"Players have been installed in powerboats and airplanes, as well as in funeral limousines..."
Time magazine (August 5,1966)
The eight-track cartridge (or "Stereo 8") was developed by a consortium of U.S. businesses lead by Bill Lear (1902-1978) of the Lear Jet Corporation. Their aim was to produce a convenient magnetic tape playback System that could be used in cars.
The eight-track cartridge contained a continuous loop of 1/4-inch (0.6 cm) tape that played back at 3.75 inches (9.5 cm) per second. It was so named since the music was recorded as four parallel pairs of stereo tracks on a single piece of tape. Switching between tracks was achieved automatically by mechanically altering the .height" of the playback head so that it aligned with -the correct piece of music.
While Lear touted the system as being superior to reel-to-reel because more music was available in a smaller package, the audio quality was inevitably ' compromised because the four parallel stereo tracks were squeezed into the 1/4-inch tape. Furthermore, the design of the transport mechanism meant that rewinding tapes was not physically possible. A greater problem existed, however: long player (LP) releases comprised two distinct "programs" of music—one on each side of the record; the configuration of the eight- track tape meant that music content had to be divided into four such programs. In some cases this meant album track listings being reorganized to fit in with the length of the tape, long passages of silences between programs as the mechanism shuffled and the heads were realigned, or songs fading out at the end of one program and fading back in at the start of the next.
In spite of these drawbacks, Stereo 8 became the first popular in-car music format, aided in no small way by the fact that throughout the 1970s most mainstream album releases were also available on eight-track cartridge.
