise reduction came out and I really loved that. But for the time, 8-track seemed great!
I remember my parents buying a Quadrophonic stereo in 1971. It had a built in 8-track player and the sample they gave us was "Big Band Moog". I will never forget that music! Later my dad added an 8-track player to his custom 1976 GMC van. And then when I got my first car at 16, the first thing I did was slap an 8-track player in it. My car was littered with 8-track cartridges, on the seats and under the seats. Those were some great years!!
A little correction: while FM car radios were first introduced in the 1950s, they didn't become commonplace until the 1970s. Even as late as 1990, you could still get some General Motors and Ford vehicles with an AM-only radio! In the late '60s and early '70s, quite a few car radios had a stereo 8-track player, but only an AM radio tuner -- no FM yet.
Because GM was ran by nitwits. They were still putting in cassette players well into the 2000's as well. Because they'd order thousands of units and had a huge backstock they had to get rid of. So they'd stick out of date tech nobody wanted into their cars.
I was born in 79, and my parent's had an old massive piece of furniture that had huge top doors you'd lift up to reveal an 8 track player on one side, and a record player on the other. We had Kenny Rogers 8 tracks, Black sabbath, Steppenwolf, The Who etc. It was what lead to me becoming a pro drummer.
When I was young and in high school, I used to babysit. One of the parents had the Beatles Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on 8 track. I spent the whole time listening to this tape. If I started to feel sleepy the tape changing channels would startle me awake. Those were some good times.
My dad had a home 8-track player that he had bought before I was even born (mid 1970s.) Since my dad had a respectable library of 8-track cartridges, he would play them on a fairly regular basis throughout the 80s and 90s, eventually even allowing me to play the classic audio device when he felt assured that I wouldn't wreck it, lol. He did refrain from playing his 8-track as the years got on due to the noted risks associated with the aging device. For the most part, he kept his 8-track and cartridges for reasons of nostalgia.
Oh wow … my first exposure to 8-tracks was from my step father in 1974. Pink Floyd Meddle and Dark Side of the Moon, Beatles, Deep Purple, America GH, among others were my earlier intro to great rock music at 5 yo.
My DAD had a 68 Chevy Chevelle with an 8 track player. I was just a boy of 5 or 6 when I start to form life long memories and music started to touch my soul. I loved that feeling of almost flying while listening to Pink Floyd or something cool like that loud in the back seat with the windows down at night. Music and Cars go together like good stories and Pirates. Thank you History Guy your videos are the best.
I added an 8-Track player and FM converter to my first car in 1977, along with another iconic staple from the post “Smokey & the Bandit” era, a CB Radio. Of course, my back seat was full of those huge 8-Track tape storage cases. I didn’t feel old until you said your first memory of the 8-Track was in your MOM’s car. I served on a submarine and when the Sony Walkman came out I would buy albums, copy them to cassettes and would take about 100 on each patrol.
I remember when the rock band KISS was on 8-Tracks. Life was simple and fun during those times, I would go back to that era if there was a time machine..
Because the period between 64-84 was the summer of our generation and when the illusion of freedom was at it's highest. Every generation is made of 4 turnings or cycles or seasons where spring and summer are all about growth and prosperity and fun and fall and winter are about receding falling and death. All goods things must come to an end they say and now we are the end. Show is over say good bye.
My first rock album was a Kiss album (their first self titled album) my mom got for one Christmas. It was a two 8-track cassette set that she purchased to go along with the turn table, cassette, radio player my father got for me that same Christmas.
@@wendellkelley3890 Yes they were Windell!!!! Very Cool!!! Should have been in the Rock and Roll HOF a year or two after the Beatles and Stones, not decades after!!😡😡😡😡
I remember me and Dad, riding in his '66 Chevy, which had a "four" track tape player under the dash, with it's pop-up pinch roller, that could be seen through the clear 4 track cartridges. Thanks History Guy, for the memories, that should be remembered.
In my circle of friends a buddy was first to buy a 4-Track, a few months later I bought a 8-Track. By time rock got a foot in door on FM(1973-ish) I'd mostly lost interest in 8-Track. FM really took off when a 100,000 watt rock outlet signed on.
Update , a recent conversation with a likewise car nut, Me) yes there’s such a thing as a 4 track tape player . Him) No, there’s no such thing , never seen or heard of it ! Later I, I did a search, found one for sale , sent him a link , ( only so he could see one) He was so fascinated with it’s unique design, he bought it for a hundred bucks, which included four playable 4 track cartridges. He loves it but , hates Me, “cause I was right 😂
I'd first heard "Freebird" from the album "One More From The Road" by Lynyrd Skynyrd on 8-track...so when I finally listened to the vinyl album...I was surprised it didn't fade out, click onto the next track, and fade in (slightly before the previous fade out on the previous track) and continue to the end. It was a beautiful medium, the 8-track tape. I learned at an early age how to repair the tape if it got messed up (I was the 'go-to' kid in my family for that!). This video brought back so many wonderful memories, strolling across open fields, at night, playing Steve Miller's Greatest Hits, and the latest albums by Billy Joel and the Eagles....good times! Great video! Thanks for bringing up that bit of nostalgia!
my mom had told me all the time as a kid that an 8-track player was one of her favorite christmas gifts that she ever received and she listened to Bruce Springsteen the whole drive to her dad's family's place (from southern FL to GA). i began collecting them myself around the age 15/16 after my mom's nostalgia got me interested and i'm 24 now
My grandparents’ 1970 Ford Mach I GT w/351 Cleveland, had factory a/c and an 8-track player installed.. they had a couple adapter carts that remained in the car, one being an FM band tuner, since the stock radio even in ‘70 was only AM &, an adapter cart to play compact cassette tapes IN THE 8-track player! Years later, @ 1994-ish, I scored an all chrome Pioneer/Craig 4 & 8 track under-dash mounted player that I had installed in my 1971 Ford Torino Ranchero GT w/351 Cleveland… mounted it adjacent too my Citizen Band radio… My Grandparents sold their ‘70 Mach I @ ‘94 to, in my Grandma’s words, “prevent any family fighting over who gets to inherit that car!” I saved and continued using those adapter carts for my car 4-8 track deck. Worked great for many years following, without issues
When I was in Vietnam, joined Columbia - they GAVE you an eight track player with speakers; yo just had to keep paying for the tapes they sent you every month. Also, FYI, there was an adapter for 4-tracks that allowed you to play them on an 8-track.
Our vocation agriculture instructor in high school each year took the junior class to Mexico over the summer. We took the back seats out of a 64 passenger bus and put mattresses on the floor. For our trip my friend put a Craig Power Play floor mount 8 track in with 3 ft tall home speakers. We listened to The Eagle’s Hotel California amongst other hits all the way down and back. Best times ever. The 70’s were the best times ever.
When I was 12 years old in 1985 I received a stereo component for Christmas. It had AM/FM radio, twin cassette decks phonograph on top, and right smack in the middle was an 8 track deck. I later found one of my Dad's old 8 tracks, it turned out to be a female X- rated comedian. The next year I received a High tech CD player component. So at 1 time I had LP records, 8 tracks, cassettes, and a few CD's at the same time. Thing about 8 track is that the tracks were not big enough to contain an entire song, so you'd be rocking along and suddenly the song would stop, there'd be a loud "Click-Snap" sound from the deck and a second later the song would resume.
Must've been a rather long song. I had a few cartridges in which someone couldn't figure out the optimal way to get all the songs on an album organized into four separate programs of reasonably similar length, and there'd be one song cut in middle that way. Annoying.
When I use to work at the only black station in Nevada I would repair 8 Tracks cassettes and real to real. I recently made a couple mix tapes within the last 5 years!
Being born in 1992 in Europe I never knew about the format. I knew cassettes and fiddled with them a lot. in 2013 I made analog media my hobby (playing, recording and fixing them), in 2017 I was given an 8-track recorder coupled with a few carts and fell in love with them! They are durable, easy to use, have long play times without having to flip them for side B. And the sound quality can live up if the cartridges are in good shape (though they usually fall behind a bit compared to other analog media). I also really like fixing them up, the carts and machines are easy to work on and the prerecorded catalog is huge even though I also record my own tapes. Nowadays they are my favorite type of physical media to work and play with. I continue to keep the media alive and rockin', showing them to my friends whom continue to tell the story to their friends and so on. Thanks for this very interesting video History Guy! This one (also) deserves a big thumps up :)
I certainly did know about 4-track tape recorders--though for the home, not for the car. My family had a Wollensak 1580 4-track tape recorder. It used tubes, not transistors, and was heavy as hell. But it had some nice features for the day, such as letting you do what we now call karaoke: live voice with a microphone along with taped music.
