Pod Insights Stuff You Should Know Short Stuff: 8 Track Cartridges About this episode 8 tracks were during vinyl, but preceded cassettes. Why? So people could listen to their music on the go. Check out this antiquated medium today.
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0:39 Josh Clark? Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck, it's just us, neither Jerry nor Dave is here. So it's Short Stuff, the bereft edition.
0:48 Speaker 02 That's right. I want to thank NPR, capture.com, a website called PS Audio, a website called EverPresent, and more for the research that went into the 8-track cassette player, or 8-track cartridge, itself. April 11th is National 8-Track Tape Day, so we've missed that. But if you don't know what an 8-track is, it preceded the cassette tape. And we're going to get into what this thing was.
1:16 Josh Clark? Yeah, you usually wedge it in between LP record albums and cassettes. Because that's basically where it really popped up. In the 70s is kind of where you really associate 8-tracks. But it was way older than that. Apparently, as far back as the 40s, it was essentially coming into development, right?
1:35 Speaker 02 Yeah, which surprised me. You might be wondering, like, why did we need 8-tracks at all? And it's because, at the time, dear listener, especially younger dear listener, if you wanted to play the music that you wanted to hear, you could play it on your record player in your house. You didn't have a record player in your car, you had a radio that played whatever the heck they wanted. So all of a sudden, 8-tracks came along as a mobile version, a way to take the music that you wanted on the road, either via your car or via these awesome portable players, of which we had one of, it was a Lloyds. We had a deck in our conversion van, of course, but we had, just look up the white Lloyds 8-track portable.
2:20 Speaker 02 Player, and that was the very one. I found it online and I might even get one on eBay. It brought back so many nostalgic memories.
2:26 Josh Clark? That's awesome, man. You totally should. One of my friends in high school, Mitch, not Dirty Mitch with scabies, but the different Mitch.
2:33 Speaker 02 That's what I was gonna say.
2:34 Josh Clark? His grandmother had a huge white Lincoln Continental with an 8-track deck in it.
2:39 Speaker 02 Yeah, baby.
2:40 Josh Clark? And we got our hands on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack on 8-track. And we would just cruise around listening to that in that car. It was pretty boss.
2:46 Speaker 02 Skipping forward two songs at a time. Ish.
2:50 Josh Clark? Yeah, yes. That's something I can't wait to talk about. But just one, a little background on the, how this worked. It was built on ancient technology from the 20s and 30s, which was magnetic film, which became reel-to-reel film. And essentially, that is, that is tape that has magnetized metal particles on it. And when sound is converted into an electrical impulse, the tape writer translates that into, well, it's an electromagnet. It translates it into a magnetic pulse that arranges these, these pieces of magnetic metal into ones and zeros. And then the whole thing is done backwards on the, on the other end.
3:31 Josh Clark? When you listen to it, this is the basis of not just 8-tracks, but cassette tapes. But since 8-tracks came first, this is what they were built on over time. And there are a few inventions that kind of were stepping stones that led to the 8-track.
3:45 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, the Germans were using it in World War II. The Allies got a hold of it and eventually it got to the music industry. And they were like, hey, we got a thing now that we can play this stuff on the road, we think, in a continuous loop. And the very first person to achieve the version that could go to market was a guy named William Powell Lear, the creator of the Learjet. Previous to this, there were some sort of housing and internal guts, things that were worked out by various people. A guy named George Ish. And 1953, I came up with the NAB cartridge, or the Fiddle, Fiddlepack cartridge. It's also called a cart. If you ever heard of like on W K R Cincinnati or old
4:29 Speaker 02 radio stations, they had carts, music carts.
4:31 Josh Clark? Yeah.
4:32 Speaker 02 That's what that was. These were built for radio stations.
4:35 Josh Clark? Yeah, it was short for cartridge slang, I guess you'd call it.
4:37 Speaker 02 Yeah.
4:38 Josh Clark? So that was followed up by the Munt's Stereo Pack. And it was created by Earl Madman Muntz, and he directly influenced the development of the 8-track because William Powell Lear was riding around in Madman Muntz's car when he was playing one of the Stereo Pack cartridges for him. But the thing that really kind of separated Muntz from everybody else is he's the first one to go directly to the record companies and say like, hey, let me license your music and put them on this new format and let's start getting it out there. And like I said, William Powell Lear was like, this is a great idea. I'm going to build on this and create a longer playing version of it, and I'm going to call it the 8-track.
