Another varied week at the Bassett Repair Shop with items including: a Technics amplifier, four Dysons, an electric scooter, a VHS VCR, a 35mm transparency slide viewer, a Halfords compressor, a Pure radio, a Delonghi coffee maker and a motorized toy car that was so big it probably needed insurance. This week’s outlier and blast from the past was an 8-track cartridge player. You have to be of a certain age to remember these little gems, so I’ll summarise: You have a plastic cartridge that contains a long loop of magnetic tape, onto which you could record 4 parallel tracks of stereo music – hence the 8 tracks. When you inserted the cartridge into the player, it would play the first stereo track. When it got to the end of the track, the pickup head would jump down to the second track and then to the third and so on. If you left an 8-track playing it would endlessly loop over and over.
Magnetic tape was a plastic tape with a thin layer of iron oxide (rust) coated onto it. Over time, and with endless playing, this would wear out and fall off, resulting in a muffled sound. Speed stability was also generally wonky. High quality, it was not. We’ve all become conditioned to very high quality digital recordings and now, when we listen to 8-tracks from the 1970s, the comparison is astounding. I guess we didn’t know any better! Back in the 70s, 8-track players were very popular in cars and I can remember my parent’s car having only two 8-track tapes: The Carpenters greatest hits and Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water. On a Sunday afternoon we’d go out in the car and these two beauties were the soundtrack. Middle of the road, beige music thumping through (not so) great 4 inch speakers and PVC upholstery certainly compounded the motion sickness. Ah, sweet memories... Today, if I hear Karen Carpenter or Simon & Garfunkel singing one of their maudlin hits, I’m an 8-year-old with travel sickness all over again. Happy days…
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