I was born after the 8 Track era. However, the first car I bought was a 1977 Ford Maverick. I loved listening to my 8 track and bought several for probably the original price. I was very sad when I had to sell her.
Saved my parents foldable 8 track player for inside, plus several tapes that still work. Tom T Hall, Charlie Pride, star wars soundtrack (original of course) and several others. ♥️
I thought I had it all with my factory 8-track player inside my 1976 El Camino! But within a handful of years, I was mixing my own cassette tapes onto high-quality Maxell tape. By the time 1986 arrived, I was already considering a new technology called "compact disks!" Those were the days! Thanks History Guy!
I heard some of my favorite music for the first time on an 8 track tape, and still think of that time when I hear the same music today. Not having a factory FM radio in my '67 Mustang, my world of driving changed when I installed an 8 track player under the dash along with two 5 1/4 inch speakers in the doors. Then I found the most amazing invention: a stereo FM radio receiver in the shape of an 8 track cartridge that plugged into the 8 track player and, after hooking up my antenna to it via an adapter, had stereo FM radio in my Stang. Those were the days!
I was born in 1988, and I remember 8-track tapes. My Mom had an old station wagon with an 8-track tape player, and we would always get 8-track tapes from the Half-Price Bookstore. So at least some people with old cars that still had the decks were still buying used tapes, and using them into the early 1990s. Incidentally, our last car with a cassette deck became our reason for doing the same with cassette tapes in the era of the CD. For a while, we were buying CDs for use at home, and recording the music onto cassette tapes so we could play them in the car. I always half-wondered as I was doing that, if people did the same thing with vinyl records back in the day, and now watching this video confirms they did. I still prefer CDs over digital music, though... because I can still rip the CDs if I want a digital copy, but I still have a case to display and a copy that doesn't need to be backed up on the cloud somewhere. I don't like not having a copy to hold in my hands if I am going to pay real money.
By the early 1980’s, I had started working for Sony’s Tape Division. We sold only a small amount of blank 8-track tapes, but based on sales forecasts, I ordered more blank 8 tracks. My first decision was a disaster!
My parents were still thrilled with the new fangled AM-FM-Stereo radio in their 1963 Bonneville, I don"t think they ever had any tape players in their cars until AM-FM-Cassettes became standard.
I was in a used reclrd store yesterday. They had a few 8-TRACKS for sale ( Oh, the horror!) Thank god for the Phillips company who invented the Cassette!
The cassette was originally intended for office dictation purposes and wasn't really intended as a high fidelity audio format, but advances in tape head technology (by companies such as Nakamichi and even Voice of Music), along with Dolby noise reduction, allowed cassettes to become a hifi music format ---- assuming you made your own recordings at home with a good quality deck and source, using better quality tape than that used for record-company issued, mass- market pre-recorded cassettes, which were duplicated at high speed and not in real time. usedreproduction from cassette
I remember 8-track players very well. My Dad had one in his '73 El Camino, we had one in our living room console TV/turntable/8-track, and my brother's and I had our own players in our rooms. I have fond memories of listening to Sonny & Cher, the Grateful Dead, Deep Purple, KISS, etc on 8-track.
We had an 8-Track in my dad's car (I believe that was the Ford Fiesta; it was after market) and added to our house stereo. The latter could record, so we recorded our choice Christmas albums. There were one or two songs which had the track change in the middle of them that we always laughed at....it was like a hiccup. 😊
By the time I had a car in the early seventies we were already into cassette players, but my next door neighbour who was several years older had an eight track player. I remember listening to Alice Cooper's Billion Dollar Babies album in his car.
I had a 4-track player. The roller engaged by pulling a knob out. I bypassed 8 tracks, went to cassettes. My folks, in their 90s, still listen to their 8-track home player.
The History Guy reminded me of warm summer evenings, driving through the hills of southern Indiana heading back to college from my hometown with the windows down and the 8-track playing. I miss the ruffled shirts along with the bell-bottoms.
Remember "Loctal" tubes? They were used in car radios. The tube base was similar to that of the Octal, but the center post had an indentation that snapped into a retaining clip in the socket, which securely held the tube, so it wouldn't work loose when the car went over a rough road.
I loved installing one myself in my first old car, what an upgrade over the Delco AM radio! And then junking the 8 track player a couple of years later for a cassette FM stereo unit. My peeve with 8 tracks was when switching tracks it would start in the middle of a song. if you were content to just pop it in and let it play all the way through the tracks, it was okay.
Oh gods, that nostalgia bug bites hard. I remember crusing up over the Grapevine and heading down into LA late at night, windows down, 8-track of UFO or Ronny James Dio blasting as loud as my old speakers would go.
Growing up in Phoenix you had to be real careful. Bring your eight tracks inside. Don't leave them in the car or they will melt. I did have an eight track tape that I had to take apart and repair splice several times. It was possible you could do it if you're careful. You heard the music start to flutter better pull the tape out real quick because it was balling up inside your player, You didn't have to pull the cartridge apart to get the tape back in if the tape wasn't damaged too bad. Holding the cartridge facing you give a quick tug on the left side of the tape. It will come down slightly and then it will suck the tape back up inside the cartridge. My brother worked at a radio station and they had what they called carts. It was a similar to the 8-track. And they put commercials on it , single track. There was also another similar cartridge for film we used to get while in school and watch various short flicks, works the same way as the eight-track, we called it a floop. Film Loop.
Jeez - I remember my old man taking me into a car showroom in the 1960's where this huge gorgeous vehicle like a white airplane sat in splendid isolation. It was a Chevrolet Impala. The beast was a convertible and I never saw so much chrome. It had an utterly miraculous electric hood, and if that wasn't enough there was a 45rpm-single record player built into the dash. How on earth such a road-angel ever found its way to the backwaters of Hull, Yorkshire, England, I cannot imagine, but it seemed that anything might be possible - even one day walking on the moon. From that day on, I understood (or thought I did) what The Beach Boys were singing about with their great motorcar melodies. I missed out on 8-tracks (though I saw them often enough). And when I got my own car, had a radio-cassette. Back in about 2001, I got hold of a Benelli Adiva scooter, which had a radio cassette as an optional extra, and that coped pretty well with pot-holes. But then, I upgraded to radio CD and that couldn't cope half so well. However, a digital plug-in soon solved that. I'll add this: in the late 1970's/early 1980's I had a Sony Walkman radio cassette, it was an expensive model and I have never heard such miraculous stereo-imaging ever - before or since on ANY system...
While I "grew up" after the 8 track had lost it's popularity, I still remember them being played and the big boxes of them that people had. This was a pretty cool video, thank you for making it. I love almost everything you do on this channel, but these off beat ones, that very few other history podcasters would do, are some of my favorites. Keep up the good work my friend.
When I graduated from high school, I used the money from my graduation gifts to put an 8-track Quadraphonic tape deck in my car. It was wonderful. I was so disappointed when Quad didn't really catch on.
@@zeusapollo8688 It was very close. Booth had around 240 lines resolution. VCRs had the killer app being recorders. That and the neighborhood video store killed Selectavision before it even got started.
My Dad used to sell bootleg 8-Track tapes in the package store him and my mom owned. $2.00 in the 70's. On some you could see you ever he bought them from had old labels under the new white generic, having taped over other tapes.
My Granddad Robert Howard Lane came home from Germany after WWII and worked with his Father in construction. Great Granddad Howard owned a machine that manufactured concrete blocks. While working on a scaffold, it collapsed and he became paralyzed from the waist down. While recovering he took mail order lessons on radio and television repair. Once he became mobile driving his station wagon with the aid of a yard stick, he opened his own business Lane's radio & television sales & service. He also partnered with Bud Harrison selling television towers while Bud handled installation. Before 8 tracks became available in home stereos he built a portable 8 track player for my Mother that she could plug in to a 110 outlet anywhere she wanted to go. Thank you for sharing this bit of history. Granddad would have loved your channel. With every new innovation in broadcast technology I see, I always wish he could be here to see it too. He lived a good life despite being paralyzed for 61 of his 89 years.
My brother was 5 years older than me. He had a nice collection of 8 track tapes. I got into cassettes based on the streams of 8 track tapes along the highways by frustrated drivers when their tapes got unwound in their players. I liked buying lp’s and recording them onto cassettes for use in my car.
I was listening to "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" on the radio the other day. I rolled the windows down because I had mothballs under the hood to keep the mice out and the smell permeates through the passenger compartment if you put the AC on. I hadn't heard Meatloaf sound so right since I was a teenage on a hot summer night and the beach was burning.
My dad was a big music collector and was in his 20s during the heyday of 8-track, so he would have been the prime demo. He's still got tons of records and cassettes, but never owned any 8-tracks.
