What's in your 8-track?

[Tailgate]

Actually, Steppinwolf or The Animals would most likely be found in mine... remember the old Muntz 4-tracks? When 8-tracks came out someone came up with an adapter for the 4 track hole so an 8-track machine could play them.. PITA...

[Big_Hitter]

Europe '72


I still have my 8-track deck from HS (I used to record my vinyl onto 8-tracks with it). Don't know if it still works tho.

[golfnut]

Back in the day, it was either Get your Yas Yas Out or Live at Leeds in my pioneer 8 track which was in my vw bug.

[boog]

Cruisin' in my Pinto in high school listening to the Allman Brothers Band "Brothers and Sisters"

[HFWR]

When I "came of age" in September of 1970, I inherited a player similar to this in our '62 Chevy.

Most notable, as well as most likely to be played, were Woodstock, Aqualung, Mountain Climbing, 4-Way Street, Steppenwolf Live, GFR Live, etc.

[Lakewood90712]

The Doors , Cream, Luvin Spoonful. Going to get me one of those new fanged K-sette players and an fm some day.

[MichaelB]

My 8-track had Led Zeppelin, Ten Years After, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, Jethro Tull, Janis Joplin, Steppenwolf and Santana. I still remember a business that had a set-up in the store and let you record your own tape. Their intent was to avoid copyright issues by "renting" everything to the user, who pushed all the buttons. They went out of business pretty quickly, but I was able to build a nice collection in the meantime.

The whole collection was ripped off from my dorm room freshman year.

[DUFUS]

My player (brand: Juliette ) and tapes are long gone, but I still remember the four that I had:
Aerosmith Rocks
Lynyrd Skynyrd Street Survivors
Heart Little Queen
Foghat Fool for the City

70's FTW!!!

[grasshopper]

It was a double album of Jefferson Airplane Bathing at Baxters/Crown of creation. I had a portable picnic deck that ran on 12v, 110 or batteries. We would be out at the lake listening to tunes, and after about 4 hours and 4 dobies the batteries would wear out and things got a bit slower, hey but who could tell.

[HFWR]

Quote:

Originally Posted by MichaelB My 8-track had Led Zeppelin, Ten Years After, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, Jethro Tull, Janis Joplin, Steppenwolf and Santana. I still remember a business that had a set-up in the store and let you record your own tape. Their intent was to avoid copyright issues by "renting" everything to the user, who pushed all the buttons. They went out of business pretty quickly, but I was able to build a nice collection in the meantime.

Forgot Santana, first three albums.

Quote:

The whole collection was ripped off from my dorm room freshman year.

Forget the year, but when I first bought a cassette player, all my eight tracks were dumped into the trash...

[Sarah in SC]

The last 8-track I played was the Commodores, in my '70 Caddy convertible (bought in 2000). Since then, I cleaned out all the 8-tracks and the cassettes. None would play any more, just too distorted. I still have lots of albums, though!

[Beldar]

I remember how all of that tape used to decorate the shoulders of America's highways and byways

I contributed many a time....

Now its the Circle-K plastic bag.


_B

[Onward]

Caught just the tail end of the 8-track party but still got a lot of mileage out of my Three Dog Night and Boston 8-tracks.

[6miths]

The soundtrack for 'American Graffiti'.

[ronin]

I had an 8 track recorder that was the bomb. Got it in a trade for mota. I loved Electric Flag, especially Killing Floor and Grass Roots Midnight Confession which was written by dudes in my high school band that had a group called the Evergreen Blues. They performed it an assembly. We were all in the jazz band together. I still expect the long jams to stop and click in the middle while the track changes when I hear some old stuff.

[Onward]

The later 8-track players had a feature that could skip individual songs by seeking to the silence at the end of the song.

I don't remember cassette players ever doing that?

[Tailgate]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ronin I had an 8 track recorder that was the bomb. Got it in a trade for mota. I loved Electric Flag, especially Killing Floor and Grass Roots Midnight Confession which was written by dudes in my high school band that had a group called the Evergreen Blues. They performed it an assembly. We were all in the jazz band together. I still expect the long jams to stop and click in the middle while the track changes when I hear some old stuff.

wow...brings back memories...Grass Roots were one of my long forgotten favorites....and I remember the clicks!

