Eight tracks

Do You Remember Eight tracks?

Do You Remember Eight tracks?

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  uknational on 2009-07-18 23:42:36

  I was a TV engineer at the time, we were amazed by the sheer cunning of how the cassette worked. It was an infinite loop that spooled our from the ouside and wound back in to the middle. It was very clever. The quality was better than cassette, but its downfall was the limited amount of play time available on the cassettes - about 15 minutes.

  
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  bleep on 2008-08-30 23:20:21

  I think the cartridges had a continuous loop of tape inside and each song was in a different postion on the width of the tape. So when you pressed a button for the next song; the head moved a little up/down and picked the next track (quite clver for the time really). We had a Binatone (remember them?) "Home Entertainment Centre" (record player, radio, 8 track) with a smoked perspex cover. We only everhad 2 cartridges : The Carpenters (pretty cool) and Val Doonican (mega cool = dig those sweaters!). There was two problems with them 1. Dad bought the music centre about a month before cassettes came out (doh!) and 2. If the tape spooled out; there was no "pencil-in-cassette"-style fix as they seemed to rely on the tape being pulled around by the player.

  
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  Redsaz on 2007-10-16 22:26:05

  My mum and dad had one of these in their lime green Ford Cortina Mk1. I remember they had Bread and Abba!

  
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  Anonymous on 2006-12-15 15:03:13

  i had an eight track in my car it was really good , you used to get them on car boot sales for peanuts , it was an early cassette player and as the name suggests had eight tracks on it , they played cartridges which were about the size of five cd casses stacked on top of each other