Had they done the same tricks with 8 tracks that they did with casettes it is likely that the 8 tracks would have been much better sounding. By that time the 8 track had lost popularity. They said 'not for music' on their ads and were marketed 'for dictation only'.Ĭassettes eventualy got much better sounding than 8 tracks but IMO that is because they went to special high density tape formulations, noise reduction and other tricks. In fact they were not designed for music. Cassettes when they first came out were horrible sounding, as Rudy mentioned. I was doing work for a pawn shop repairing their tape decks, and they let me borrow the Roberts for quite some time.Ĥ Tracks definitely sounded better than 8 tracks because they had a larger track width. I had a Roberts Reel to Reel that could record 8 tracks back in 1968. The program splits are something you either got used to or you didn't - some still miss turning sides with the CD. The 8 track recorder is capable of good quality recording but the development stagnation - in terms of tape formulation and absence of Dolby - effected its sale potential, which as the cassette recorder got better, cut into the market. It was often the best way to get great sound from cassettes - hands up all you LP dubbers! The home cassette deck from roughly the mid 70's armed with Type II tape and Dolby could produce good sounding copies with low noise. It wasn't really to the 80's that with better oxides and Dolby Nr that the Pre-cassettes improved, which when coupled with the invention of the Walkman, really saw the 8 track fade away and even begin to challenge the sales of the LP. Now Reel to Reel was and is marvelous at 7 1/2 I.P.S - until I got poorly, I had two and used them for copying my LP's on to and the pre-recorded sort could challenge the LP. I would not say they were better than a LP but sometimes the mastering can be preferable and there are Q8 Quad fans here who enjoy those vintage mixes. I had my player running through Christmas day. Talking about pre-recorded tapes first then I would say in my experience as a forum member still using 8 track, the 8 track of the early 70's did sound better - much clearer high frequencies compared to the cassette. When I first heard and critically listened to Cassette recorders in the late 1960's/early 1970's, they were poor in speed stability, and noisy, and had poor high-end extention and had a "gritty" sort of distortion to the sound. I think most decent open-reel recorders from the late 1960's till the late 1970's operating at 7.5 IPS sonically blew all the cartridge systems out of the water until the final decade of Compact Cassette technical improvements made the best of them finally compettive to open-reel. It fairly quickly became mechanically unreliable and track alignment went to hell. And the Ka-Wham! Unexpected 8 track Track-Change was rude to say the least. Which just stagnated technically in the late 1960's. Then the cassette technical development quality took off and beat the pants off the 8 track. And the dual-capstan cassette drive systems and motor/flywheel mechanics were improved to the point of lowering wow and flutter to being around what most open-reels could accomplish. Until better tape formulations and amazingly better head/electronics designs came about. For casual use, it made "decent" sounding tapes for the car, slightly quieter and with more high frequency extention than the 1972 Compact Cassette when you consider the non-Dolby Cassette competition was slightly worse. It was head alignment set-up correctly at first, and apart from the horrid AGC that was non-defeatable. I had a Sony 8 track recorder/player around 1972. I only buy reels now if I absolutely cannot find clean vinyl of the same title. I'm not talking about some of those rare configurations, but the standardized version that Ampex and others duplicated in droves back then. It is a recorder, and has Dolby, so it's one of the more recent models.Īs for the claim about reel to reel, I will say this: the decks themselves were pretty darned good, but the pre-recorded tapes were mass-duplicated at higher speeds like cassettes, and I have yet to hear any mass duplicated reel that sounds as good as the vinyl. I wanted the deck mainly to play back rare finds, but it really needs to be gone over, and I don't have the time and/or money to bring it back up to spec. I've not owned 8-track long enough to comment-I have a later-model Fisher I got cheap on eBay, and a box of tapes.but that's it. As the 70s went along, I noticed the tapes sounded better with each passing year, and the last tape I bought in the mid 80s (Rosie Vela's "Zazu") actually sounded pretty good, considering! It held me over until the CD finally came out. Click to expand.Early cassettes were horrid! I have a few A&Ms from back in the early 70s, and you were lucky to hear anything above 4kHz on those.
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