On Mon, 10 Nov 2008 08:51:24 -0500, Boater
wrote:

Steve wrote:
On Sun, 09 Nov 2008 20:53:37 -0500, wrote:

On Sun, 9 Nov 2008 15:35:17 -0800, "Calif Bill"
wrote:

8 tracks? I have a whole passel of 'em.
Cleaned them out of the mother-in-laws apartment in the spring.
I meant to catalogue and list them on Kijiji or Craigs List

What a piece of crap design.

The design was excellent, it was the market driven quality that gave
them a bad reputation. I have a genuine Lear 8 track cartridge that
has literally thousands of hours on it. It was elevator music in an
office.
There were also a lot of bad machines out there. The fact that radio
stations used "carts" that were the same basic design for decades
supports the strength of the design.

Radio station carts were only the length of the commercial, 30, 60
seconds, whatever. They didn't have to have a rewind. Have you ever
tried to rewind an 8-track to get to some part of a song you like
again, or to get to the song before the one you're listening to? Also,
you have a choice of either having a blank spot at the end of a song
before the next one waiting for the end of the tape for the track to
change *or* it would just change tracks in the middle of a song.
Usually the latter. And I won't even talk about jams.

What a piece of crap design. And it's the design, not the equipment.
It's fine for carts. Crap for consumer audio media. Casette tape was
a huge improvement.

Steve


Was everything in life that tough for you, Steve?

What a whiner.

Not at all. As I said, casette tapes were much better and served me
very well for decades. Huge improvement over 8-track.

Steve