5:17 Speaker 02 Yeah, and then invent a jet.
5:20 Josh Clark? Yeah.
5:21 Speaker 02 I should point out too quickly, and this can't be a coincidence, but Earl Madman Muntz was the creator of that cart. If you're a Coen Brothers fan and a fan of the movie Barton Fink, you will know that John Goodman's character name is Carl Madman Munt.
5:37 Josh Clark? Oh, really?
5:37 Speaker 02 And there's no way that's a coincidence.
5:39 Josh Clark? No.
5:40 Speaker 02 I don't know the correlation, or if it was just they got, they thought it sounded cool or something, who knows?
5:44 Josh Clark? What a strange homage if it was, though.
5:47 Speaker 02 Agreed. Should we take a break?
5:49 Josh Clark? Yes, Chuck.
5:50 Speaker 02 All right, we'll be right back with more on the bygone era of the 8-track, right after this.
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8:38 Josh Clark? So, all of this was being developed in the 50s, I think as early as the 40s technically, but the 8-track really came into its own in the mid 60s. And the reason why is because the Ford Motor Company said, "Hey, everybody, have you heard of these 8-tracks? Well, we're going to start putting 8-track players in our 1966 model cars as a high-end option." And as more and more cars started featuring 8-track players, 8-track cartridges just became dominant as the form of how you listen to music outside of your home in a way that you controlled, unlike radio.
9:13 Speaker 02 Yeah, for sure. They were pretty cheap. They were $2 to $3. The most expensive on record was the Beatles Greatest Hits, released in 1970. That was almost $5, $4.97, which would be-
9:26 Josh Clark? That's the nice price.
9:27 Speaker 02 Yeah, the nice price. That'd be more than $40 today. So that was, you know, that was an expensive 8-track, for sure. It hit its popularity in the mid 70s. And I guess we should talk a little bit about how these things played. You know, you've got the magnetic tape that you described inside on a single reel, and there was a little motor that pulled the tape across the audio head to make it make the sound. But, you're probably, if you don't know what these are, you're probably like, "What is the 8-tracks? What does that even mean?" Each tape had 8 tracks and a sensing strip that told a solenoid coil, like, "Hey, a program is over," which was, you know, roughly 2 songs, "and now it's time to switch over to the next track."
10:11 Speaker 02 So, when I said you could skip ahead 2 songs at a time, if you hit the button, it would pop forward the 2 songs, roughly.
10:19 Josh Clark? So, weirdly, I want to say just one thing because I don't want us to get emails. I saw in one place that it actually had 4 tracks, but there were 2 of each of the 4 tracks, so they were in stereo. So 2 times 4 was 8. I only saw that in one place. Everywhere else kind of described it as 8 different tracks, like you just did, but I just wanted to put it out there.
10:41 Speaker 02 I had no idea.
10:42 Josh Clark? So yeah, so this this whole thing, what differentiates it from cassette is that it was, it played continuously. It was an endless loop, right? So I guess if you pressed play, it would play the whole album over and over again until you press stop. Is that correct?
10:58 Speaker 02 Yeah, and the point is, you didn't have to flip it. The downside of that is you couldn't rewind it or fast forward it, except for skipping two songs ahead, but you couldn't go back two songs, as far as I know.
11:09 Josh Clark? Okay, so that was kind of one of the downsides. Another big downside is that these tracks were not, like, they just took an album and they cut it up into four equal amounts of time, or eight equal amounts of time, I should say, right? So if one track could fit one and three quarters of a song, that three quarters of a song would fade out, there'd be a click, and then when the next track started, it would fade back in. And people hated that.
11:39 Speaker 02 Of course they did. That's very clunky.
11:41 Josh Clark? Understandably so, but that level of clunkiness really kind of gets across the, just the kind of attention to detail that was given to eight tracks. They, as far as technology goes, they were perfectly encompassed by what they looked like. Clunky, giant, plasticky, and just clunky, I guess.
12:03 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, it was, it was interesting. They, they deserved to be popular for a while because it was such a revolution and to be able to listen to what you wanted to outside of your home. But the other limitations, you know, not rewinding, stuff like that, apparently the internal components would fail a lot of times, like the cassette itself was very sturdy and long lasting. But the little motor and stuff, that would fail. Your car was famous for eating the tapes. They had a lot of downsides, but that didn't outweigh the ups, the initial upside of being able to take your music on the road.
