FAQ's

This file is intended to provide a general information base and answer some frequently asked questions about 8-track tapes and other analog audio formats that are discussed on alt.collecting.8-track-tapes. It is hoped that this file will be useful to newcomers to the group and help fill in information gaps in the minds of experienced trackers. This FAQ is posted monthly to alt.collecting.8-track-tapes as well as to news.answers and alt.answers.

Table of Contents ============= 1. 8-track tapes on Internet? Are you kidding? 2. Who invented the 8-track tape? 3. A. When did they stop making 8-tracks? B. Why did they stop making 8-tracks? 4. What is "8-Track Mind"? 5. How does an 8-track work, anyway (when it works...)? 6. Where can I buy 8-track tapes and players? 7. How can I fix broken 8-tracks? (See new stuff!) A. How do you replace the foam backing pads on tapes? B. How do you replace the metallic sensing strip? C. How can I open the cart without damaging it? D. How to Open an Ampex/Lear Jet Cartridge. E. Is there any hope for an 8-track in which all of the tape is just in a big pile (untangled)? Is there any way to spin it back on the reel? 8. Can I sell my 8-track tapes on alt.collecting.8-track-tapes? 9. What about that 8-track movie....? 10. Are my 8-tracks rare or valuable? How can I tell how much they're worth? 11. Why do 8-tracks break and/or jam so easily? 12. What is that black gunk where the pinch roller should be? 13. Was any punk rock released on 8-track? 14. What's the deal with quadraphonic 8-tracks? 15. What about 4-track tapes? 16. What about the 8-track tape WWW site, "8-Track Heaven"? 17. And what about Dolby 8-track decks and tapes? 18. Players A. I have an 8-track that plays too fast; is there any remedy? B. What's the best method for cleaning 8T tape heads? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~

ANSWERS 1. 8-TRACK TAPES ON THE INTERNET? ARE YOU KIDDING? Up until the creation of this group on April 28, 1995, the only resources for those curious about the continuous-loop cartridge format called 8-track tape were stuck with a list of Beatles 8-tracks and a few home page mentions of music collections. There was nothing that we could use. No definitive representation of American pop culture in the past 20 years would be complete without at least some mention of the ever-present 8-track tape. It's like people are ashamed to admit they ever bought one.

Well, as someone I know likes to say, it's not a CONTRADICTION, it's a PARADOX. What possible place could clunky old mechanical has-been 8-tracks have on the fast-paced, up-to-the-minute high tech Information Superhighway? I'm glad you asked. Well, I guess the first point worth making is that the Internet is really not all that much more modern than the 8-track. If you know your cyber history, you'll recall that the Internet emerged out of Arpanet, which was born in 1969, when 8-tracks themselves were still very young.

Doubtless many a Defense Department computer scientist enjoyed those twin pillars of technological progress - email and endless-loop cartridges. While the sudden popularity of the 'net could scarcely be missed by anyone, perhaps you were not so aware that the 1990's also ushered in an 8-track renaissance. 8-tracks were rarely considered or discussed in the late 1980's except as a cruel joke, but the turn of the decade brought an accelerating interest in 'tracking which continues to this day. There is a fanzine, a feature-length movie, lots of attention from the mainstream media and even several brand-new independent releases available on 8-track.

Countless numbers of 8-track fans worldwide have "come out of the closet" and let their 8-track interests be known. Many more have been introduced for the first time to the wonders of the endless loop. The Internet provides the means for these people to get together, as it does for so many other groups. But what about the rest of you, the tire changers ones who are reading this in amused or horrified silence? Well, 8-tracks have something to say to every computer user and most particularly to everyone who uses the Internet.

Have you ever wanted tires for sale to throw your computer out the window or against a wall? Have you ever been confounded by the sheer number and variety of things that can go wrong with your machine? Ever spent hours trying to tell if the problem was in the hardware or the software?

