Welcome to Hell, here's your 8-Track

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

Agreed!

Mike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DeKay

missing ehen it went extinct?

I don’t believe that intelligent individuals ponder this.

The title of this thread made me think of my "Alice Cooper Goes To Hell" 8-Track.

Anyway, I remember back in th early to mid 70's getting a portable cassette player for X-mas one year.  In the little town we lived in, I could find very few prerecorded cassettes.  (I did wind up with a couple by Jim Croce & Tony Orland & Dawn and some pirated looking stuff by CCR & Johnny Cash and Three Dog Night and I ordered some stuff that was advertised on TV, but there sure wasn't a lot in that town available.  So I joined Longines Symphonette Record Club and ordered 12 cassettes, but the ba$tards sent me 12 8-tracks.  I sent them back and told them that they screwed up, and they sent me 12 more 8-tracks!  Anyway, in '77 I put an 8-track player ( the first of a few) and started buying 8-trracks.  .