12:38 Josh Clark? No, for sure. That, I mean, that was a big deal. Like, I, I never was like, this eight-track sucks when we were listening to Saturday Night Fever. So I mean, it couldn't have been that bad, but I think for people who are like really into music, it was probably very annoying.
12:51 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, the irony is, is that the cassette tape was introduced in 1965, kind of. Either just kind of squarely in the middle of, or just before, 8-tracks were at their zenith of popularity. But they weren't marketed, like, bands weren't releasing music on cassettes at first. It was just like, hey, here's a cassette and you can record yourself at home and interview your parents about what life was like in World War II.
13:17 Josh Clark? Yeah, do your own storycorps at home.
13:19 Speaker 02 Yeah.
13:20 Josh Clark? Yeah, so people were like, I can start taping songs off the radio with these things. And essentially, it just kind of avalanched from there. Cassettes took over because you could fast-forward, you could rewind, and even though you had to flip the cassette, the worst thing you could possibly have to do in the world, they were way cheaper than 8-tracks, too, just to produce and to purchase. So, cassettes pretty quickly took over. And interestingly, this is also happening at the same time with video. VHS tapes were overtaking Betamax and LaserDisc at the same time, too.
13:53 Speaker 02 What were you about to say, the worst thing you would have to do?
13:56 Josh Clark? That was an addendum to having to flip a cassette tape.
14:00 Speaker 02 Oh, okay. I thought you were gonna say, if the tape unspooled some, you would have to put a pencil or use your pinky finger to rewind the tape and draw that magnetic tape back into the cassette.
14:13 Josh Clark? I always had to use a pinky because I never had a pencil because I wasn't a nerd.
14:16 Speaker 02 Well, I had one in my front pocket, my breast pocket, so, hey.
14:23 Josh Clark? What else you got? Anything else?
14:25 Speaker 02 Uh, just a couple of tidbits. I was in a museum for a little while. There was an enthusiast named Buck Sburnett in Dallas, Texas, that had a museum because he collected them. And it seems like it was open for a handful of years. The largest collector now is a guy named Gary Heitzman, who apparently has close to 100,000 tapes. He may have more than that, because that was 2019.
14:46 Josh Clark? Yeah.
14:47 Speaker 02 And the most, there's actually a very valuable one. Frank Sinatra, it's called Sinatra-Jo Beam, Frank Sinatra and Antonio Carlos Jobim, which I bet is a great record.
14:57 Josh Clark? Yeah.
14:58 Speaker 02 Because they did a limited pressing, of course. It's scarcity that makes something valuable, and they only did 3,500 copies of that one. And if you have one of those, you can get a few grand for it, apparently.
15:09 Josh Clark? Why not? What are you gonna do? You're not gonna do anything to look at it. You might as well sell it.
15:14 Speaker 02 Yeah, get one of those Lloyds players and put that strap over your shoulder and go down the street rocking it.
15:19 Josh Clark? I found another player too that I would actually like. It was made by Panasonic. It was called the Dynamite Plunger, portable 8-track player. And the reason why is because it had like a, like the handle was like on a rod coming off of it. And then it had like a, well, the thing that you gripped and it looked like kind of a dynamite plunger. It was neat. Came in yellow and all sorts of great colors.
15:40 Speaker 02 I'm looking it up because I gotta see what you're talking about.
15:42 Josh Clark? So yeah, there was one for sale on Etsy.
15:45 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah. I've seen those.
15:46 Josh Clark? Okay.
15:46 Speaker 02 Yeah, those are rad, man. Those are awesome.
15:49 Josh Clark? If I got into 8-tracks, I would, I would definitely buy one of those, but I'm not into 8-tracks, so I'm not going to.
15:54 Speaker 02 Yeah. I mean, it, there's no reason to, like, people are into vinyl still because the fidelity is so great. There's really no reason to buy 8-tracks now unless you just want to go little walk down memory lane of a sort of a cruddier version of everything else.
16:08 Josh Clark? Right. Well, I guess since we started walking down memory lane, we just walked away from the short stuff, right?
16:14 Speaker 02 Yeah, I guess that means it's out.
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