At 15:38, they show the tape recorder I received for Christmas in 1978. It took me most of my life to find a photo of this online, and lo and behold here we are with this video footage. Needless to say that main knob broke and made the unit pretty much useless after that in just four short months.
You brought back many happy memories of the music format of my youth. I began installing car radios, with and without 8 track players, when I was 12 years old. I would take non-working decks and "Frankenstein" them together, to install in my parent's 1970 VW van. When I began to drive, I had bought a Sears, under-dash, FM radio/8track player, and hooked 8 speakers, that I had pulled from some home stereos, inside my car. I have some major hearing loss, now that I'm in my 60s, but I have no regrets, and I chuckle now, everytime I hear someone's car thumping away, while sitting in traffic. Oh, and I did fix a 4 track home player for a family friend. Unfortunately, the only 4 track tape that they had was of Leonard Nimoy.😮 Thank you for helping reminisce all those memories of my youth.😊
I loved this episode of #TheHistoryGuy! I remember wearing out multiple 8 track tapes on my parent’s hifi system when I was younger. I even figured out how to wedge a match book between the 8 track and the opening if it was too loose. I think it is amazing that I have lived in an era when so many things have advanced so quickly. 78s to Spotify in 6 decades.
I had an 8-track installed in my '72 Plymouth valiant. I had a cartridge with Grand Funk's "I'm You Captain", a song that ran about 10 minutes. Halfway through the song the tape clicked to the next track to play the second half of the song. A tape with the band Fever Tree was given to me when I bought the 8-track player. It seems to me the name brand on the player was Majestic, but I find no indication of such a machine on a Google search.
I bought a Craig brand 8 track in the spring of 1968 and installed it in my 1964 Plymouth Barracuda. Everyone enjoyed cruising with me because of the music. But Friday and Saturday nights the tape player would be shut off and the am radio tuned into the Might ten ninety, Little Rock, Arkansas to listen to Clyde Clifford's Beaker Street. Which sounded good because of a Motorola reverb unit. Yes, I spent money on music instead of racing parts! Oh the memories that this episode brought back!
My dad had 8-track players in his car and garage while I was growing up. Probably long after cassettes were gaining momentum, but that’s what we had. I still remember the song breaks in Eagles greatest hits.
I always wondered what an "8-track" was when I, as a European, watched the "Simspons" and when Homer drove the family car, they'd show the car stereo. "8-Track. Hifi" and I was like "What is that???!"
one begins to feel old when their own history becomes "forgotten history that deserves to be remembered"
Truth. Lol..
Oh my lands, you're right.
Word.
I felt the same when I went to an antique store and most items were from my childhood. I was like excuse me these aren't antiques... They looked at me in that way and reality slapped me
For me its when I hear "my music" referred to as classic rock...
My dad was an audiophile and when I turned 13 in 1973 I asked for an 8-track player for my birthday. My dad already knew that 8-tracks were inferior to cassette tapes and would soon be on their way out and convinced me to go with cassettes instead. My parents bought me a portable cassette player and my first cassette - Dark Side of the Moon.
That is cool, your Dad was cutting edge. I vividly remember being 4 or 5 and getting that first Sony Walkman, the one without rewind so you had to FF then flip whenever you wanted to hear a song.
I believe my first was Men At Work. Great format, the portable players really did last for a longtime before the CD-man came... and went
damn fine first cassette to have been gifted 🔥
👍
Best album ever
8 track sound was far superior to the record company,s cassettes due to the width of the tape
I'm 57 and still love listen to my 8-Tracks on my Sears 8-Track juck box (holds 5 8-Tracks) through my 40 year old Pioneer home stereo system. When the weekend rolls around, I love listening to the Eagles, Doobie Brothers, Journey and so on. I'll never stop listening to my 8-Tracks.
I still play 8-tracks too! And my dad's old reel to reel deck.
My 8-track ate my "Kitty Wells " Greatest hits a few years ago 😖 I stopped using it 🤷♂️
Did you replace the pads on your tapes? All mine went bad but they were always in the desert.
Those old tube stereo amps are awesome. 8 track sound was inferior to vinyl but quality reel to reel could smoke vinyl. I'll be 67 in 3 weeks. I worked in a record store/headshop in 78-79 and had some friends with more money than I did. They'd borrow my vinyl and record it on reel to reel. Hearing it back was like being in a studio. But prior to cassette and then CDs, there wasn't anything available at the record store but vinyl and 8 track. So, for the era it was ahead of its time while driving down the road.
As a teen in the mid 70s, my cars had 8 track stereos. They would occasionally unwind inside my players. I guess I was cheap, and liked a challenge, so I began opening up the cartridges to see how they worked. It didn't take me very long to figure them out, and begin repairing my tape cartridges.
Replace "occasionally" with "frequently".
you must have bought the pirated $1.99 specials at the convenience stores. those things were so cheap
Same here. I went on to repairing the playback decks as well. A lot of dirty heads and drive parts, broken drive belts, burned output circuits and so on.
I had one in my 77 mercury couger with 100 8tracks. This was 2005-2006
You are THE MAN !
My late husband would insert his "cassette" into my "player". Ohhhhh what sweet music we made ! ! ! !
My first 8-track player (bought for way too much money!), was a used unit from a friend. I stuffed it into my glove-box. One day, rollin' down the road, it started sounding funny... then... a thick plume of smoke poured out of my glove-box. Both player and tape were now toast. And that's history that IS remembered!
After my dad passed in 2017, we found many 8-track tapes (one was Santana) and player. He had CD's, cassettes and vinyl but forever loved his 8-track.
Cool! I have Santana's "Abraxas" on both 8-Track and LP! Your dad had TASTE!
Excellent
I knew about the four track, have actually seen and heard them. But I had mistakenly thought Lear invented them, had no idea Muntz was the actual inventor. I stand corrected.
Angie, I understand well.
I was born in ‘58 and my first car was a ‘68 Pontiac LeMans, bought in 1975. I immediately bought an 8 track player and installed it
on the hump between the bucket seats, on a wood base I made to fit the contour of the hump. I LOVED that player and that car. The only drawback is that I still remember the exact spot on several longer songs where you heard the “clunk” as the machine switched tracks. They just became part of the song in my brain 🧠 and my brain still expects it!
I too, was born in 1958, & my first car, in 1974 was a 1968 SS 396 Chevelle. My friend's mom owned an electronics store in our little town. He sold me a new Craig 8 track player for $10. Installed it in the knee beater position, & had some great tunes! I hated the pause & clunk right in the middle of 'The Bitch is Back.'
Do you add the "clunk" to those songs on karaoke night?
@@Chuck_W59 I read your comment & glanced over at my BTO & Grand Funk Railroad cassettes in the corner.
The mastering of 8 tracks was pretty spotty back in the day. Sometimes they would re-arrange the song order into 4 even groups to fit the 4 channels, which ruined concept albums where the songs, in order, told a story. Sometimes they would just fade a song out in the middle, change channels, then fade it back in, which pretty much ruined whatever song got chopped in half.
Born in 62 first car was a 67 turtle green mustang and the first thing i got for it was a 8 track player . that was i think 1979 guys .
It was difficult to record your own 8-tracks if you had OCD because the 3 breaks per tape meant it would be nearly impossible to avoid having a song cut in two. Those of us who used them still hear some of those breaks in our heads when we hear those songs today.
Actually I had a recorder and the song would only be off for a second when it changed tracks unlike the studio ones.
For example “For You Blue” from The Beatles “Let It Be” 8-track. Right after you hear George say “Elroy James got nothing on this thing” it starts to fade out and switch from 3 to 4. Today i can’t listen to the song without half-expecting that.
The worst recording format ever offered.
@@eddieboggs8306 it wasn't that bad. You need to clean head and a good fine tuning on the head. After all it was basically a reel-to-reel. No they didn't hold up too good
I used to take them apart and splice them with Scotch tape and they would work forever.
How did you record? Was it like the old cassette method where you just typed off the radio or was there a connection to something else?
ALWAYS a treat! Thanks again H.G. 😎👍
When I was a kid all my friends had 8-track players in their cars, mostly that really cool Craig floor mount player. Me? I had an 8-track, but instead of buying tapes I bought a Radio Shack tape splicing kit. When my friends' 8-tracks ate the tape they'd give it to me when they bought another tape. I had a great collection of free music, thanks to a sharp eye, a Radio Shack splicing kit and the ability to resurrect dead tapes. Some of them worked for years after I fixed them.
