Last Updated on 5 years by Christopher G Mendla
Ah, the old 8-track player. Who remembers ..
Back in the 1960’s through some time in the 1980’s cars came with several types of sound systems ranging from a factory installed AM radio with a speaker in the front dash to AM/FM/Cassette systems with equalizers and hearing damaging speakers in the doors, front deck and a big bass speaker or two in the rear deck.
In addition to the cassette players, there were 8 track players. A cassette player had two sides and would auto reverse at the end.
8 Tracks were a continuous tape. The would play to a point and then there would be a distinctive Click as the tape heads moved to the next track. In some cases, that happened in the middle of a song. So, if you were enjoying back seat recreation, you could listen to the same album over and over but not have any distracting commercials.
There were some disadvantages to 8 tracks. You couldn’t easily ‘burn your own’ 8 track as you could with a cassette. The tapes themselves were a lot bulkier. Occassionally, an 8 track would get jammed in the heads. Sometimes the tape would ‘get loose’ and you’d have a handful of spaghetti like tape that was once your favorite album.
