Forgotten audio formats: 8-track tapes

Phil Strongman

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The 8-track cartridge, aka the Stereo 8, first appeared at trade shows in 1964, just 18 months after the cassette, and it did initially seem to have it all: it was comparatively small, portable, and had pretty good audio quality. And despite its roots in the Mad Men in-car market of the 1950s, it was seemingly future-proof, too, with a unique potential for quadraphonic sound (a potential later realised, in part). Within a few years various megastars were using it, and it was swiftly installed in virtually every radio station in the western world—and, with rising domestic sales, it even had a massive ad campaign fronted by TV star Jimmie "Dy-no-mite!" Walker.

Yet within a few years of that expensive media blitz, the cartridge was dead in the water as far as the consumer market was concerned—and, by the mid-1990s, it was a rare antique even in broadcasting studios. What went wrong is easily explained with hindsight—though it seemed mysterious at the time.

To begin at the beginning, the 8-track was based on something refined by the one-and-only Earl "Madman" Muntz. Master Muntz was a businessman, engineer, and promoter who became famous—or, rather, infamous—in the US for his outrageous clothes, stunts, and TV appearances. He was quoted—and mocked—by many top celebs and comedians such as Bob Hope and Jack Benny. And Muntz loved publicity so much that during the height of McCarthyism—with people being sacked or deported merely for having communist friends—he seriously asked one of his advisers "do you think I’ll make the front pages again if I now join the Communist Party?"

Earl "Madman" Muntz.

High-school dropout Muntz put together his own radio set at the age of eight, and he was barely in his teens when he designed and built a radio for his parents’ car—way back in 1928 when even cars were fairly new. He launched the Muntz Jet car after World War II, a reworked and rebadged Kurtis Kraft Sports car—complete with a full cocktail bar in the back. But he’d changed the Kurtis so much, and added so many extras, that he was actually losing $1,000 on every car sold. So he went on to pioneer the first cheap black-and-white TV sets in the late 1940s, while at the same time popularising the "TV" abbreviation itself. Earl Muntz’s televisions were cut-price, first costing under $150 and then under $100, and he appeared in the subsequent ads himself, wearing bright red long-johns and a large furry Napoleon hat, naturally, while shouting "I wanna give these TV sets away but Mrs Muntz won’t let me! She’s crazy!"

Crazy it may have been, but it worked spectacularly. Muntz's TV sales grossed an amazing $49 million in 1951-52 alone—almost half a billion in today’s money—but his overheads were tight, and his bank unfriendly, and within two years he was posting losses of over one million dollars a year. Muntz television sales then started to drift downwards, and he finally sold off his telly division in 1959. But by then he had returned to his first loves—audio and cars. Peter Goldmark’s Highway Hi-Fi had caused a stir, but his in-car Hi-Fi system had one major snag: it was all based on vinyl records whose audio signal emerged via a needle, a needle which frequently jumped whenever the vehicle went over the slightest bump. This happened until it was heavily weighed-down, a process which made playing easier but which swiftly wore out the records. It was fine if the car was sitting in the garage or crawling along at 10mph, but that all rather defeated the purpose of a mobile Hi-Fi in the first place.

Cart-horse before the cart

The first significant answer to this mobile-audio problem came via the Fidelipac Cartridge, aka "the Cart." Rather like the car, and the moving-picture film-camera, the cartridge seems to have several separate parents. Vern Nolte is one claimed inventor, once an employee of the Automated Tape Company and a distant relative of 1980s' actor Nick Nolte—but the most cited creator is  George Eash. The Fidelipac Cart was created in the mid-1950s by Eash, and it was an analogue magnetic-tape format based on an endless loop system (which, in turn, had first been developed by Bernard Cousino, who had shared workshop space with Eash for several years). Rather than put the Cart before the cart-horse, Eash realised he was no manufacturer and so licensed the device to Telpro Industries, which sold it under the name Fidelipac.

This was aimed squarely at the pro-radio market and was based on a quarter-inch, two-track format running at "broadcast speed," or 7.5 inches per second (ips). One of the tracks was mono, for broadcast, the other was a cue track. A later version used three tracks, two for stereo broadcast and one for cueing. But rarely were even the shortest radio programmes broadcast like this, as the Fidelipac—and its various bastard children—was usually used for background music, jingles, stings, and adverts. The most popular version was "size A," a four-inch wide package that had a maximum playing time of just over 10 minutes at 7.5ips. Its professional radio use continued—sometimes with 15ips versions, sometimes with the humbler Stereo 8 carts—well into the '90s. Here’s a recording of a Cart being used as a potential weapon (at 17:19) in 1980's radio sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati:

In late 1962, Madman Muntz and George "Fidelipac" Eash began work on the Stereo-Pak system, a four-track cartridge aimed at cars that contained a couple of simplifications—a practice later known as "Muntzing," i.e. making modern electric and electronic devices less complicated. Both of these changes aided mass-production: one kept the speed at a mere 3.75ips, reducing sound quality but leaving it still running at twice the speed of its new music cassette rival, while the other was to use a moving playing-head between the pair of two-track programmes. It offered far more continuous music than the Highway Hi-Fi, and it all seemed to work well—and so Muntz was off on another new adventure.

His MEC firm, Muntz Electronics Corporation, was soon licensing music from all the major music companies and released many hundreds of different tapes right up to the late 1960s. Muntz also exhibited his Stereo-Pak cartridge and its Autostereo predecessor at the 1967 Consumer Electronics Show, as well as funding various magazine and poster ads, virtually all of which featured young women and suggestive slogans, such as: "Come join the Muntz car stereo turn-on... lover boy!" Subtle, huh?

Although the Autostereo and Stereo-Pak players were not particularly cheap—$130 in 1963, $1,050 today—they found a small but growing market among the wealthy and famous, who were soon beating a path to Muntz’s LA shops (usually staffed, again, by young women in bright uniforms). Rat Pack superstar Frank Sinatra swiftly bought a set for his new Buick Riviera—and his pals Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and Peter Lawford soon followed suit. While out driving, Martin’s co-star Jerry Lewis was said to learn his lines by recording scripts onto a play-record version of the Stereo-Pak.

But it’s always been hard to keep the Madman apart from King Lear—and so at this point enters William Powell "Bill" Lear. A former used-car salesman, Lear was another "car freak" who had run his own used-car lot when he was just 19 years old—his mother signed the sales forms for him until he turned 21. Lear was also a self-taught inventor who, as a teenager, was twice thrown out of school for "showing up teachers," i.e. displaying more technical knowledge than his high school staff. He continued to excel, clocking up an amazing 120 new patents in a working life of just over 45 years.