Stereo 8?

BAH! I'm a niche-niche collector, I go for the quadraphonic 8-tracks.

They should do a match book sollection there as well.

/you know, to wedge under the 8 track to keep it on the proper channel.

What is love
Baby don't hurt me

$5000? Really? Holy crap!

Where did I put my copy of John Denver's Greatest Hits...?

If we can get hipsters away from vinyl and onto 8 track, the world will be a better place.

Well. Now I know. That's a thing.

8-track was crap when it was brand new.

Sgygus: 8-track was crap when it was brand new.

I had exactly 2 8-track tapes. Boston's debut album and some "greatest of" '73 or '75 POS... both got exactly one listen. cutting songs in the middle to switch tracks still seems wrong all these years later. I got the vinyl Boston, and before long, the cover art vinyl. Wore out the plain black vinyl, the picture disk was played 3 times to record cassettes. One more play coming to record to mp3...

My first girlfriend in high school had an 8 track of Carlin's 7 Words. That was the first I'd heard it and I still remember listening to it while she and I had awkward teenage sex. In summation, 8 track was pretty damn cool.

There's also a Pinball museum here in Asbury Park, the difference being, is that you can actually *PLAY THEM!*

I bought a 65 Falcon (second owner) in 1992. One day I discovered the dash radio was one of those "hidden" 8-track players. Pushed the tuning dial and a tape popped out: Tommy by The Who.
If you're only going to have one tape that is a pretty good one to be stuck with.

/csb

2XL says, that was some very good button pushing!

/Still have all the tapes

This is like a long running Elephants turd

sno man: Sgygus: 8-track was crap when it was brand new.

I had exactly 2 8-track tapes. Boston's debut album and some "greatest of" '73 or '75 POS... both got exactly one listen. cutting songs in the middle to switch tracks still seems wrong all these years later. I got the vinyl Boston, and before long, the cover art vinyl. Wore out the plain black vinyl, the picture disk was played 3 times to record cassettes. One more play coming to record to mp3...

Rip it to 24-96 WAV and downsample as required for your portable player and you won't have to re-rip again in 5 years when Apple releases their SQSpod.

L.D. Ablo: If we can get hipsters away from vinyl and onto 8 track, the world will be a better place.

Fixed that for you.

Earguy: Stereo 8?

BAH! I'm a niche-niche collector, I go for the quadraphonic 8-tracks.

Those things always go for decent money on eBay.

Sgygus: 8-track was crap when it was brand new.


Maybe you had to be there?

The AM tube radios were nice... and then the FM radio was better... but then a 8 track that could fill a car with the sound it could put out on four speakers, there was nothing like it at the time. 

Of course some times when you were cruising looking for parties you would have to shut it off and roll down the windows to listen for the band.

A couple of years ago my kids bought me an 8 track player for my birthday. Then they rubbed it in by saying "Were's old technology, just like you Dad!"

There is some really strange stuff on 8 track. My personal favorite is a quadraphonic recording of string band music from the Mummers parade in Philadelphia with an opening greeting from Frank Rizzo himself inviting folks to his city for the Bicentennial!

My brother left a box of 20+ 8-track tapes when he moved out. I sold the box for 50¢.

/slashie
//slashies

I recently observed a very well-known (well, at least in the recording industry) engineer record a quite famous band using all digital equipment. He took certain tracks (snare, overheads, a doubled guitar track, a doubled vox track), run them out into a Panasonic 8-track deck and record them. Then he ripped the tracks back from the tape into the computer and doubled them up with the digital versions. Sounded brilliant. Compression, how does it work?

/still have my Ted Nugent and Foreigner 8-Tracks
//as well as the Huey Lewis And The News "Sports" album which was supposedly the last release from Chrysalis on 8-Track and possibly the last album ever released on the format
///have a car deck, but am not tearing the dashboard apart in my Prius

Approves

Why would an*K-CHOONK!*yone want to collect 8 tracks?

JonZoidberg: My first girlfriend in high school had an 8 track of Carlin's 7 Words. That was the first I'd heard it and I still remember listening to it while she and I had awkward teenage sex. In summation, 8 track was pretty damn cool.

You... had sex.... with George Carlin's voice as the moodsetter?

HotWingAgenda: JonZoidberg: My first girlfriend in high school had an 8 track of Carlin's 7 Words. That was the first I'd heard it and I still remember listening to it while she and I had awkward teenage sex. In summation, 8 track was pretty damn cool.

You... had sex.... with George Carlin's voice as the moodsetter?

I'll one up that.... Monty Python's Meaning of Life in the Background.

You know the track.

How I like my 8 track. Of course, I don't have a player.

"I prefer the superior fidelity of 8-track" -- Leisure Suit Larry

shanrick: What is love
Baby don't hurt me

Wait a minute, did you just grab my ass?

One of the few 8 tracks I owned:



Ended up in my truck as an ice-scraper.

Friend of mine brought over a girl from Art school whom he wanted to bang. During a conversation, she looked at me and said in a deadly serious voice, "I ONLY listen to vinyl. " I did not know how to respond.