Tape has become something of a lost art except for aficionados who keep the format alive. As an electronic technician and (very) amateur guitarist I still think that a tape echo device such as an Echoplex, Eccophonic, or Roland Space Echo are the coolest sound processing devices ever built. Where would rock and roll be without Scotty Moore using a tape echo device for the slap-back sound on all those old Elvis Presley records?
yeah everyone wanted a Craig
I had a Craig unit also. Never really had as much problems as others had. Just took some extra precautions that seems to save having problems later.
We didn’t always have money for family trips, but when we did they were memorable. One such trip found us driving to New Mexico, three teenagers in the back seat of my dad’s Bonneville, and the 8-track of Dueling Banjos stuck in the player. It was either us complaining, or the 8-track; that was it. After two days, and my father basically disassembling the dash as he drove, the tape ejected! It was the only time I saw my father litter. Somewhere along I-25, near the Colorado border, I’d like to think that bit of our family history, is just waiting for its next family. Love the car history stories; my day is already better because of this one.
Yes, something you used to see frequently back in the day, was yards and yards of audio tape on the sides of roads. Although I seem to remember they were usually attached to cassette cartridges, as opposed to 8 tracks.
@@clark9992 Yah, the 8 tracks flew further from the road when hurled out of a moving automobile. 😎
It's not litter, when it's for your health and sanity.
Let's go find it!!!
I got Boston's and Alabama's first albums from the roadside store. Rewound them both. Nice finds for a kid.
I can remember my Dad getting an "Auto-Reverse" cassette player and gleefully junking his 8-Track. He let my friends have whatever 8-track tapes they wanted. He had a Kenwood cassette recorder on our home stereo, and made all of his cassettes. It was MUCH better.
Auto-seek was a massive feature for cassettes when it became cheap.
But for all our autoshuffle technology these days there's something to be said for pushing the listener to just play an album in order.
Did he have the record bias adjusted for the tape he used? It could make a big difference.
My older brother had a 4 track. Odd lever to pinch tape between rubber roller(in the machine) and drive capstan. Had about 8 tapes. Wish I still had it.
No it wasn't "MUCH better." People trash 8-track because it's ugly. All those freaky colors and the bubbling glue just makes it ugly. But the sound quality was excellent and sounds better than a type I cassette (with or without Dolby). It moves twice the speed as a cassette and has much less hiss.
The main weak point of wow and flutter inherent in a never ending loop was FAR less an issue back then because the tapes were new. There are several inches of difference between where the tape pulls off and where it is pulled back onto the reel. This differential causes the tape to tighten, which is why they had a graphite lubricant on them.
@@tarstarkusz
Cassettes were much better. Most people did not get the high frequency bias adjusted for their tape. Wow & flutter was always crappy on 8-tracks and since there was no rewind trying to adjust the bias was nearly impossible.
At 51 years old, I was weened on 8 track. My older brother cranked lots of Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath etc, in his old Torino. I still listen to 8 tracks today! Definitely a nostalgic format but I still love that analog sound. Great video History Guy!
Me too. I have hundreds of them. A bunch of players too.
61 here. I wore out the heads on at least one eight-track deck in my charger
You don’t get weaned ON to something. The definition of “wean” (the correct spelling) is: Wean is also used figuratively to mean to acclimate someone to doing without something that they have become dependent on.
@@PoesRaven73 Lol.
@@PoesRaven73 You must be fun at parties... 🎉🪅🎈
I still have my 8-track collection, many of which came from the Columbia Record Club. My 75 Malibu, which I am restoring, still has the Sears AM/FM/8-Track stereo. My favorite tape was a mix tape I recorded on my Soundesign 8-track recorder. Those were some great days.
I had a Chevy van when I was in high school. The radio didn't work, and I installed an 8-track with speakers in the front and back of the van. I eventually had three big 24-cartridge boxes to hold all my tapes, and always had something good to play. I bought a new car at 19 that had neither a radio or tape deck, installed the deck but never messed with the radio. 8-track tapes defined my music life as a teenager. There are songs I listen to today, 50 years later, where I still anticipate the fade-out-*click*-fade-in of the track change that I was so used to back then.
I still expect that click or warble on a tape when listening to a favorite song. Funny how that stays with you.
It wasn't a click but a CLUNK on the 8-track player I had. Never did develop a tolerance for it. In fact, it actively irritated me that the companies who recorded them couldn't be bothered to tweak gap times so switching occurred between songs instead of the middle of them.
@@boblangill6209 - like in the middle of Hey You on The Wall...
My friends and I put 8 tracks in our cars in 1973:) We loved them! Traded tapes between us all the time. Made my’68 Oldsmobile a sound stage. :)
In cold Michigan winters. If you had left the tape engaged in the player when you started the car the player would eat your tape:) extracting it from Player was a challenge:)
@@BlasphemousBill2023 I bought a Motorola unit in 1967 and installed it in my Barracuda Plymouth. I lived in Iowa, so winter was indeed a problem. I had a tape carrier that fit between the bucket seats, and took it into the house to keep the tapes warm. When I came out and the car was cold, I had a small flexible tube I stuck in the heater vent on one end, and stuck in the 8 track door on the other end. When the player was warm, the tape went in. Never had any problem with that warm up system..lots of great memories riding along with my music.
Sometimes even trading tapes for reels
"Switched on Bach" was the 1st 8-track I listened to, and I've purchased it on every format since!
I've recorded over that reel to reel tape
My favorite LP was A Fifth of Beethoven. I had my own wooden cabinet stero from the 60s in the basement but turned it up to 11 on my father's forbidden Solid State wedge shaped player when left alone at the house. Almost 50 years later and they still have the same stereo.
E Power Biggs is smiling at you, while playing Joy
On the Moog synthesizer - a GREAT album. Had it on vinyl.
@@nofaith5994 Me too along with the same album done by instruments It was great
While I born in 1982 and grew up with cassette tapes for music, I distinctly remember 8-tracks because my grandmother had an in home 8-track player that she'd keep immaculate, and we'd listen to her collection whenever I visited her for the weekend. There was something about listening to music from before my time on a system that was popular before I was born that fascinated and stuck with me throughout my life.
I bought my last new 8-track in 82'! Scorpions "Blackout"🤘
Plug in a good (heavy means quality) 80'/90's turntable, plug it into the AV or phono connection on your mean sterio and chuck on 'Dark side of the moon' or 'Another brick in the wall record, It's way... better than anything digital.
OMG dude 😎!!!!!
Dad and I had an 8-trak player in every car, truck, camper, travel trailer, and motorhome he owned as well as a "BOX" of tapes....!!! What a crazy Time! I had a stash box of recorded and custom tapes when my buddies and I blasted away from the house on our own!!!
I still have the car player and I gave one of the house units to my brother (his was broken...) , and the older brother found a retired electronics specialist that repaired his and our brothers unit, just to keep the music going!.
I led the change though and bought a serious AM/FM cassette unit and then another and both brothers followed the trend....CD players next, and so on.
However, we kept our maintained 8-Trak car players in our HotRods, just for the sake of nostalgia. Nothing says "Tunes" like that big ole tape! Of course we all bought quick release slide mounts, plugs and a fitted box for taking them out of the cars, along with the tape box. Keeps them working and safe.
This is a blast! Thanks for doing this episode big chunk of our lives!👍👍👍
I added an 8-track stereo player in my first car (post HS) an 8 year old dodge. I remember having to mount it under the dash along with the two speakers. The build in AM radio only had one speaker that opened thru the top of the dash. I ran the 8-track system for four years all that time I only had eight tapes (the tape box had ten slots and one slot held the cleaner/demagnetizer cassette and another held the cleaning fluid bottle.) Most of them were compilation/greatest hits albums I bought at yard sales. I learn quickly to bring the tape box inside if parked at home/school/work anytime when outside temps were below 40*F or above 90*F. Also in winter I learn to run the car heater at least twenty minutes before even attempting to insert a tape.
I ordered an AM/FM/8-track in dash unit for my Pontiac from JC Whitney. Then I bought an. 8-track/cassette adaptor so that I could play everything.
@@dave3657 I've never heard of cassette to 8-0track adapters, but it makes perfect sense and I can see pictures on EBay. I wonder if the cassette is the most-adapted format? Might be a worthwhile bit of history for our host to explore.
In the late 1970s, I put an adapter in both my AMC cars -1968 Javelin and 1968 AMX 2-seater. It connected to the AM radio and converted it to FM. I also had separate Cassette players under the dash.
I had one in my 66 Mustang. Tape stretch or breaking was a main problem back then.
@@dave3657 I had an adapter myself for my 66 mustang. I loved the cassettes as they could hold more songs, but I did not like the fact that unlike my 8 track, I could not skip to a different track, but had to listen to a whole side.
