Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Remember 8 track tapes?

Suddenly can post pictures.

It's an Earth Day miracle. May Gaia bless us each and every one.

I had a few tapes that you had to wedge a pack of matches in below the tape or else the music would sound like you're on some sort of exotic drug or something. It put a whole new meaning on the term "far out".

yea i had a bunch back in the day

Those under age 55 or so will never know the joy of hearing the tape changing tracks in the middle of their favorite song.

.....or finding a really good tape and spending hard-earned bucks on it! Only to come back to your car and finding the case warped to the point it won't go into the player!
Heaven only knows how many dollars in warped 8-track tapes I've tossed into car wash trash cans! 😖
Did I learn?
Nope! Just went back and bought more! 🤪

take that back,

my granddad had a el camino with an 8 track player, I swear he only had one tape, Clarence Carter. My younger cousin would always start singing "I be strokin" when we would go to get in that mullet of a car.

THen I remember when they had the 8 track tape adapter you could put the newer cassettes in to play them.

I used to buy my 8-tracks from a store called "Tape World" . They would stamp the date of purchase right on the tape, and guarantee it for 30 days, no questions asked.

They must’ve been designed by a sadist to frustrate all that tried to use them.

The Stereo 8 Cartridge was created in 1964 by a consortium led by Bill Lear, of Lear Jet Corporation,[8] along with Ampex, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Motorola, and RCA Victor Records (RCA - Radio Corporation of America).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8-track_cartridge

I still sing along with some of those songs on XM and add the clicks as I am singing. Only way I know how to sing some of them. I still have a box of those in storage. In my youth during the summer driving combine I had an 8 track and would listen to those for 14 hours a day. I would switch them up with friends that also had them in their combines and yes after a while you would have to "adjust" them with a wedge of some type. My parents bought a new Chrysler car in the early 70's and it had AM, FM, 8 Track, and on the Transmisson hump it had a new fandangled thing called a cassette player, played these tiny little things you put in there.

Those were the worse, especially when the music would fade down to change tracks right in the middle of a song.

Pulling out of the high school parking lot the day they turned us seniors loose: May 1969. Grassroots 8-Track playing "Live for Today" on the tape deck in my '67 Firebird. Tape deck stolen later that fall while at college.

I had dozens of them, until someone stole them.

I remember the crinkling sound that the player made when it started chewing up the tape…😳

I still have an Automatic Radio AM/FM 8 track under dash unit kicking around in my shop.

My 63 Impala SS 327 white on red, had a Lear Jet 8 track with a now small amp and speakers. Had a small Allen head wrench on the dash, to adjust the play back speed for the temperature change. Way better than the rock AM radio stations of the time that expired daily at sunset.
When I got the Impala, I called my Uncle in Birmingham, AL and drove down to his custom car shop to have the sound system installed over the weekend. Then drove back to Campbell in time for revile, Monday morning.

Still find a tape, in a storage box, now and then. Stones, CCR, Beatles, Zombies, Yardbirds, etc.

And not blurry at that!

It is, truly a miracle of epic proportion!

Ah but do any of you remember the 4 tract

I had a lear jet 8 track in my 64 Buick LeSabre. Those were the days!!

.....or it would go fast forward real fast like the chipmunks. Then you'd spend the next 3 hours picking tape out of the deck.

I had an 8 track in a Firebird back in the day. I wore out a “Peter Frampton Comes Alive” tape in that thing.

Of course not.

I hear ya. I wore the first one out and had to buy another tape. lol

Those Pioneer Supertuners were the tits...

I remember the 4 tracks! It was a great day when 8 tracks came out and already had the wheel in them. My room mate in college worked at Columbia Records in Terre Haute and when they had a monthly sale of " seconds" employees got advanced buying. We had all the latest stuff! Records were a buck and 8 tracks were two. We used to buy the good stuff and sell to friends for $3.50 which was half price.

Had one in my 66 mustang, about 1976. Cassettes were becoming popular a few years later.

Wabby do you play your 78rpm vinyls also?

And it's not a photo on a monitor, more rejoicing. He ditched his crystal radio internet connection for this one....

I still have all mine. Wish I could get them transferred to CD's.I have quite few 78's too.

Heck, I remember 4 track tapes....

Current truck doesn't even have a CD player. Can't remember if previous car did. Car before that only had AM/FM.