Bathysphere: Friend of mine brought over a girl from Art school whom he wanted to bang. During a conversation, she looked at me and said in a deadly serious voice, "I ONLY listen to vinyl. " I did not know how to respond.

bought a '75 toronado in the 90s. had an 8 track player (and THREE cigarette lighters!) so bought a bunch of disco 8 tracks. Could fit 7 people in that thing and cruise around and when we got out the smoke would just roll out of there.

nasty beast of a car. front wheel drive with a 454 or something. would go 110 down the interstate like a magic carpet though.

LordJiro: L.D. Ablo: If we can get hipsters away from vinyl and onto 8 track, the world will be a better place.

Fixed that for you.

And we don't have a [Hipster] tag why?


/Though we have other priority tags such as [FarkReady] for Farkready headlines.

sallys: [dottedmusic.com image 265x350]
How I like my 8 track. Of course, I don't have a player.

I remember reading about that, a new album released on 8-track in 2006.

Skyfrog: sallys: [dottedmusic.com image 265x350]
How I like my 8 track. Of course, I don't have a player.

I remember reading about that, a new album released on 8-track in 2006.

RIck Nielsen: "We're the #1 8 track in the world"

it was 2009...

I have two. There put away with hundreds of LPs. One is Troutmask Replica and the other I can't remember.

TFA was a little short on important facts. For instance, 8-track was not the first format in that particular cartridge. A couple years earlier, they made 4-tracks in nearly the same physical format, but with a giant hole in the bottom side where a rubber pinch roller would flip up from the deck and push the tape against the playback head. Eventually they got smart, added a cheap roller to the cartridge itself, and then doubled the number of tracks while they were at it. Back around 68-69 I remember seeing a little adapter at record and tape stores that you could put in the hole of a 4-track so you could play it in the "new" 8-track players.

Another important thing they should have mentioned is that 8-track audio quality WAS better than cassette tapes - exactly TWICE as good. Cassette tape moves at the ass-draggingly awful speed of 1 7/8 ips (one and seven-eighths inches per second) The faster the tape moves, the more magnetic particles (i.e. "samples") there are representing the waveform. Originally they had virtually ZERO high frequencies (almost nothing above 8khz or so) until they came up with things like metal tape and Dolby noise reduction in the late 70s. Even then, they still sounded like shiat. Cassettes were the audio equivalent of a thumbnail-sized 16-color GIF image.

8-track tape, otoh, moved along twice as fast at 3 3/4 ips and therefore had considerably better fidelity, on par with good vinyl. In fact, the same speed was used on some commercial reel-to-reel tapes of the era, back when audiophiles still preferred tape over lowly vinyl. (FYI, The RIAA curve for vinyl records rolls off HARD at about 50 hz. Tape was good for nearly a half octave lower in the bass range, making it far superior for bass junkies). 3 3/4 represented the lower end of r2r tapes. Most ran at 7 1/2 ips, twice as fast again. Somewhere in a storeroom, I have Led Zeppelin 1 and Moody Blues' Question of Balance on 7" R2R tapes in the original cardboard boxes with miniature versions of the album covers glued on.

Cassette tape is also 1/8 inch wide, so besides being slow, it physically had fewer particles due to the tiny size. Did I mention that casettes sounded like shiat? 8-track and most consumer R2R tapes were 1/4 inch, which held twice as much information.

Another FYI, the 1", 2", and the odd 3" wide multi-track tapes on 10 1/2 inch reels used in commercial recording studios ran at either 15 ips or 30 ips. Since a 2" wide 10.5" reel of professional tape cost about $200 and lasted around 16 minutes at 30 ips, most studios ran everything at 15 when they could get away with it.

Man...

Now I wish I hadn't thrown out those Betles and Bay City Rollers tapes away.

Damn it! Between my father and I we had a nice collection of 8-tracks. Then I joined the Army, and left my 8-tracks at home, and a few years later he passed. If I had known that all those 8-tracks would be worth something one day I would be a rich man today.

I mean how rare is the 8-track soundtrack of The Album of the Soundtrack of the Trailer of the Film of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Had this one in my car.

/get off my lawn
//78 T-Bird land yacht

Houses Of the Holy
Was an album by Led Zeppelin
I bought it on 8-track
Not on CD
It fades out in the middle
The way an 8-track's s'posed to
The way an 8-track's s'posed to

~ Steve Poltz

I have all of Loomis Simmons dating tips on lovely 8 track cartridges.

©

The first piece of recorded music I owned was Mike Oldfield's "Ommadown" on 8-track. Ah, lovely fun progrock..*PROGRAM CHANGE *KACHUNK** Ugh.

I remember an episode of Cheers where Cliff Clavin said he had an 8 track answering machine.

Old people getting misty eyed about old stuff that is crap?

Colour me surprised.

If audiophiles put down the vinyl and pushed for hi-def replacement for cd's they would do the world a favour. But that would need most of them to know what they are talking about.

LordJiro: L.D. Ablo: If we can get hipsters away from vinyl and onto 8 track, the world will be a better place.

Fixed that for you.

Don't be stupid. Hipsters, like cockroaches and vultures, serve an ecologically crucial function in our culture - they are scavengers. They seek out and consume all the dead, decaying flesh our culture sloughs off before it can accumulate to the point that it becomes a mental health hazard.

What about 4 track?

I have a buddy who, at a flea market, found an 8-track of "Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols", still in its original shrink-wrap with the K-Mart price sticker. He bought it for two bucks, then Ebayed it for $200.00.

/Common Story, Bro.