8-Tracks

[dtel]

You have to pull the machine apart to clean it.

No you don't...

Dave

No way he will fix it for $1, unless you have nice long legs (female type) then it's free ! []

[Colin]

Here is why engineers don't write specs! here is the simple carriage returns he needed:

You 2 channel tube guys can get all nostalgic on this

one,have fun.

Long before he set down to work on the famous Learjet,

William Powell Lear had made a name for himself developing instruments and

communications equipment for airplanes. In 1946, Lear Inc. became a licensee of

a Chicago-based R&D laboratory called the Armour Research Foundation

allowing Bill Lear access to Armour's successful wire recording technology,

bits of which made their way into his own design for an endless loop wire

recorder.

While this machine hardly even made a ripple in the

marketplace, it was the genesis of Lear's interest in the endless loop. 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 called Cousino Electronics, 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 (a maker of antennas). When Cousino put 1/4 inch tape (about 7.5

millimeters wide, slightly narrower than the motion picture film) in the

cartridges, he found that with more than 30 -45 seconds' worth of tape in the

loop the tape would quickly bind up. The problem, as it turns out, was not only

friction but static electricity.

Cousino invented and patented the use of a "double

coated" tape, treated on the back with colloidal graphite, which not only

lubricated the tape in the pack but conducted away static (graphite is a conductor).

Cousino soon developed a cartridge specially adapted for audio tape that he

marketed in 1952 through his company, Cousino Electronics, as the "Audio

Vendor."

A xxx later, fully enclosed version was called the

"Echomatic" 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, an

advanced two-track cartridge which, like the later 8-track, required a special

player.

In the mean time, another inventor named George Eash

designed and patented a similar cartridge that came to be known as the

"Fidelipac". Eash was an inventor whose main claim to fame before the

Fidelipac was a patent for a helmet mounted loudspeaker for soldiers. Like

Cousino, he was from Toledo and was interested in the burgeoning audio-visual

field. He became interested in cartridges after he began to rent a work space

in the Cousino Electronics building.

Following Cousino's pattern, Eash designed and patented a

cartridge with similar specifications, later modifying it to include a more

complex reel braking mechanism. But while Cousino had assembled and marketed

his own products, Eash chose to licensed his designs to a number of outside

manufacturers. One result of this strategy was the widespread adoption of the

Eash cartridge standard by a wide range of different companies.

Eash's cartridge, although complex internally and prone to

sudden failure, was nonetheless the basis of dozens of commercial applications

of the endless loop, two of which were particularly successful. The first and

most long-lasting [use] was in broadcasting.

Radio equipment manufacturers since the end of World War II

had been developing equipment to automate radio stations-- the idea was to

replace expensive d.j.'s and board operators with machines. Eash's Fidelipac

design became the basis of several new recorders adapted for radio station use,

with heavy duty mechanisms, automatic starting and stopping features and

end-of-tape sensors.

Even in 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 Kaiser-Frazer

automobile dealer who had earned his nickname through his loud, flamboyant

television commercials. His motto was "I buy 'em retail and sell 'em wholesale.

It's more fun that way!" Already a national celebrity by the 1950s, he

soon jumped from auto sales to electronics, opening a chain of television

retail outlets. The sets he sold were manufactured by another of his other

firm's, Muntz Television Inc., and they were based on a clever design that

saved a few bucks on parts and assembly.

The TV business had its ups and downs, and Muntz went from

riches to rags when he landed in bankruptcy court in 1955,and then back to

riches a few years later when the market turned around. When he discovered the

Fidelipac in the early 1960s he sold Muntz TV and threw in his lot with the

endless loop, never to return to his television business (although in later

years he re-entered the TV industry with a line of big screen TV sets).

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, where

"hi-fi" hardly mattered, Muntz sought to enhance the appeal of his

product by adopting the 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.

These heads put 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 then began to 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, not to mention Barry Goldwater's ride (make unknown).

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 spectacularly-successful Learjet 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.

In 1963,he [Lear] became a distributor for Muntz

Electronics, mainly in order to install 4-track units aboard his Learjets.

Dissatisfied with the Muntz technology, he contacted two of the leading

suppliers of original equipment tape heads, the Nortronics Company and Michigan

Magnetics.

He [Lear] 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.

During1964, Lear's aircraft company constructed 100 players for distribution to

executives at the auto companies and RCA. Just how Bill Lear got his products

under the dashboards of Ford Mustangs and Fairlanes is a little unclear.

Certainly Lear had the cachet of his successful business jet

project, and had many personal contacts in industry. In a roundabout kind of

way, he already had ties to Ford. In the 1930s Lear and Paul Galvin had

together built Motorola into a leading manufacturer of car radios, and Motorola

was now affiliated with Ford. Lear Radio even manufactured a wire recorder

briefly in the late 1940s.

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 Learjet 8-tracks, Ford agreed to offer the players as

optional equipment on 1966 models.

