![]() ![]() By 1967, Ford offered 8-track upgrades for all its models. RCA issued 175 Stereo-8 cartridges from its RCA Victor and RCA Camden labels. In September 1965, Ford Motor Company introduced factory-installed and dealer-installed eight-track tape players as options in the Mustang, Thunderbird, and Lincoln. Lear Jet produced 100 demonstration copies of the tape and player and sent them to auto company and RCA executives.Ī consortium consisting of Bill Lear of Lear Jet Corporation, Ampex, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Motorola, and RCA Victor Records created 8-track tape technology in 1964. His design reduced the mechanical complexity of the cartridge. Richard Kraus designed a Lear Jet Stereo 8-track cartridge in 1963. He introduced his Stereo-Pak four-track cartridge stereo system tape in 1962 in Florida and California. Eash formed the Fidelipac Corporation to manufacture his tapes and recorders.Įarl “Madman” Muntz of Los Angeles saw these broadcast carts' potential for automobile music systems. Fidlpac tapes were nicknamed “carts” by DJs and radio engineers. Collins Radio Company licensed the cartridge and introduced it at the 1959 National Association of Broadcasters' annual show. ![]() George Eash invented his Fidelipac cartridge in 1953. RCA developed its Magazine Loading Tape Cartridge in 1958. Because each tape had to be dubbed from a master, reel to reel tapes were expensive. ![]() Within ten years, the cassette was clearly going the way of the LP, although blank cassettes for home recording continue to be used.The magnetic tape reel-to-reel recorder, introduced in the late 1940s and commonplace through the 1950s, was expensive and bulky for home use. The Compact Disc, introduced in the early 1980s by Phillips and the Sony Corporation, was slowly gaining ground. LP sales went into decline, and by about 1990 few phonograph discs were being released. The success of the cassette as both a format for making home recordings and for listening to purchased albums came together in the 1980s. Dolby noise reduction and improved forms of tape created especially for the cassette helped improved its sound quality so that it nearly equaled that of the LP record. Although it started as a cheap format for teens, engineers made so many improvements to the basic cassette technology that pretty soon it was acceptable to include it in "hi-fi" home audio systems. When the quality of automobile cassette players improved in the mid-1970s, more and more people abandoned the eight track. Pre-recorded cassettes were a little cheaper than eight track tapes, and they were considerably smaller and more convenient. But what the 8-track could do well, the cassette could do better, and by the middle 1970s it was catching up. It quickly became one of the most popular options for new cars in the United States, and became the first truly successful portable tape product. In 1965 William Lear introduced an 8-track tape player, a new tape cartridge to use in cars. The cassette remained the medium of choice for making inexpensive recordings at home, while another form of cartridge briefly stole the market for pre-recorded albums on tape. Pre-recorded cassette tapes sold poorly, however, because albums offered better sound quality and were often less expensive. At first it was just a fad, but later young people used blank tapes as a way to share recordings and create a music collection at very low cost. Introduced in the United States in 1964, the medium was an instant hit with teens. Less expensive than its predecessor, the reel-to-reel recorder, the cassette was aimed at a new market-ordinary people willing to sacrifice sound quality for inexpensive recordings. In 1962 the Phillips Company of Eindhoven, The Netherlands introduced the cassette and cassette player to the European market. Although the cassette would move to the forefront of high fidelity audio, it originally appeared as a child’s toy. It came roaring back in the early 1960s in the form of the Phillips “Compact Cassette,” today simply called the cassette. In the 1950s, magnetic tape looked like the obvious replacement for the disc, but it fizzled. A Phillips Carry-Corder cassette recorder from the mid-1960s. ![]()
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