And isn’t part of the mythos of turntablism that early rappers like Grandmaster Flash repaired and cobbled together unstable equipment that gave rise to scratch and sampling (Toop, 2000)? Why deny this golden history to other subcultures organized around low-tech media like 8-tracks? Ingenuity on the ground with regard to tapes and hardware has always been part of the 8-track mind. This is why the repair and replacement parts industry played – and still plays – a significant role in 8-track culture. The cartridge itself also presented a minefield of problems. There is no defense of 8-tracks on the basis of technical, that is, high-definition sound reproduction. One obvious reason is that 8-tracks excel in the display of an impressive range of flaws and inflexibilities. But this paper is not merely a defense of the 8-track format. After all, he raises a number of salient historical, technical, socio-cultural and aesthetic points. This litany of criticisms and complaints rehearsed by Coleman need to be met. There was no fast forward or rewind, which meant 8-track tapes didn’t manually cue as a cassette did, and while the sound quality couldn’t compare to vinyl LPs, it sure beat cassettes, at least for the time being. Also, a selection couldn’t be repeated without running through the entire tape. Despite a generous total playing time of one hour, the 8-track automatically switched from one pair of stereo tracks to the next, which means glaring interruptions in the middle of a song. Tellingly, this awkward format never caught on outside the car-crazed United States.
8 track tape drivers#
Convenient for drivers owing to its size and shape, an 8-track tape could be inserted and removed with one hand while driving. The success of the 8-track format (by 1975, it accounted for 25% of all prerecorded music sales) must be attributed to the automobile.
8 track tape software#
In an exclusive software deal, RCA offered hundreds of prerecorded selections for the new machines to play back. Beginning in 1966, the Ford Motor Company installed Motorola 8-track players in its cars as a luxury option. Conceived by William Lear, inventor of the Lear Jet, the 8-track cartridge contains a continuous-loop tape with four sets of paired stereo tracks. Today, the 8-track format is fondly recalled as a relic of smiley face seventies kitsch, about as practical as a pair of men’s platform shoes. As Mark Coleman maintains, the Walkman broke the more-or-less equal sales enjoyed by the two aforementioned formats, but the death knell of the 8-track had sounded. Cassette tapes were making major inroads into the music marketplace in a battle over tape formats in which the introduction of the SONY Walkman in 1979 played a significant, some think decisive, role. In the late 1970s 8-tracks were on their last legs. Regular maintenance helped prolong the life of an 8-track.Ĭonsider, for example, a fairly typical version of the 8-track’s inferiority. 8-track tapes attracted and housed a range of debris because of the rubber or plastic pinch roller which, like a rollerball on a computer mouse, gathers dirt, but unlike a rollerball profited immensely from light lubrication, applied manually. We are clearly far beyond the introduction of mere dust, of the plastic or oxide variety.
8 track tape manuals#
Since 8-track tapes relied on a metallic splice to enable program changes, most manuals warned against repair work that might spread ‘magnetic particles on the tape’ through use of a tool (i.e., razor blade or utility knife) that was not properly demagnetized the results are described as ‘an annoying click’ (Ritter, 1975: 24).
Tapes (cassettes and 8-tracks), as the story goes, are plagued by inherent sounds like hiss and the cartridges themselves create no end of squeals, clicks, rumbles…. Fortunately, many disparaging reflections are perfused with factually erroneous and selectively incomplete descriptions, not to mention wildly hyperbolic dismissals that put into relief the high fidelity prejudice that shapes much writing on music and technology. Cultural historians of the formats and associated technologies of pre-recorded popular music do not look kindly upon the 8-track tape.
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