![]() Fast-forwarding times were extremely slow and there was no way to rewind the tape except by fast-forwarding all the way back around. Also, the little metal tape splice that held together the continuous tape loop would eventually break which meant, if you ever wanted to listen to the tape again, you had to carefully try to fish the end out of the tape spool and try to splice it together. The pressure pads would breakdown and turn to goo. Distortion levels were high, wow/flutter was bad. ![]() Even with spot-on head alignment, frequency-response was very poor and noise/hiss levels were high. The tapehead would often drift out of alignment and you could hear the song on program 2 playing while also listening to the song on program 1 and so on. Crosstalk problems on 8-tracks were not of the L>R and Rsize (you could fit four CCs, in cases, in the space of one 8-track tape).Although 8-track played at a faster speed, the audio tracks on the tape were the same size as those on the CC but, due to the moving playback head, tape alignment on an 8-track was an issue and affected the sound quality (such as hearing two different tracks at the same time).However, in all other aspects the CC was a much-better format for the following reasons: I think the reason no one has really tried to revive the 8-track format is that it had basically only one advantage over the compact cassette (CC): faster playback speed (3 3/4 inches per second vs. Fine for car use, but at home for true audio fidelity, it was useless. I forgot what the average S/N was on 8T but I'm sure it was also quite horrible. I eventually gave up for the far superior cassette medium. More than once I thought I had it perfect, only to run out just a few seconds before the song ended. ![]() After a while, it got to be too much of a hassle to try and calculate the song lengths to avoid the track change foil. I also owned an 8T recorder for a while back then, bought blanks and recorded for use in the car. More than once, I actually unrolled an entire tape on the living room floor and rewound it loosely, which would buy me a few more plays before it would happen again. Once the lubricant dried out, the tape would jam and hang, stretch and be "eaten". Some tapes had a metal spring with a felt pad, similar to a cassette but much larger, which avoided this problem completely.Īnother issue was the tape itself, which was coated with lubricant so that it could feed smoothly out of the center of the reel (see photo in the link above). I'm not affiliated with him but this guy does this still today We would take out the flywheel and insert it into a small device hooked up to an air compressor, which would blow grit at the capstan while we rotated it and resurfaced it. Company, we had a sandblaster for the flywheel capstans. Back in the mid-70s when I worked at Teledyne Svc. Foam pads that disintegrated and turned into goo or powder, gumming up the works.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |