When I was 17, in 1972, my best friend had an 8-track tape player installed in his Ford Maverick.  Like me, he was a music lover and album buyer, but when he was driving around, he had grown mighty tired of having to listen to commercial radio in the car, especially the incessant commercials and DJ banter found on AM radio.

As the guy riding shotgun, I enjoyed this too.  Being able to choose your own music seemed like a dream come true. But it didn’t take long for me to see several significant, annoying drawbacks of the 8-track format which prevented me from ever considering investing in it.  

To this day, for reasons I’ll explain, I contend the 8-track tape was an ill-conceived and poorly executed idea.

Perhaps you shared my distaste for 8-tracks and didn’t succumb to the temptations of portability and convenience.  Or maybe you joined the millions of other Americans who embraced 8-tracks in the 1970s, only to rue the day several years later when the entire format went the way of the dodo bird (and rightly so).

Here are the six most obvious defective characteristics of the 8-track tape that, in my view, doomed the format to an early obsolescence:

No rewind or fast-forward options.   At home, when you listened to albums, you could change songs easily.  Simply pick up the needle on your turntable and move effortlessly to another specific song, or put on another album.

Once the decision was made to embrace some sort of tape player, if you chose a reel-to-reel tape deck or a cassette tape deck, you could hit “FF” or “REW” in order to back up or move ahead to the desired place on the tape. With 8-track tapes, you didn’t have that flexibility. Eight-track tapes were configured as four “programs” sharing four parallel portions of the tape bandwidth. If you were listening to a song and decided you wanted to skip to the next song, or maybe go back and listen to the same song again, you were out of luck. All you could do was jump to one of the next programs and listen to whatever song was playing on that program. To listen to the song you really wanted to hear, you had to listen to other songs first before the one you wanted came back around on the program. Man, was this irritating!

Messing with the way the artist sequenced the music.  

Because 8-track tapes are set up as four programs lasting about 10 or 11 minutes each, the order of songs often had to be changed in order to maximize efficient use of the available tape.  For example, if an album’s first three songs lasted more than 10 minutes, one song might be replaced on Program 1 by a different, shorter song from later on the album just so the music would fit the 8-track’s limited format.  This might happen on all four programs, completely altering the flow of the music as intended by the artist.  A particularly egregious example was “Abbey Road” (see tracking below).

Even worse, sometimes there was no mathematical way to make the various album tracks fit in four 10-minute sets, so one or more tracks would actually have to be interrupted midway through.  The tape would then fade out, and several seconds (even as much as a minute or more) would pass before it would automatically switch to the next program, and the song would then fade back in at the point of interruption and proceed to its conclusion. Needless to say, this was an abominable way to listen to a song, and certainly not the artist’s intent.

Physical limitations of the tape.

The movement of the head at the point where it switched between programs could sometimes pull the tape up or down, causing the tape to fold over and start playing the back side of the tape. The tape would continue to play, buy very muffled and barely audible. Continued playing would flip the entire tape over, so the tape would be wound on the reel inside with the backside showing. The program switch point is often the place where the tapes would sometimes be ingested into the player (“eaten”), most often when the tape head moved from program 4 to program 1, its furthest track change movement. At that point, the tape was ruined, and the player could no longer play that tape, or any tape.

Head alignment:  Misalignment resulted in reduced high frequencies and allowed sounds from adjacent tracks to bleed over, an effect sometimes known as “double-tracking.”  Among audio service technicians, there used to be a joke that “the 8-track is the only audio device which knocks itself out of alignment four times every time you listen to it all the way through.”

The sensing foil that allows the tape to switch programs would sometimes dry up, fall off, and the tape would separate, and disappear inside the sealed cartridge. This was especially prevalent on bootleg tapes that typically used cheaper sensing foils.  In general, the 8-track market was flooded with cheaper bootleg tapes, found at truck stops and service stations. Had the tape been reinforced on both sides at this point, the tapes would have been much more reliable.

Capstan wear and buildup was also a chronic problem with 8-tracks.  As tape residue, dirt and lubricant accumulated on the capstan, the tape speed would increase and, since the buildup was uneven, the tape speed would become correspondingly uneven.  Similarly, some units were subject to the capstan wear, causing a decrease in tape speed. Any alteration to tape speed is clearly an unwanted defect that made listening to 8-tracks unpleasant and frustrating.

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I had a couple of other friends at that time who invested in reel-to-reel tape decks as an additional component in their home stereo systems.  These devices, introduced in the 1950s and generally purchased only by serious audiophiles, offered high-quality sound but were relatively expensive and a little tricky to operate for most casual music fans. They became more popular by the 1970s as prices came down and more casual listeners became interested in home recording and assembling customized mixed tapes that collected choice tracks from their album collections.

I loved this concept.  It was like being your own DJ, but without the commercials and talk.  You could put together mixes for every occasion — holiday parties, pool bashes, dances, romantic encounters and more.

But reel-to-reel tapes were not portable.  You could take them to a friend’s house only if he/she also had the necessary reel-to-reel player.  Most important, you couldn’t play them in a car.  So I chose not to invest in this format either.