[jimbee]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ronin I had an 8 track recorder that was the bomb. Got it in a trade for mota. I loved Electric Flag, especially Killing Floor and Grass Roots Midnight Confession which was written by dudes in my high school band that had a group called the Evergreen Blues. They performed it an assembly. We were all in the jazz band together. I still expect the long jams to stop and click in the middle while the track changes when I hear some old stuff.

Yikes, the Grass Roots practically cloned the sound of the original.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YydwL0kl_5o

[HFWR]

Amusing 8-track anecdote:

Shortly after I was mistakenly allowed to drive legally, our 62 Chevy Belair, the family's second car, was swapped for a 66 Beetle, which had a 6-volt electrical system. To facilitate using the already-in-hand (under dash?) 8-track player, I bought an adapter to convert the voltage. Being a "passive" convertor, it doubled the voltage by halving the current.

So, the player did just fine, but unless the car/engine was cranking at a pretty good clip, there wasn't enough current to actuate the solenoid that moved the tape heads to the next track. This meant that, while sitting, watching the local cruisers go by (small town USA...), I either had to listen to the same track over and over (and over), or else crank up the engine, and rev it until there was enough "juice" to change the track...


Sent from my iCouch using Early Retirement Forum

[ERD50]

Quote:

Originally Posted by HFWR Amusing 8-track anecdote: Shortly after I was mistakenly allowed to drive legally, our 62 Chevy Belair, the family's second car, was swapped for a 66 Beetle, which had a 6-volt electrical system. To facilitate using the already-in-hand (under dash?) 8-track player, I bought an adapter to convert the voltage. Being a "passive" convertor, it doubled the voltage by halving the current. So, the player did just fine, but unless the car/engine was cranking at a pretty good clip, there wasn't enough current to actuate the solenoid that moved the tape heads to the next track. This meant that, while sitting, watching the local cruisers go by (small town USA...), I either had to listen to the same track over and over (and over), or else crank up the engine, and rev it until there was enough "juice" to change the track...

Ahhh, modern technology.

I managed to never own an eight track. I think I had just enough mechanical awareness at the time, to realize that pulling a fragile tape from the center of a reel, and having it roll back to the outside (which meant all those layers had to rub against each other as they moved from outer to inner layers), and all the twisting to get that tape out and to the tape head just could not be reliable (as evidenced by those piles of tape on the side of the road - something our kids would have no idea of, and I'd forgotten about).

And are people aware, Bill Lear (of Lear Jet fame) was the inventor of that 8-track (though other similar tape cartridges pre-dated it)? But Bill got the auto companies to pick up his design, so that was a major acceptance factor.

I went back and read up on them, and in addition to those obvious mechanical mobius-strip-like issues, the head alignment, critical to fidelity, was compromised, as the heads had to be shifted to get those 8 tracks of sound (4 stereo?). Really not good for the sound quality.

I did have an early, cheap reel-to-reel. No capstan, the tape speed would increase as the take up reel filled - which was OK as long as you played it back w/o altering the tape. Impossible to edit though, moving a slice of tape from the beginning to later in the tape would have it playing back faster than it was recorded.

The hi-fi cassette tape decks, with advanced dolby/dbx were quite good though. And yes, they did have a 'next track seek' function (asked about in an earlier post). IIRC, it ran in fast forward with the pressure pad pulled back from the head, just the tape tension kept the tape in loose contact with the head to avoid wear. The audio would be muted (or severely attenuated) in the listening path, but the circuits would detect the silence between tracks, and use that as the identifier.

I was always peeved that they designed the cassette with 1/8" tape. Using 1/4" tape would have made it easier to get much better fidelity, and an extra 1/8" on that housing wouldn't even be that noticeable. It still fit in a shirt pocket, and that was a big deal.

The present digital systems, with flash memory or hard drive make it hard for me to imagine how much better things could get. Sure, flash will get cheap enough that we won't need those mechanical whirrrr-ry physical hard drive thingies, but other than capacity and $ what could be better? Could we have imagined that in the mid 1960's? Can we imagine what will be available in the mid 2060's? Or at least in our lifetimes yet?

-ERD50