Like a lot of Gen X - I had the GIANT portfolio of CD's on the passenger seat to change music at stop signs. Then we got 5 disc changers but the Crutchfield catalog was REQUIRED lunch time reading. (shoehorned 2 Rockford Fosgate 10 inch subs behind the seat of my regular cab Toyota with the amp under the seat. Ported, a good bass track would launch rolled up socks out the ports - it moved some air)

Buddy had 8 track in his 79 Corolla he drove to school.

my cousin worked for the New York City sanitation department. Back in the late 70s everybody was throwing them out. He took them all lol, he had 100s and 100s … after a while we started use them as target practice.

I bought a 76 Camaro in 1983 when I turned 16, still got the car! Lol
It had a Pioneer 8 track in it, played alot of 8 tracks and then bought a cassette adapter so I could play my cassette tapes. Thought it sounded pretty good back then! Lol

LMAO..

it only because that reminds me of my grandmother.

she knew 8-track tapes and had a few when I was a small kid. but she got some sort of newer car that had it one of the first cassette players in it.

she was kind of disappointed when they ate tracks didn't work in the cassette player but she just was looking for 6 tracks. and that's what she called a cassette player to the day she died was a 6 track I guess she called it that cuz it was smaller..

to put it all in perspective she passed away something like 96 to 98 range..

I grew up on 8 tracks.
Home stereo 33 LPs and 8 tracks. Always old Country.
First 2 cars had AM/FM 8 tracks. By the time I was driving, I listened to Rock and Country.
I bought a cassette adapter that played cassettes in an 8 track player from a buddy, and started buying cassettes about 1980 or 81. I remember the first cassette I bought was Meat Loaf’s “Bat Outta Hell!😎
From then on I bought cassettes, until I finally switched to CDs in the late 90s.
Few years ago, I was helping my Aunt read up her attic. She had 3 or 4 big boxes full of 8 track tapes, all 70s Country. She joined one of them tape clubs, where you bought a dozen for a dollar, and then 2 or 3 a month for a year!😀
Wilma was a big influence on me, and i know there was a big pile of some solid gold Country there! Johnny Cash, Conway, Patsy Cline, Loretta…, heck, you name it!😀
I’m gonna go to an auction and get one of them old stereos for a couple bucks just to see if those things will still play!
I haven’t decided whether I’ll give her the stereo, or buy her out of those old tapes!
Reon

8-tracks, cassettes...the CD was a FANTASTIC invention.

Yes. They sucked compared to technology we have now.

Still have a working 8 track player and a 100 or so tapes in the game room here at house.

I have a friend with 5000 records and 6000 CD's in his media room (his count, not mine). Each backed up to a hard drive/recorded etc. He's a music nut but no 8 tracks lol. One of those guys whose every electronic device he owns is on his network. Smart guy, former coms guy in the Army but that's too much for me.

Hell, I remember crystal radios.

I had the old Craig Power-Play..........

What vehicles of old had actual turntable record players factory installed? I recall seeing pics but my teen yrs started in ‘67 and I’ve never seen one in person.

I was 16 had a ‘71 Lemans sport. My geek friend at school told me to buy a cassette player for it. I had never even heard of one and didn’t know what it was. I bought an 8-track player instead thinking I knew better than him. I learned a valuable life lesson that day to always listen to someone who knows more than me on a given subject. That advice has never failed me to this day.

late 50's-early 60's Chryslers & Desotos i think?... when i was a kid in the 70's, we had one so optioned in our salvage yard... nobody wanted it, went to the crusher...

when i was a kid just about everybody with one of those found their door glass broken and their tape deck missing... the smart ones didn't lock their doors...

Never owned one but a buddy had one in a tricked out 59 Ford. It must have been in a different gear, as a 3-minute tune would run through in about 2 minutes. I had no idea the Supremes could sing that fast.

it's not easy to trick out a 59 Ford!... lol

Well I think the 8 track only had four tracts, no?
Never thought of why they called it an 8 track when it only had four tracks?

Yes, kept a bottle of alcohol in my car to clean the capstan drive.

My 8 track decks got stolen too quickly in 1970.

And Q-tips !!

Each channel had 2 tracks, left and right. Therefore you had 8 tracks.

No

Yep, still have it and tapes, I started out with reel to reel.