The response, in one Ford spokesman's words, "was more

than anyone expected." 65,000 of the players were installed that year alone.

The machines were initially manufactured Ford's electronics supplier and the

firm that had pioneered the "motor victrola" --Motorola. Although the

8-track today is dismissed as a failure, from a contemporary standpoint it was

a huge success.

It was the first tape format to achieve a true, national

mass market. While the projections of the promoters of recorded tape on

reel-to-reel had fallen short all during the 1950s and 1960s, cart sales on 4

and 8-track grew spectacularly from the early 1960s through the 1970s. While

most of this was due to the 8-track, some labels continued to issue 4-tracks

into the 1970s. Meanwhile, a number of new contenders rose up to enjoy fleeting

moments of glory.

Bernard Cousino, arguably the font of much of our cart

technology, 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 a-v 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, the company 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 had recently been acquired by Ampex

and who was preparing to start a new under the name John Herbert Orr

Enterprises.

Orr and Cousino cooked up a new firm, called Orrtronics,

which was to be 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 "Orrtronic 8-Track", a

better-sounding but commercially unsuccessful response to Lear's cart. The

obscure Orrtronics 8-Track. The "horizontal" tape playing surface can

be seen as a light gray rectangle at the upper left. The slot just to the right

is where the capstan contacted a friction roller to drive the tape. These were

the main patentable features of the cartridge. 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, in his 90s, submitted a patent for an endless loop

videocassette. Endless variations on the endless loop cart appeared during the

1960s and1970s.

The best known, of course, was the Playtape, a tiny cart

introduced in the fall of 1966 which later re-emerged in slightly modified form

as the basis of a Dictaphone Corp. telephone answering machine in the 1970s.

Answering machines, in fact, were a major source of new endless loop variations

from the 1960s on.

The success of the Fidelipac in radio spawned a host of

imitators, including both the well known Audiopak, the Aristocart made in

Canada, the Marathon made by some Massachusetts firm, and the Tapex. The

manufacture of 8-track players shifted almost entirely to Japan between1965 and

1975. There were a few valiant efforts to revive the flagging American

industry, but to little avail as the foreign firms cranked players out in huge

numbers using cheap labor. Nonetheless Quatron Inc., a Maryland firm, shone

brightly for a few years making the (now highly desirable) Model 48 automatic

8-track changer, but its star soon faded. By the time the major record labels

stopped offering new releases on 8-track, there were no domestic manufacturers

of home or auto players.

[Dennie]

Here is why engineers don't write specs! here is the simple carriage returns he needed:

You 2 channel tube guys can get all nostalgic on this
one,have fun.

Long before he set down to work on the famous Learjet,
William Powell Lear had made a name for himself developing instruments and
communications equipment for airplanes. In 1946, Lear Inc. became a licensee of
a Chicago-based R&D laboratory called the Armour Research Foundation
allowing Bill Lear access to Armour's successful wire recording technology,
bits of which made their way into his own design for an endless loop wire
recorder.

While this machine hardly even made a ripple in the
marketplace, it was the genesis of Lear's interest in the endless loop. 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 called Cousino Electronics, 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 (a maker of antennas). When Cousino put 1/4 inch tape (about 7.5
millimeters wide, slightly narrower than the motion picture film) in the
cartridges, he found that with more than 30 -45 seconds' worth of tape in the
loop the tape would quickly bind up. The problem, as it turns out, was not only
friction but static electricity.

Cousino invented and patented the use of a "double
coated" tape, treated on the back with colloidal graphite, which not only
lubricated the tape in the pack but conducted away static (graphite is a conductor).
Cousino soon developed a cartridge specially adapted for audio tape that he
marketed in 1952 through his company, Cousino Electronics, as the "Audio
Vendor."

A xxx later, fully enclosed version was called the
"Echomatic" 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, an
advanced two-track cartridge which, like the later 8-track, required a special
player.

In the mean time, another inventor named George Eash
designed and patented a similar cartridge that came to be known as the
"Fidelipac". Eash was an inventor whose main claim to fame before the
Fidelipac was a patent for a helmet mounted loudspeaker for soldiers. Like
Cousino, he was from Toledo and was interested in the burgeoning audio-visual
field. He became interested in cartridges after he began to rent a work space
in the Cousino Electronics building.

Following Cousino's pattern, Eash designed and patented a
cartridge with similar specifications, later modifying it to include a more
complex reel braking mechanism. But while Cousino had assembled and marketed
his own products, Eash chose to licensed his designs to a number of outside
manufacturers. One result of this strategy was the widespread adoption of the
Eash cartridge standard by a wide range of different companies.

Eash's cartridge, although complex internally and prone to
sudden failure, was nonetheless the basis of dozens of commercial applications
of the endless loop, two of which were particularly successful. The first and
most long-lasting [use] was in broadcasting.