I installed an 8-track player in one of the vehicles we owned in the 1970's. I loved it. As long as your speakers were decent it played great music. The only problem was the occasional eaten 8-track tape when required a lot of fine needle nose extraction of consumed 8-track tape.
Ah, the time and money I spent recording albums to cassettes, cds to cassettes (for car use) and so on. Finally have everything on a $10.00 usb drive that fits into my truck stereo. Sad? A bit but also amazing!
I only use android phones so I can stick a 256 gb micro SD card in it with 900 CDs worth of music on it. I still have 3 nice cassette decks & a couple turntables but I'll take the quality of CDs & 320kbps mp3 files over them both
@@neilschlemeel5751 I have a Ipod classic 160 GB with 18,000+ songs. It is still going strong. I like collecting music. I try not to think how much money I have spent over the last 13 years on I-tunes. Now when I put a want list together on I-Tunes and spend too much money buying the music I swear I need to stop buying music. I wait a month or so and get bored. I go on I-tunes just to check it out and before I know it I have another want list with 200 dollars worth of songs again. I think I have an addiction. But an addiction buying music is a lot healthier than if I was addicted to drugs or alcohol.
BUT...a USB in nowhere near the fun of playing 8 tracks.
@@johnnyd63 Nothing quite like jamming to your favorite tune and having to wait for the track to shift right in the middle of your jam!😀
I’m embarrassed to admit how much money I spent on my first home CD player😢
No doubt about it. Top 40 hits with LOTS of commercials gave way to Bob Seger Night Moves, or The Cars first album without interruption. Or Billy Joel’s 52nd Street… So pleased with my player in 1979!
side note : I seem to recall that Billy Joel's "The Stranger" was the first album commercially released on CD !
No interruptions except when the track changed in the middle of the song-
"Ca-Chunk!"
@@urbanurchin5930 Pirates by Ricky Lee Jones may have soon followed, it was an all digital recording, Ry Cooder I believe one of the first artists to use digital.
@@someguy2135
Hated that!
@@izzzzzzzzzzzie Sounds right. Dire Straights too, I think. I don't remember the title, but the cover had a photo of a Dobro.
Bought the Muntz 4-track and a carrying case of all the top songs - installed it in my 64.5 Mustang with four speakers. Later, I moved it into my 67 Camaro RS and added 4 headphones.What a party-mobile. Those were the daze;)
That brings me tears as I think of my happy youth of freedom and fun. Now a happy day is one that doesn't start with an aching back and an aspirin. Then again, I've already out lived most of my peers.
My mother used to tell me "first you outlive your friends, then you outlive your money". She lived to be 97.
@@FeatnikSF That's long time to go without money. I'm going to assume her children took care of her as should happen in a family. After all, if you had no mother you wouldn't be alive and she assumably took care of you first. Hopefully she also had many friends.
Those 8-tracks were the "thing" when I was in high school in the 70's The better quality ones had felt instead of a cheap piece of foam on the heads. The iconic "click" between channels was cool....I've come across them at estate sales, along with 78's.
I well remember that KER-CHUNK in the middle of a long guitar solo.
@@RonSparks2112 I play keyboard and sing (Definity NOT professionally, More like high-level Karaoke,LOL) I once recorded a song and while editing it, I faded the audio about 2/3rds in, Then I dubbed in the sound of an actual 8-Track deck switching the channels with a nice, healthy ker-chunk. Then a faded the remainder of the tune! All for my own silly amusement! I wonder if any REAL recording artist thought of that or even has done it. Would be perfect for a 70's tribute band!
We had a Chevy Nova with an 8 track and the click was more like a "thud" that actually shook the car! My sister had a Sears at home 8 track tape player and when you would pull the tape out it went "wing" because it felt so cheap.
That brought back a lot of memories! I lived through the revolution. I was a teenager to early 20's during the rise and rule of the 8-track and my father was a early convert to the medium. I went through after-market players, to built-in types, and through home recorder/players. Thanks for the nice episode.
I had a Pioneer 8-Track player in my 1968 Mercury Montego MX station wagon. I had quite a selection of 8-Track tapes too. To this day, I have no idea what happened to my tape collection. Of course, once the cassette player was introduced, that was the end of the 8-Track.
My first stereo (a Soundesign unit - there's a name you rarely hear nowadays) had an 8-track player/recorder in it; I used to record LPs (sometimes a whole LP, sometimes specific songs) onto 8-tracks I could then play in my car or at home when I felt like listening to a mix. The thing I remember about 8-tracks is that from a physical design point of view, after many playings one of two things had to happen: (1) the tape had to stretch, thus affecting (negatively) the sound, and/or (2) the tape had to break. The reason being that as the spool of tape spun to let out tape from the spindle, it was taking up more tape on the outer edge of the wound tape with each revolution. I think the record companies would wind them loosely so as to lengthen the time before that would happen, but if played enough times the stretch and/or break would occur. I fixed a number of 8-tracks where the tape had broken by opening them up, splicing the tape, and reassembling the case. (My splice was really high-tech: scotch tape on the back side of the 8-track tape where it was broken... LOL).
I had a Soundesign as well in 1972.
YES! 8Tracks are still around! I have three decks in my apartment. THANK YOU for this video. You and TECHMOAN could team up!
😎 I figured Techmoan would be mentioned here! Among other things, he does videos about old audio formats and players/recorders, including some _extremely_ obscure ones.
Techmoan just did a video about an early Panasonic portable 8-track player, and its history.
Coincidence? 🤔
Came in here for this... Great timing that they both put out videos in the same topic, seemingly unaware of the other's... Techmoan went into how Japan was basically the only other country to widely adopt 8 track, but not in cars, for karaoke 🎤
What? And why? The sound is equivalent to AM and songs fade out halfway through?
@@alfredodedarcProbably for nostalgic purposes, kind of like how vinyl is popular now. Both mediums sound like crap to me. 😂😂
Bill Leer is worth an episode himself. Had his hands in a lot of things.
Lear
Bill Lear and friend Elmer Wavering of Quincy, Illinois developed a car radio just for their own entertainment . Lear was from nearby Hannibal MO. The two approached Paul Galvin with the concept. Wavering remained with Galvin and eventually became president of Motorola. When you listen to radio in your car today, chances are the radio broadcast equipment was developed in Quincy Illinois. In the early years of radio the cost to enter the manufacturing side of the radio business was relatively low. Few big companies initially saw radio broadcasting as anything than a fad
@@timothykeith1367 Motorola deserves a huge place in history for doing things nobody else even thought of, and yet once it had been invented, nobody could imagine not having.
I read on some website that he tried developing an endless loop wire recorder, don't know how true that is though.
absolutely. Bill Lear could comprise an entire series. I have a forward nose hatch cover hanging in my shop from a 23 that was born in the same time frame i was. 😁
My first experience with 8-track tape was riding with a neighbor to church in his Cadillac, listening to Johnny Cash. It was a marvel to hear stereo music for the 1st time… in an automobile!
Bonus: There were also 4-Channel Quadraphonic 8 track tapes. This was the ULTIMATE car audio experience. There were FOUR different sources of music for the same musical piece. This did mean that there were 1/2 as many songs/selections on a single 8-track tape…but it was worth it!!
I had one, they were great!
And before the 4 track there was morello record player
When you said "Fidelipak", my ears perked up. Yes, I remember the old gray-bottom, clear-top "carts" we used in radio stations. For me, it was the late 70's when I first got to use "carts" and I immediately loved them. Later, there were Audiopak carts, and 3M came out with a padless cart. When I went to a station that used stereo carts, I thought I'd arrived in heaven. And, the first time I used an ITC 99-B cart recorder, it was orgasmic. Funny thing is, I never got into 8-track tapes. Some in my family did, but I didn't. Still, a cool idea. Thanks for the memories.
There was an episode of the old Mission Impossible where Peter Graves gets into a car, puts a cart in a mobile player, and listens to his instructions. I always wondered if there was such a thing as a mobile cart deck.
65-70 were my college years, I bought 65 Mustang in 68, 4speed, V8, AM radio. The first thing added was a FM converter, FM was the place to get new music and they could play the whole song and it sounded so good. Cassettes, 8 track, CD, etc came later.
I had a FM converter until I upgraded to a am fm 8 track.
Was that like that joke/not joke in the Movie "Auto Focus" (about pervert Bob Crane from Hogan's Heroes and how it just about ruined his career?)...
Anyway, his buddy with the cameras shows his new car and brags about 8 watts per channel. I almost broke my neck laughing about that...lol
A bit of terminology that deserves to be remembered: Though we commonly refer to albums by their format (record, tape, CD) an album is the work of the artist, usually in a collection, sometimes meant to be played intact. Thus, an album is not just a vinyl record. It is the work of the artist whether it be on record, tape, CD, or other media - it's still an album, regardless of media.