Then you have something in common with the 8-track hobbyist. Imagine a product for which the only manuals available are old and increasingly hard to get. Imagine if every possible technical support number stopped answering the phone years ago. What, you say you don't have to imagine, that I have just described the plight of the computer user as well as the 8-tracker? My point exactly. Some 8-trackers are making a statement with which computer users cannot help but sympathize. What more eloquent protest against the forces which make consumer goods obsolete before they even go to market than buying your technology in thrift stores? If you get nothing else out of a.c.8-t-t but the realization that there is more than one way of looking at the world, then you have gotten the point. 2. WHO INVENTED THE 8-TRACK TAPE? [8TM - David Morton] The 8-track tape has roots that extend into the motion picture industry. Endless loop motion pictures were made from the 1920s on for advertising or other special purposes. With the appearance of inexpensive reel-to-reel tape recorders in the late 1940s, several inventors adapted the endless loop motion picture idea for use with the new German-style plastic recording tapes. Of these inventors, only one, William Powell Lear, gets much attention Long before he set down to work on the famous Lear Jet, Lear had made a name for himself developing instruments and communications equipment for airplanes. In 1946 Lear Purchased a California company that had tried to market a steel-tape loop recorder based on the old Western Electric/AT&T Technology [from their 1933 "Hear Your Own Voice" endless loop recorders]. Bits of this technology made its way into his own design for several models of wire recorders announced in 1946, including an endless loop wire recorder. But Lear's early experiments did not result in a line of investigation that led directly to the 8-track. Instead, Lear dropped the project and subsequently was out of the loop for many years while he concentrated his efforts on aircraft. In the mean time, the focus of endless loop technology shifted from wire to tape and from Lear's Chicago headquarters to Toledo, Ohio. There, Bernard Cousino, the owner of an Audio Visual equipment and service company, became interested in endless sound recordings. He won a small contract to build a "point of sale" device -- that is, a store display that played a recorded message over and over endlessly. Cousino, aware of the widespread use of short motion picture film loops for similar purposes, began experimenting with an 8-millimeter endless loop film cartridge marketed by Television Associates, Inc. of New Hampshire. Cousino soon developed a cartridge specifically adapted for audio tape that he marketed in 1952 through his company, Cousino Electronics, as the "audio vendor." The little cart could be used with an ordinary reel-to-reel player -- the cart fit over one reel spindle and the exposed loop of tape was fed through the heads. Later, Cousino would develop the Echomatic, a more advanced two-track cartridge which, like the later 8-track, required a special player. In the meantime, another inventor named George Eash designed and patented a similar cartridge that came to be known as the Fidelipac. Following Cousino's pattern, Eash designed and patented a cartridge with similar specifications, later modifying it to include a more complex reel braking mechanism. Eash's cartridge was the basis of dozens of commercial applications of the endless loop, two of which were particularly successful. Eash's Fidelipac design became the basis of several new recorders adapted for radio station use; by the early 1960s, many radio stations had put some or all of their music, spot announcements, and station i.d.'s on carts that could be quickly inserted and played and which could be automatically stopped at the beginning of the recording. The second main commercial application was in the field of auto sound. Earl "Madman" Muntz was a former used car salesman who became something of a local celebrity on the West Coast by opening a chain of television retail outlets selling TV sets that were manufactured by his other firm, Muntz Television, Inc. When he discovered the Fidelipac in the early 1960's, he threw in his lot with the endless loop, never to return to the television business. Muntz had inexpensive Fidelipac players custom manufactured in Japan, and licensed the music of several record companies for duplication on carts. Even though the players were intended to be installed in cars, Muntz sought to enhance the appeal of his product by adopting stereo tape standards established by recorder manufacturers a few years earlier, and his players used the new, mass produced stereo tape heads being made for the home recorder industry by firms like Michigan Magnetics and Nortronics. These heads but two stereo programs, a total of four recorded tracks, on a standard 1/4 inch tape. Muntz players caught on quickly, starting an autosound fad in California which slowly spread east. By 1963 Muntz players were to be found stylishly adorning the underdash regions of Frank Sinatra's Riviera, Peter Lawford's Ghia, James Garner's Jaguar, Red Skelton's Rolls Royce, and Lawrence Welk's Dodge convertible. During 1964 and 1965 a number of major labels began issuing new releases and old favorites on 4-track, and the Fidelipac looked like it was going to be the next big thing in consumer audio. A number of home players even appeared. Suddenly Bill Lear appeared on the scene, newly world famous for his Lear Jet business plane, and announced in 1965 that he had developed a cartridge with eight tracks that promised to lower the price of recorded tapes without any sacrifice in music quality. Lear's enthusiasm for loops had not faded after the failure of his endless wire cartridge of the late 1940s. In 1963, he became a distributor for Muntz Stereo Pak, mainly in order to install 4-track units aboard his Lear Jets. Dissatisfied with the Muntz technology, he contacted one of the leading suppliers of original equipment tape heads, the Nortronics Company of Michigan. He specified a head with much thinner "pole-pieces" and a new spacing that would allow two tracks (or one stereo program) to be picked off a quarter-inch tape that held a total of 8-tracks. Although a departure from the Muntz player, the technology of the closely-stacked multi-track head was by the early 1960s well established in fields like data recording. Lear in 1963 developed a new version of the Fidelipac cartridge with somewhat fewer parts and an integral pressure roller. During 1964, Lear's aircraft company constructed 100 players for distribution to executives at the auto companies and RCA. Just how Bill Lear got his products from the drawing board to the dashboards of Ford Mustangs and Fairlanes is a little unclear. Certainly Lear carried with him the cachet of his successful business jet project, and had many personal contacts in industry. And in a roundabout kind of way, he already had ties to Ford. In the 1930s Lear and his partner Paul Galvin had together built Motorola into a leading manufacturer of car radios, and Motorola was now affiliated with Ford. Whatever the details of Lear's selling job, the keys to its spectacular success seems to have been the backing of both Ford and the recording industry. After getting RCA Victor to commit to the mass production of its catalog on Lear Jet 8-tracks, Ford agreed to offer the players as optional equipment on 1966 models. The response, in one Ford spokesman's word, "was more than anyone expected." 65,000 of the players were installed that year alone. The machines were initially manufactured by Ford's electronics supplier: the firm that had pioneered the mass produced auto radio or "motor victrola" -- Motorola. Meanwhile, a number of new contenders rose up to enjoy fleeting moments of glory. Bernard Cousino, arguably the source of much cart technology, has rendered a seemingly endless succession of endless loop technologies. He had a measure of success with his Echomatic cartridge in the 1960s as a "point of sale" or educational audio-visual technology, largely by adopting Eash's strategy of licensing his designs to other firms. In 1965 the success of the Echomatic spurred the Champion Spark Plug company (a subsidiary of Ford) to purchase a controlling interest in the firm. At Champion's insistence, Cousino Electronics became a manufacturer of Lear-style players and was a major supplier for Sears Roebuck. Looking for greener fields, Cousino had in the early 1960s also linked up with Alabama entrepreneur and firebrand John Herbert Orr, whose Orradio Industries tape manufacturing firm (makers of Irish Brand tape) had recently been acquired by Ampex. Orr and Cousino cooked up Orrtronics, a company that made a background music system based on the old Echomatic cartridge. While Ford debated the adoption of the Lear Cartridge in 1965, Champion Spark Plug funded the development at Orrtronics of a competing system. This was the ill-fated Orrtronics 8-track, a remarkably better sounding but commercially unsuccessful response to Lear's cart. The Orrtronic cartridge had a somewhat different tape path that reduced strain on the tape and allowed better head-to-tape contact, and was somewhat more compact to boot. Nonetheless, no record companies seemed interested, and the idea was stillborn. Cousino continued to patent endless loop devices, such as a miniature cartridge and, now in his 90s, he has recently submitted a patent for an endless loop videocassette.

