Most were intended only for low-fidelity voice recording in dictation machines. To eliminate the inconvenience of tape-threading, various manufacturers introduced cartridges that held the tape inside a metal or plastic housing, thereby eliminating handling. Loading a reel of tape onto the machine and threading it through the various guides and rollers for playback was more difficult than putting an LP on a record player. Because, in the early years, each tape had to be dubbed from the master tape in real time to maintain good sound quality, pre-recorded tapes were more expensive to manufacture and costlier to buy than vinyl records which could be stamped far more quickly than their own playing time. The original format for magnetic tape sound reproduction was the reel-to-reel tape recorder, first available in the United States in the late 1940s, but too expensive and bulky to be practical for amateur home use until well into the 1950s. Muntz's design had itself been adapted from the Fidelipac cartridge, which in turn had been developed by George Eash.Ī four channel quadraphonic version of the format was announced by RCA in April 1970 and called first Quad-8 and later Q8.
Lear had tried to create an endless-loop wire recorder in the 1940s but gave up in 1946, only to be re-inspired by Muntz's four-track design in 1963. It was a further development of the similar Stereo-Pak four-track cartridge, which had been introduced by pioneering businessman and engineer Earl "Madman" Muntz, who promoted and sold consumer electronics in America. The Stereo 8 Cartridge was created in 1964 by a consortium led by Bill Lear, of Lear Jet Corporation, along with Ampex, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Motorola, and RCA Victor Records ( RCA - Radio Corporation of America). One advantage of the 8-track tape cartridge was that it could play continuously, and did not have to be "flipped over" to play the entire tape. The format was most popular in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Mexico, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden and Japan. The 8-track tape (formally Stereo 8 commonly called eight-track cartridge, eight-track tape, and eight-track) is a magnetic tape sound recording technology that was popular from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s, when the compact cassette, which pre-dated the 8-track system, surpassed it in popularity for pre-recorded music. The black rubber pinch roller is at upper right.
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