The original albums were a collection of 78 rpm discs, in a bound book-like cover with record sleeves, like pages.
@@colonialstraits1069 I remember those!
@T Raybern that’s what 45s we’re for.
I still say "album" to refer to a collection of music released together. I'm glad that I am being accurate as opposed to quaint.
@traybernThe Truth: “Greatist Hits” albums nullify your scam theory. So do some all-time classic studio albums that were all killer and no filler. But I agree, the earlier albums of the 60s weren’t as consistent quality-wise.
I'm a car buff, and yesterday I was taken aback by a beautiful classic convertible I'd never seen before. I chased it down and took pics and asked the owner what it was.
A Muntz Roadjet.
And today, this video featuring Muntz.
What a cool world.
I have a cool table model BEST ONE 8 TRACK tape player, I thoroughly enjoy listening to.. Lots of cool mixed genre stuff, but my favorite tape is Led Zeppelin., fifty year old tape that has moved someone with a good head many miles down the highway. I found my unit and tapes in the attic of a house I bought 12 years ago. It takes me back to 1969, when I bought my first 8 track portable player.
I really liked the "you shove it in and ya pull it out" phrase, but one thing left out was if you were lucky all the tape would come out with it.
Great review. Brings back good memories.
You have a great way of telling these stories. Your story is “History that deserves to be remembered!” Best of luck, to you!
Before the end of 8 track I bought a Quadraphonic 8 Track system for my car. For youngsters out there, that means 4 channels instead of 2. It worked great! Made by Motorola, of course. It still works perfectly.
One of the many problems with 8 track was the tendency of the little conductive strip that triggered the switching to the next track, to fall off and get caught inside the machine. I repaired many machines with that problem. And the fact that the tape was pulled from the center of a spool of tape meant that it was constantly rubbing against itself. That wear would degrade the quality of sound and put oxide dust inside of the player. But for a time, if you had an 8 track in your car, you were top cock on the block!
I installed a Quad deck in my 1970 Mustang Mach 1 (in about 1977) and it was great. It had separate volume controls for each channel going through 4 speakers and depending on how the tape was recorded you could often turn off the front 2 channels (speakers) and listen to just the vocals through the back 2 channels (speakers) essentially making the song a cappella which really let you know how good the singers were! The vocals from the group "Bread" were some of the best by far.
A friend had one. The only quad tape he could find in stores around us was by Bread.
@@kevinkennedy7237 A 1970 Mach 1! I’m very jealous! Mine has front/rear and left/right. Back in the 70’s I wanted a Pyle-driver amp/speaker setup and couldn’t afford it.🤣 I didn’t know a lot about audio stuff back then and didn’t realize that that amp used transformer coupling to get it’s high power output. Eventually, when I got a good job, my friend sold me a Pioneer system with two GM-120 amps. That was outrageous power in those days! But by then I had switched to a Pioneer cassette deck with Dolby and a metal tape mode. It had the Supertuner system with remote control. But I never threw away my Motorola 8 track player. Quad tapes are still found on eBay. The quad demo tapes are incredible! Thanks for the memories!😊
Did any of you have Black Sabbath - Paranoid Quadraphonic Mix? People say 8 track sound quality was bad, is it true?
@@jrgenholteng1529I didn’t have those tapes. The quality wasn’t great. And as time went by, it got poorer as the oxide wore off. At the time we thought it was great. Then we got cassette tapes, which were an improvement. Then Dolby noise reduction came out and I really loved that. But for the time, 8-track seemed great!
I remember my parents buying a Quadrophonic stereo in 1971. It had a built in 8-track player and the sample they gave us was "Big Band Moog". I will never forget that music! Later my dad added an 8-track player to his custom 1976 GMC van. And then when I got my first car at 16, the first thing I did was slap an 8-track player in it. My car was littered with 8-track cartridges, on the seats and under the seats. Those were some great years!!
A little correction: while FM car radios were first introduced in the 1950s, they didn't become commonplace until the 1970s. Even as late as 1990, you could still get some General Motors and Ford vehicles with an AM-only radio! In the late '60s and early '70s, quite a few car radios had a stereo 8-track player, but only an AM radio tuner -- no FM yet.
My '71 Cougar and my brother's '73 Mach 1 came with factory AM/8-Track radios. It made no sense but that's what Ford did.
I daily a 72 Coronet with an AM radio and an 8 track player that was installed at Kmart.
Yes, the Danforth Ave. used car salesmen called them AM/AM radios...
Remember FM converters in the mid 70’s?
Because GM was ran by nitwits. They were still putting in cassette players well into the 2000's as well. Because they'd order thousands of units and had a huge backstock they had to get rid of. So they'd stick out of date tech nobody wanted into their cars.
I was born in 79, and my parent's had an old massive piece of furniture that had huge top doors you'd lift up to reveal an 8 track player on one side, and a record player on the other. We had Kenny Rogers 8 tracks, Black sabbath, Steppenwolf, The Who etc. It was what lead to me becoming a pro drummer.
When I was young and in high school, I used to babysit. One of the parents had the Beatles Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on 8 track. I spent the whole time listening to this tape. If I started to feel sleepy the tape changing channels would startle me awake. Those were some good times.
My dad had a home 8-track player that he had bought before I was even born (mid 1970s.) Since my dad had a respectable library of 8-track cartridges, he would play them on a fairly regular basis throughout the 80s and 90s, eventually even allowing me to play the classic audio device when he felt assured that I wouldn't wreck it, lol. He did refrain from playing his 8-track as the years got on due to the noted risks associated with the aging device. For the most part, he kept his 8-track and cartridges for reasons of nostalgia.
Oh wow … my first exposure to 8-tracks was from my step father in 1974. Pink Floyd Meddle and Dark Side of the Moon, Beatles, Deep Purple, America GH, among others were my earlier intro to great rock music at 5 yo.
My DAD had a 68 Chevy Chevelle with an 8 track player. I was just a boy of 5 or 6 when I start to form life long memories and music started to touch my soul. I loved that feeling of almost flying while listening to Pink Floyd or something cool like that loud in the back seat with the windows down at night. Music and Cars go together like good stories and Pirates. Thank you History Guy your videos are the best.
I added an 8-Track player and FM converter to my first car in 1977, along with another iconic staple from the post “Smokey & the Bandit” era, a CB Radio. Of course, my back seat was full of those huge 8-Track tape storage cases.
I didn’t feel old until you said your first memory of the 8-Track was in your MOM’s car.
I served on a submarine and when the Sony Walkman came out I would buy albums, copy them to cassettes and would take about 100 on each patrol.
I remember when the rock band KISS was on 8-Tracks. Life was simple and fun during those times, I would go back to that era if there was a time machine..
Because the period between 64-84 was the summer of our generation and when the illusion of freedom was at it's highest. Every generation is made of 4 turnings or cycles or seasons where spring and summer are all about growth and prosperity and fun and fall and winter are about receding falling and death. All goods things must come to an end they say and now we are the end. Show is over say good bye.
My first rock album was a Kiss album (their first self titled album) my mom got for one Christmas. It was a two 8-track cassette set that she purchased to go along with the turn table, cassette, radio player my father got for me that same Christmas.
Born in 75. First car was a 79 olds. First 8 track from a yard sale was “ days of the future passed” by the moodies.
Wonderful!!! A Moodies fan!!👏👏👏❤️❤️
Awesome, another 8 track and Moody Blues fan still today. Moodies were so unique 👍👍👍
@@wendellkelley3890 Yes they were Windell!!!! Very Cool!!! Should have been in the Rock and Roll HOF a year or two after the Beatles and Stones, not decades after!!😡😡😡😡
I had a stereo in 1990 which had an 8-track tape deck, and I sold it to a very appreciative SGM as I was PCSing.
I remember me and Dad, riding in his '66 Chevy, which had a "four" track tape player under the dash, with it's pop-up pinch roller, that could be seen through the clear 4 track cartridges. Thanks History Guy, for the memories, that should be remembered.
In my circle of friends a buddy was first to buy a 4-Track, a few months later I bought a 8-Track. By time rock got a foot in door on FM(1973-ish) I'd mostly lost interest in 8-Track. FM really took off when a 100,000 watt rock outlet signed on.
Did you grow up around Elgin?
Update , a recent conversation with a likewise car nut,
Me) yes there’s such a thing as a 4 track tape player .
Him) No, there’s no such thing , never seen or heard of it !
Later I, I did a search, found one for sale , sent him a link ,
( only so he could see one)
He was so fascinated with it’s unique design, he bought it for a hundred bucks, which included four playable 4 track cartridges.
