8-track Tape - History

History

The original format for magnetic tape sound reproduction was the reel-to-reel tape recorder, first available in the U.S. in the late 1940s but too expensive and bulky to be practical for amateur home use until well into the 1950s. Loading a reel of tape onto the machine and threading it through the various guides and rollers proved daunting to some casual users—certainly, it was more difficult than putting a vinyl record on a record player and flicking a switch—and because in early years each tape had to be dubbed from the master tape in real-time to maintain good sound quality, prerecorded tapes were more expensive to manufacture, and costlier to buy, than vinyl records.

To eliminate the nuisance of tape-threading, various manufacturers introduced cartridges that held the tape inside a metal or plastic housing to eliminate handling. Most were intended only for low-fidelity voice recording in proprietary dictation machines. The first tape cartridge designed for general consumer use, including music reproduction, was the Sound Tape or Magazine Loading Cartridge (RCA tape cartridge), introduced in 1958 by RCA. Prerecorded stereophonic music cartridges were available, and blank cartridges could be used to make recordings at home, but the format failed to gain popularity.

The Compact Cassette, in appearance and function essentially a miniaturized version of the RCA cartridge, was introduced by the Dutch firm Philips in Europe in 1963, and in the U.S. in late 1964, but it took several years to achieve significant market penetration. Initially, the audio quality was too low to recommend it as a promising medium for music-listening. It seemed to be just another convenient new format for dictation systems and small battery-powered portable units designed for recording speech but not music. By the late 1960s, however, audio quality had been improved enough to make music reproduction acceptable to listeners willing to tolerate a limited frequency range and substantial background hiss in exchange for convenience and economy, and by 1968 AC-powered stereo cassette decks were available. Sony introduced a battery-powered portable stereo cassette recorder in 1970. After the introduction of Dolby B noise reduction for cassettes in the early 1970s, and the advent of new tape coatings that greatly improved the high-frequency response, the Compact Cassette finally became a respectable and increasingly popular medium for listening to music, both on the road and at home.

During the Compact Cassette's unmusical childhood, other formats were introduced in attempts to profit from the widely recognized need for a practical, convenient, affordable means of listening to high-fidelity recorded music while in a moving car. Stereo 8 was released in 1965.