Music For You Years of Chicago: principles of the 80 - final ones of the 80 main Article: House of Chicago an honorary street company/signature inside Chicago for the music of the house and the knuckles of Frankie. In the principles of the 80, & of the club of Chicago; DJs of radio played several styles of the dance music, including less files of the disc, a newer disc of Italo, jump of the hip and electro tracks of canguelo, as well as electronic music MGP by Kraftwerk, and R& dance recent; Productions of B in the sort now known like boogie. Some did and played his the own ones correct of their songs preferred in the spool tape, and mixed sometimes in the effects, the machines of drum, and the other rythmical electronic instrumentation. Beginning in 1984, some of these DJs, inspired by Jesse Saunders' success with " Incessantly " , tried its hand in producing and the liberation of the original compositions. These compositions used the affordable electronic instruments again to not hardly emulate to Saunders' the song, but the styles corrected, heightened of the disc and the other music of dance favored already. Before 1985, although the exact origins of the term are discussed, " music" of the house; it included these premises-produced recordings. Subgenres of the house, including deep house and house of acid, emerged and gained the traction quickly. The game of the club to initiate DJs has taste of robust Rum and Lil Louis, local stores of the file of the dance music such as Amounts, etc, files of the street of the state, files and Gramaphone of the bow, and the popular hot demonstrations of mixture 5 in the helped radio station WBMX-FM to popularize music of the house in Chicago and between visiting & of DJs; producers of Detroit. Files of Trax and files of the International of DJ, labels of the premises with one more a ampler distribution, helped to popularize music of the house outside Chicago. A harmony of the house called " Its Body" moves; by Marshall Jefferson it made music of the house known outside Chicago and was called " anthem" of the music of the house; by many, and it was offered in " of the game video 2005; Automobile of magnificent theft: " of San Andreas; in " of the radio station of ingame; SF-UR". Before 1986, the BRITISH labels sent music of the house, and beginning in 1987, tracks of house by Chicago and Detroit DJs and producers, such as Steve Hurley, canguelo of Farley Jackmaster, Larry heard, the drilling rig May and Kevin Saunderson appeared ignition and even it finished off letters of the United Kingdom. [corrects] the lyrical subjects the house also had an influence to relay political messages to the people who were considered to be pariahs of the society. It appealed to that didn' the adjustment of t in the American society of current and was celebrated especially by many black men. The knuckles of Frankie made a good comparison of house that said that it was like " church for the people who have fallen of grace" and Marshall compared it to Jefferson to " religion of long ago of the way which people as soon as it obtains happy and screamin' " (30). The deep house was similar to many of the messages of the freedom for the black community. Both Cdes of the house of Joe Smooth, " Land" promised; and " of the DB; I have a Dream" it gives to the similar messages of Martin Luther King ' " of s; I have a Dream" speech." Someday" by CeCe Rogers, the house to " would move more far; more ahead titled of the current of the gospel; house" of the gospel;. It contains he was also very sexual and it had much mystical in him. It was as far as having " delirium" of the eroto-mystic; (31). Jamie Principle' " of s; The baby wants to Ride" he begins in a prayer but he is amazingly on dominatrix that he seduces a man to " ride" she with the rest of the song.