He loves it but , hates Me,
“cause I was right 😂
I'd first heard "Freebird" from the album "One More From The Road" by Lynyrd Skynyrd on 8-track...so when I finally listened to the vinyl album...I was surprised it didn't fade out, click onto the next track, and fade in (slightly before the previous fade out on the previous track) and continue to the end. It was a beautiful medium, the 8-track tape. I learned at an early age how to repair the tape if it got messed up (I was the 'go-to' kid in my family for that!). This video brought back so many wonderful memories, strolling across open fields, at night, playing Steve Miller's Greatest Hits, and the latest albums by Billy Joel and the Eagles....good times! Great video! Thanks for bringing up that bit of nostalgia!
my mom had told me all the time as a kid that an 8-track player was one of her favorite christmas gifts that she ever received and she listened to Bruce Springsteen the whole drive to her dad's family's place (from southern FL to GA). i began collecting them myself around the age 15/16 after my mom's nostalgia got me interested and i'm 24 now
My grandparents’ 1970 Ford Mach I GT w/351 Cleveland, had factory a/c and an 8-track player installed.. they had a couple adapter carts that remained in the car, one being an FM band tuner, since the stock radio even in ‘70 was only AM &, an adapter cart to play compact cassette tapes IN THE 8-track player! Years later, @ 1994-ish, I scored an all chrome Pioneer/Craig 4 & 8 track under-dash mounted player that I had installed in my 1971 Ford Torino Ranchero GT w/351 Cleveland… mounted it adjacent too my Citizen Band radio… My Grandparents sold their ‘70 Mach I @ ‘94 to, in my Grandma’s words, “prevent any family fighting over who gets to inherit that car!” I saved and continued using those adapter carts for my car 4-8 track deck. Worked great for many years following, without issues
The History Guy has an amazing ability to pull you in and take you for a ride. Great storytelling
Agreed; I'm glad that John Daly hasn't seen fit to mock his choice of tie.
When I was in Vietnam, joined Columbia - they GAVE you an eight track player with speakers; yo just had to keep paying for the tapes they sent you every month. Also, FYI, there was an adapter for 4-tracks that allowed you to play them on an 8-track.
Cool Thanks for your service.
I still play these tapes to this very day...
Love it 😍
I was born in 1959 and ... yeesh, like EVERYTHING post-LP audio seems to have happened in my lifetime!
Our vocation agriculture instructor in high school each year took the junior class to Mexico over the summer. We took the back seats out of a 64 passenger bus and put mattresses on the floor. For our trip my friend put a Craig Power Play floor mount 8 track in with 3 ft tall home speakers. We listened to The Eagle’s Hotel California amongst other hits all the way down and back. Best times ever. The 70’s were the best times ever.
When I was 12 years old in 1985 I received a stereo component for Christmas. It had AM/FM radio, twin cassette decks phonograph on top, and right smack in the middle was an 8 track deck. I later found one of my Dad's old 8 tracks, it turned out to be a female X- rated comedian. The next year I received a High tech CD player component. So at 1 time I had LP records, 8 tracks, cassettes, and a few CD's at the same time. Thing about 8 track is that the tracks were not big enough to contain an entire song, so you'd be rocking along and suddenly the song would stop, there'd be a loud "Click-Snap" sound from the deck and a second later the song would resume.
Look at the stupidity for FreeBird on cassette. It cuts off halfway through.
Must've been a rather long song. I had a few cartridges in which someone couldn't figure out the optimal way to get all the songs on an album organized into four separate programs of reasonably similar length, and there'd be one song cut in middle that way. Annoying.
When I use to work at the only black station in Nevada I would repair 8 Tracks cassettes and real to real. I recently made a couple mix tapes within the last 5 years!
What was the station? I love the historical African American aspect of vegas history. Quite sad to see the Moulin Rouge is completely gone now.
Being born in 1992 in Europe I never knew about the format. I knew cassettes and fiddled with them a lot. in 2013 I made analog media my hobby (playing, recording and fixing them), in 2017 I was given an 8-track recorder coupled with a few carts and fell in love with them! They are durable, easy to use, have long play times without having to flip them for side B. And the sound quality can live up if the cartridges are in good shape (though they usually fall behind a bit compared to other analog media).
I also really like fixing them up, the carts and machines are easy to work on and the prerecorded catalog is huge even though I also record my own tapes.
Nowadays they are my favorite type of physical media to work and play with. I continue to keep the media alive and rockin', showing them to my friends whom continue to tell the story to their friends and so on.
Thanks for this very interesting video History Guy! This one (also) deserves a big thumps up :)
I certainly did know about 4-track tape recorders--though for the home, not for the car. My family had a Wollensak 1580 4-track tape recorder. It used tubes, not transistors, and was heavy as hell. But it had some nice features for the day, such as letting you do what we now call karaoke: live voice with a microphone along with taped music.
I was born after the 8 Track era. However, the first car I bought was a 1977 Ford Maverick. I loved listening to my 8 track and bought several for probably the original price. I was very sad when I had to sell her.
Saved my parents foldable 8 track player for inside, plus several tapes that still work. Tom T Hall, Charlie Pride, star wars soundtrack (original of course) and several others. ♥️
I thought I had it all with my factory 8-track player inside my 1976 El Camino! But within a handful of years, I was mixing my own cassette tapes onto high-quality Maxell tape. By the time 1986 arrived, I was already considering a new technology called "compact disks!" Those were the days! Thanks History Guy!
I owned a 77 Lincoln Town car that had a factory 8 track tape player. Apparently 8 tracks were still in use in 1977.
I heard some of my favorite music for the first time on an 8 track tape, and still think of that time when I hear the same music today. Not having a factory FM radio in my '67 Mustang, my world of driving changed when I installed an 8 track player under the dash along with two 5 1/4 inch speakers in the doors. Then I found the most amazing invention: a stereo FM radio receiver in the shape of an 8 track cartridge that plugged into the 8 track player and, after hooking up my antenna to it via an adapter, had stereo FM radio in my Stang. Those were the days!
I was born in 1988, and I remember 8-track tapes. My Mom had an old station wagon with an 8-track tape player, and we would always get 8-track tapes from the Half-Price Bookstore. So at least some people with old cars that still had the decks were still buying used tapes, and using them into the early 1990s. Incidentally, our last car with a cassette deck became our reason for doing the same with cassette tapes in the era of the CD. For a while, we were buying CDs for use at home, and recording the music onto cassette tapes so we could play them in the car. I always half-wondered as I was doing that, if people did the same thing with vinyl records back in the day, and now watching this video confirms they did. I still prefer CDs over digital music, though... because I can still rip the CDs if I want a digital copy, but I still have a case to display and a copy that doesn't need to be backed up on the cloud somewhere. I don't like not having a copy to hold in my hands if I am going to pay real money.
I remember when I was real young in the late '70s my parents having an 8-track player.
Me too; I know they had a ton because my parents loved music but the two I specifically remember were Freddie Fender and Jackson Browne lol
By the early 1980’s, I had started working for Sony’s Tape Division. We sold only a small amount of blank 8-track tapes, but based on sales forecasts, I ordered more blank 8 tracks. My first decision was a disaster!
My parents were still thrilled with the new fangled AM-FM-Stereo radio in their 1963 Bonneville, I don"t think they ever had any tape players in their cars until AM-FM-Cassettes became standard.
I was in a used reclrd store yesterday. They had a few 8-TRACKS for sale ( Oh, the horror!)
Thank god for the Phillips company who invented the Cassette!
The cassette was originally intended for office dictation purposes and wasn't really intended as a high fidelity audio format, but advances in tape head technology (by companies such as Nakamichi and even Voice of Music), along with Dolby noise reduction, allowed cassettes to become a hifi music format ---- assuming you made your own recordings at home with a good quality deck and source, using better quality tape than that used for record-company issued, mass- market pre-recorded cassettes, which were duplicated at high speed and not in real time. usedreproduction from cassette
I remember 8-track players very well. My Dad had one in his '73 El Camino, we had one in our living room console TV/turntable/8-track, and my brother's and I had our own players in our rooms. I have fond memories of listening to Sonny & Cher, the Grateful Dead, Deep Purple, KISS, etc on 8-track.
I still own my Muntz blue light 4track/ 8track tape player!!!!my dad had a few 4 tracks left over,,,,but I took it over and have dozens of 8tracks!!!
I LOVE this channel! 8 tracks were groovy...in the day, I had tones of them in my 1976 mustang II
It’s fascinating to realize that I lived through this period of music history. Thank you for showcasing these technologies.