Radio equipment manufacturers since the end of World War II
had been developing equipment to automate radio stations-- the idea was to
replace expensive d.j.'s and board operators with machines. Eash's Fidelipac
design became the basis of several new recorders adapted for radio station use,
with heavy duty mechanisms, automatic starting and stopping features and
end-of-tape sensors.

Even in 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 Kaiser-Frazer
automobile dealer who had earned his nickname through his loud, flamboyant
television commercials. His motto was "I buy 'em retail and sell 'em wholesale.
It's more fun that way!" Already a national celebrity by the 1950s, he
soon jumped from auto sales to electronics, opening a chain of television
retail outlets. The sets he sold were manufactured by another of his other
firm's, Muntz Television Inc., and they were based on a clever design that
saved a few bucks on parts and assembly.

The TV business had its ups and downs, and Muntz went from
riches to rags when he landed in bankruptcy court in 1955,and then back to
riches a few years later when the market turned around. When he discovered the
Fidelipac in the early 1960s he sold Muntz TV and threw in his lot with the
endless loop, never to return to his television business (although in later
years he re-entered the TV industry with a line of big screen TV sets).

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, where
"hi-fi" hardly mattered, Muntz sought to enhance the appeal of his
product by adopting the 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.

These heads put 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 then began to 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, not to mention Barry Goldwater's ride (make unknown).

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 spectacularly-successful Learjet 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.

In 1963,he [Lear] became a distributor for Muntz
Electronics, mainly in order to install 4-track units aboard his Learjets.
Dissatisfied with the Muntz technology, he contacted two of the leading
suppliers of original equipment tape heads, the Nortronics Company and Michigan
Magnetics.

He [Lear] 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.
During1964, Lear's aircraft company constructed 100 players for distribution to
executives at the auto companies and RCA. Just how Bill Lear got his products
under the dashboards of Ford Mustangs and Fairlanes is a little unclear.

Certainly Lear had the cachet of his successful business jet
project, and had many personal contacts in industry. In a roundabout kind of
way, he already had ties to Ford. In the 1930s Lear and Paul Galvin had
together built Motorola into a leading manufacturer of car radios, and Motorola
was now affiliated with Ford. Lear Radio even manufactured a wire recorder
briefly in the late 1940s.

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 Learjet 8-tracks, Ford agreed to offer the players as
optional equipment on 1966 models.

The response, in one Ford spokesman's words, "was more
than anyone expected." 65,000 of the players were installed that year alone.
The machines were initially manufactured Ford's electronics supplier and the
firm that had pioneered the "motor victrola" --Motorola. Although the
8-track today is dismissed as a failure, from a contemporary standpoint it was
a huge success.

It was the first tape format to achieve a true, national
mass market. While the projections of the promoters of recorded tape on
reel-to-reel had fallen short all during the 1950s and 1960s, cart sales on 4
and 8-track grew spectacularly from the early 1960s through the 1970s. While
most of this was due to the 8-track, some labels continued to issue 4-tracks
into the 1970s. Meanwhile, a number of new contenders rose up to enjoy fleeting
moments of glory.

Bernard Cousino, arguably the font of much of our cart
technology, 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 a-v 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, the company 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 had recently been acquired by Ampex
and who was preparing to start a new under the name John Herbert Orr
Enterprises.

Orr and Cousino cooked up a new firm, called Orrtronics,
which was to be 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 "Orrtronic 8-Track", a
better-sounding but commercially unsuccessful response to Lear's cart. The
obscure Orrtronics 8-Track. The "horizontal" tape playing surface can
be seen as a light gray rectangle at the upper left. The slot just to the right
is where the capstan contacted a friction roller to drive the tape. These were
the main patentable features of the cartridge. 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, in his 90s, submitted a patent for an endless loop
videocassette. Endless variations on the endless loop cart appeared during the
1960s and1970s.

The best known, of course, was the Playtape, a tiny cart
introduced in the fall of 1966 which later re-emerged in slightly modified form
as the basis of a Dictaphone Corp. telephone answering machine in the 1970s.
Answering machines, in fact, were a major source of new endless loop variations
from the 1960s on.

The success of the Fidelipac in radio spawned a host of
imitators, including both the well known Audiopak, the Aristocart made in
Canada, the Marathon made by some Massachusetts firm, and the Tapex. The
manufacture of 8-track players shifted almost entirely to Japan between1965 and
1975. There were a few valiant efforts to revive the flagging American
industry, but to little avail as the foreign firms cranked players out in huge
numbers using cheap labor. Nonetheless Quatron Inc., a Maryland firm, shone
brightly for a few years making the (now highly desirable) Model 48 automatic
8-track changer, but its star soon faded. By the time the major record labels
stopped offering new releases on 8-track, there were no domestic manufacturers
of home or auto players.

Ahhhh.........Wow! Thanks Colin!

Dennie