Enter the cassette tape.  When first introduced in the early ’60s, their sound quality was pathetic, marred by a prominent hiss and muffled sound.  Their use was adequate for use in voice dictation and playback of children’s nursery rhymes and such.  So music lovers shunned the format…until the Dolby Noise Reduction technology arrived in the early ’70s to substantially improve cassette tape sound quality.  This development, combined with newer chromium-dioxide tapes, made cassettes a significantly more attractive format. Decent sound quality, portability, and fast forward-rewind capabilities made them the clear winner as the best music delivery system for your car.

In late 1974, I made the investment in both a home cassette deck for play back and recording, and an auto cassette deck to play tapes on the road. I immediately began compiling mixed tapes (“Hack Tapes,” I called them) and they became very popular among my circle of friends, many of whom requested them at parties and asked to borrow them for road trips. I even took to making custom mixed tapes as birthday or Christmas presents for friends and family.

As more people saw the advantages of cassettes over 8-tracks beginning around 1975-76, the 8-track began its inevitable slide toward extinction.

So what was the thinking behind the 8-track, anyway?

The “Stereo 8 track” cartridge was designed by Richard Kraus while working under Bill Lear for his Lear Jet Corporation in 1963. The major change from the reel-to-reel tape players then available was to incorporate a neoprene rubber and nylon pinch roller into the cartridge itself, rather than to make the pinch roller a part of the tape player, reducing mechanical complexity.

In September 1965, Ford Motor Company introduced factory-installed and dealer-installed 8-track tape players as an option on three of its models, and RCA introduced hundreds of Stereo-8 cartridges from its labels of recording artists’ catalogs.  This push from major corporations helped spark the interest in this new product, despite its drawbacks which would become obvious later.

Hundreds of thousands of car and truck owners took the bait. Those in rural and small-town environments seemed to embrace it the most, as evidenced by the number of country songs that mentioned 8-tracks. Here’s Conway Twitty’s “Red Neckin’ Love Makin’ Night”: “Get ready to go, we’re gonna roll about sundown, I got some boogie-woogie music on the old 8-track, /I got the top laid back and we’ll cruisin’ and foolin’ around, /Here I am baby, ready to play, slide it on in and we’ll slip away…” Or Alan Jackson’s song “1976”: “Eight track tapes were still in style and Elvis was still alive, Wonder Woman sure looked fine, Bionic Man was still Prime Time…”

Some consumers bought 8-track players for their home stereos, but curiously, the manufacturers didn’t offer 8-track recorders, so buyers couldn’t assemble their own mixed tapes like they could with cassettes. I believe that oversight helped contribute to the decline of the 8-track’s popularity, and by 1982, the record labels stopped selling new music in the 8-track format.

Some folks loved the format and defended it to its dying day.  In an article in Stereo Review magazine that collected opinions from music consumers, here’s one viewpoint from a guy who felt the 8-track was superior to the cassette: “Cassettes sound like crap.  They only play at 1-7/8 IPS (inches per second), so even with all the metal tape formulations, and Dolby, etc., the sound quality is limited compared to an 8-track.  If 8-track manufacturers had invested in the metal and chrome tape the cassette had, it would have blown away the cassette, because 8-track plays at 3.75 IPS, twice the speed of a cassette, and with analog tape, it’s all about tape speed.”

Here’s another: “Those who say that not being able to rewind an 8-track is a drawback are crazy.  You could just let it keep playing.  Want to start over again? Just switch from track 2, to 3-4 and back to 1.  There you are, rewound, with just a few button clicks.”

Other observers were merciless in their assessment of 8-tracks: “The primary reason the 8-track became extinct was because it was an unreliable piece of shit.  They simply weren’t built to last and, subsequently, they earned a reputation as ticking time bombs.  Truth be told, brand new eight-tracks often sounded good, and the tapes themselves were virtually indestructible. They rarely melted in the sun or cracked.  It was the internal components that started to fall to pieces over time.  If the manufacturers hadn’t opted for cheap construction, things might have turned out differently.”

“If the heads became misaligned even slightly (a VERY common occurrence), one track would bleed through into another track.  Worst case scenario:  two songs at equal pitch would play at the same time.  Best case:  a faint background of an altogether different track.  Either way, it was a thoroughly miserable listening experience.”

So there you have it.  The 8-track format, while perhaps not all that bad a concept, was shoddily merchandised and manufactured, and nothing was done to combat the onslaught of pirate/bootleg tapes on the market, which helped kill its credibility.

Cassettes, on the other hand, lasted for decades, staying viable as a music delivery option even as vinyl records were outperformed by CDs in the ’80s and especially in the ’90s and 2000s. (Eventually, though, cassettes and CDs both gave way to mp3 files and online downloading.)

Vinyl has since made a remarkable comeback in the past 10-15 years, and CDs too, to a lesser extent. Cassettes? Still hanging on by a thread in some circles, but 8-tracks are ancient artifacts from a bygone era.

If you want to get a chuckle out of anyone who lived through the ’70s, pull out an 8-track tape and ask them to slip it into their player!