We had an 8-Track in my dad's car (I believe that was the Ford Fiesta; it was after market) and added to our house stereo. The latter could record, so we recorded our choice Christmas albums. There were one or two songs which had the track change in the middle of them that we always laughed at....it was like a hiccup. 😊
By the time I had a car in the early seventies we were already into cassette players, but my next door neighbour who was several years older had an eight track player. I remember listening to Alice Cooper's Billion Dollar Babies album in his car.
I had a 4-track player. The roller engaged by pulling a knob out. I bypassed 8 tracks, went to cassettes. My folks, in their 90s, still listen to their 8-track home player.
The History Guy reminded me of warm summer evenings, driving through the hills of southern Indiana heading back to college from my hometown with the windows down and the 8-track playing. I miss the ruffled shirts along with the bell-bottoms.
Remember "Loctal" tubes? They were used in car radios. The tube base was similar to that of the Octal, but the center post had an indentation that snapped into a retaining clip in the socket, which securely held the tube, so it wouldn't work loose when the car went over a rough road.
I loved installing one myself in my first old car, what an upgrade over the Delco AM radio! And then junking the 8 track player a couple of years later for a cassette FM stereo unit. My peeve with 8 tracks was when switching tracks it would start in the middle of a song. if you were content to just pop it in and let it play all the way through the tracks, it was okay.
Oh gods, that nostalgia bug bites hard. I remember crusing up over the Grapevine and heading down into LA late at night, windows down, 8-track of UFO or Ronny James Dio blasting as loud as my old speakers would go.
UFO 👍
Who knew UFOs used 8-tracks. So much for advanced races. 🤔🎵
Love UFO!
Growing up in Phoenix you had to be real careful. Bring your eight tracks inside. Don't leave them in the car or they will melt. I did have an eight track tape that I had to take apart and repair splice several times. It was possible you could do it if you're careful. You heard the music start to flutter better pull the tape out real quick because it was balling up inside your player, You didn't have to pull the cartridge apart to get the tape back in if the tape wasn't damaged too bad. Holding the cartridge facing you give a quick tug on the left side of the tape. It will come down slightly and then it will suck the tape back up inside the cartridge. My brother worked at a radio station and they had what they called carts. It was a similar to the 8-track. And they put commercials on it , single track. There was also another similar cartridge for film we used to get while in school and watch various short flicks, works the same way as the eight-track, we called it a floop. Film Loop.
Jeez - I remember my old man taking me into a car showroom in the 1960's where this huge gorgeous vehicle like a white airplane sat in splendid isolation. It was a Chevrolet Impala. The beast was a convertible and I never saw so much chrome. It had an utterly miraculous electric hood, and if that wasn't enough there was a 45rpm-single record player built into the dash. How on earth such a road-angel ever found its way to the backwaters of Hull, Yorkshire, England, I cannot imagine, but it seemed that anything might be possible - even one day walking on the moon. From that day on, I understood (or thought I did) what The Beach Boys were singing about with their great motorcar melodies. I missed out on 8-tracks (though I saw them often enough). And when I got my own car, had a radio-cassette. Back in about 2001, I got hold of a Benelli Adiva scooter, which had a radio cassette as an optional extra, and that coped pretty well with pot-holes. But then, I upgraded to radio CD and that couldn't cope half so well. However, a digital plug-in soon solved that. I'll add this: in the late 1970's/early 1980's I had a Sony Walkman radio cassette, it was an expensive model and I have never heard such miraculous stereo-imaging ever - before or since on ANY system...
While I "grew up" after the 8 track had lost it's popularity, I still remember them being played and the big boxes of them that people had. This was a pretty cool video, thank you for making it. I love almost everything you do on this channel, but these off beat ones, that very few other history podcasters would do, are some of my favorites. Keep up the good work my friend.
Rush 2112 on 8 track lol
When I graduated from high school, I used the money from my graduation gifts to put an 8-track Quadraphonic tape deck in my car. It was wonderful. I was so disappointed when Quad didn't really catch on.
Still into quad
We have at least two of those. Betamax was WAY better than VHS, as was laserdisc. Either were extremely impressive (not cheap) for the day.
@@windsofmarchjourneyperrytr2823 selectavision was better than vhs too
@@zeusapollo8688 It was very close. Booth had around 240 lines resolution. VCRs had the killer app being recorders. That and the neighborhood video store killed Selectavision before it even got started.
My Dad used to sell bootleg 8-Track tapes in the package store him and my mom owned. $2.00 in the 70's. On some you could see you ever he bought them from had old labels under the new white generic, having taped over other tapes.
My Granddad Robert Howard Lane came home from Germany after WWII and worked with his Father in construction. Great Granddad Howard owned a machine that manufactured concrete blocks.
While working on a scaffold, it collapsed and he became paralyzed from the waist down.
While recovering he took mail order lessons on radio and television repair.
Once he became mobile driving his station wagon with the aid of a yard stick, he opened his own business Lane's radio & television sales & service. He also partnered with Bud Harrison selling television towers while Bud handled installation.
Before 8 tracks became available in home stereos he built a portable 8 track player for my Mother that she could plug in to a 110 outlet anywhere she wanted to go.
Thank you for sharing this bit of history.
Granddad would have loved your channel.
With every new innovation in broadcast technology I see, I always wish he could be here to see it too.
He lived a good life despite being paralyzed for 61 of his 89 years.
My brother was 5 years older than me. He had a nice collection of 8 track tapes. I got into cassettes based on the streams of 8 track tapes along the highways by frustrated drivers when their tapes got unwound in their players. I liked buying lp’s and recording them onto cassettes for use in my car.
Dad's chevelle had an add on 8 track player under the dash. my earliest memories are of Jamin too zz top's cheap sunglasses.
I was listening to "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" on the radio the other day. I rolled the windows down because I had mothballs under the hood to keep the mice out and the smell permeates through the passenger compartment if you put the AC on. I hadn't heard Meatloaf sound so right since I was a teenage on a hot summer night and the beach was burning.
we still have that 8 track tape lol
Bat Out Of Hell was one of the first carts I owned.
My dad was a big music collector and was in his 20s during the heyday of 8-track, so he would have been the prime demo. He's still got tons of records and cassettes, but never owned any 8-tracks.
At 15:38, they show the tape recorder I received for Christmas in 1978. It took me most of my life to find a photo of this online, and lo and behold here we are with this video footage. Needless to say that main knob broke and made the unit pretty much useless after that in just four short months.
You brought back many happy memories of the music format of my youth. I began installing car radios, with and without 8 track players, when I was 12 years old. I would take non-working decks and "Frankenstein" them together, to install in my parent's 1970 VW van. When I began to drive, I had bought a Sears, under-dash, FM radio/8track player, and hooked 8 speakers, that I had pulled from some home stereos, inside my car. I have some major hearing loss, now that I'm in my 60s, but I have no regrets, and I chuckle now, everytime I hear someone's car thumping away, while sitting in traffic. Oh, and I did fix a 4 track home player for a family friend. Unfortunately, the only 4 track tape that they had was of Leonard Nimoy.😮 Thank you for helping reminisce all those memories of my youth.😊
I loved this episode of #TheHistoryGuy! I remember wearing out multiple 8 track tapes on my parent’s hifi system when I was younger. I even figured out how to wedge a match book between the 8 track and the opening if it was too loose. I think it is amazing that I have lived in an era when so many things have advanced so quickly. 78s to Spotify in 6 decades.
I had an 8-track installed in my '72 Plymouth valiant. I had a cartridge with Grand Funk's "I'm You Captain", a song that ran about 10 minutes. Halfway through the song the tape clicked to the next track to play the second half of the song. A tape with the band Fever Tree was given to me when I bought the 8-track player. It seems to me the name brand on the player was Majestic, but I find no indication of such a machine on a Google search.
I bought a Craig brand 8 track in the spring of 1968 and installed it in my 1964 Plymouth Barracuda. Everyone enjoyed cruising with me because of the music. But Friday and Saturday nights the tape player would be shut off and the am radio tuned into the Might ten ninety, Little Rock, Arkansas to listen to Clyde Clifford's Beaker Street. Which sounded good because of a Motorola reverb unit. Yes, I spent money on music instead of racing parts! Oh the memories that this episode brought back!
My dad had 8-track players in his car and garage while I was growing up. Probably long after cassettes were gaining momentum, but that’s what we had. I still remember the song breaks in Eagles greatest hits.
I always wondered what an "8-track" was when I, as a European, watched the "Simspons" and when Homer drove the family car, they'd show the car stereo. "8-Track. Hifi" and I was like "What is that???!"
Never really took off here in the UK, can only remember seeing one during my mispent youth in the seventies.
You're right, they never were really big over here.