Revisiting the 8-Track with a New 1975 Pioneer HR-99 Recorder

This video is a little different for me because instead of looking at the latest technology, I'm going to go back and look at the 8-

track

tape cartridge system. I'm going to take a look at the technology behind the 8-

track

tape cartridge system. I'll see how it works and also take a look at what happens when it goes wrong and how it's fixed. I'm going to listen to some of them because it's been over 35 years since I heard one of these I have no idea how good or bad they sound. I'm going to see if it makes any sense to compile eight tracks, but most exciting of all is that I'm going to unpack a brand new, unused 8 track

recorder

. in its box since the day it was made almost 40 years ago.

I guess you're wondering why and that's a legitimate question. The reason is that in the UK the 8-track never had such an impact that some people had it in their homes. cars from the seventies but they replaced them pretty quickly a father has one with two cartridges. I don't really remember the 8-track, so I wanted to go back and find out for myself how good or bad everything I remember really was. There are people who ridicule him as if he were a young MC and maybe it's a little ironic that the album is on cassette. Let's take a look at a typical 8-track. the track listing notice at the bottom here, although we have four shows now, obviously the cartridge is quite thick and that was one of the problems with a track that's not really very portable, but the tape inside is a quarter of inch the way those The tracks are divided into those four programs, once four from top to bottom.

Now you think about where the 8 clues come from. The reason is that each of those four programs is divided into two, which are your 8 left and right stereo tracks. four different programs. I know there are four 8-tracks, but we're not going to get into that now, so within an 8-track, the tape is about 11 and a half minutes long generally for an album and in an actual 11 and a half minutes that. it just rotates continuously from the middle, pulls the tape, goes to the left and comes back out the outside of the reel again. The way it works is like this, you pull it from the middle.

Turn in this direction. The ribbon rotates around the front. a little spongy around that wheel and then it goes back to the outside of the reel, so you can't rewind it, since you can see what happens when you turn it the other way, so you can't rewind eight tracks, although you can fast forward quickly. them, if you have one of those buttons, now this piece of metal that appears at the bottom here is what changes our tracks, so that when a complete loop is achieved, it touches that piece of metal and drops it to the next one clue.

Now I'll show you. Do you know how that works inside this player that I have disassembled so that the cartridge goes to the front? Note that it jumps directly to the next program when you pass the metal strip, but if you want, you can press that selector button yourself to jump between programs. Now you can't get to the exact track you want because of course each of those programs has three or four tracks and you have to wait for the one you want to appear. Now look at the playback heads here, look at the metal one at the end. the bottom one is the one that skips the tracks when it hits the metal strip, but look above, that's the playback head, look how far it goes into the cartridge when I push the cartridge, it pushes the tape right against that piece of sponge and When you press a selector button, you can see the tape head move to the individual programs.

Now when it comes to buying 8 track cartridges for myself in the UK I have found that the best place has been eBay. There are thrift stores around me that stock these, of course, most of them disappeared in the '70s, so you can understand, there's a lot of junk in there, a lot of Elvis easy listening country and western compilations, stuff well, very few contemporary pop acts, however 8-track was around until the eighties and you can get some post eighties albums that you wouldn't really expect to find on 8-track and some of them fetch quite high prices now that I've managed get one of the eight subsequent themes.

They are only available by mail. I think this is Michael Jackson's Thriller, of course, the first time I have this album, believe it or not, now an 8-track cartridge tape is twice as thick as a compact cassette tape and runs at twice the speed . speed, so at one point it sounded better, but the compact cassette improved in technology over time and ended up sounding better than the 8-track. Now one thing about a chart that has that loop inside the tape, the programs have to be rearranged to fit. the table because if you imagine a 10 minute loop, not all the tracks are the same length, so for example if you look at Michael Jackson's Thriller, the way the album is divided, you will find that some tracks are quite a track. young man who divides. as a beginning and conclusion and the way it works is that the track fades out, there's a big noise when they moved down and then it comes back in now, if you also look at the last two tracks here, it tops it and Thriller, those are in the eighth.

The track is the last two tracks on the album, but the official album according to Wikipedia ends on something quite young and put it in my life, so the tracks are completely rearranged in the eighth track. Now this video has had a few false starts. Six months to originally put it together, I got this 8 track player, a very simple device that I showed you inside before it was manufactured in 1976 and it has been in its box ever since, however I couldn't get the audio to work. correctly it had this dim plug in the back i converted it to fanos it was too quiet i put a preamp in it it was still too quiet it went in the trash so i decided to buy a tape

recorder

instead of a high end one so i took a look at one of those which many people don't know that you can get 8 track recordable cartridges and you can record your own tracks on them.

After much searching I found the Pioneer H R 99. It is now recognized as one of the best playback machines of the eight track era shown in a

pioneer

Stroke 76 booklet from

1975

now in its box since it was made apart from when the guy who sold it to me who is in Spain took it off the market. box to replace the belt because of course belts wear out on old tape machines but other than that no one has touched this so let's take a look at what you get here are all the things you get inside the box, you get the photos, the instruction booklet, there are some Here are some pretty long tape head cleaning sticks because you have to reach inside the back of the machine with the door open and it also comes with a bit of that liquid that you put on the end of those swabs to clean it. time is speed in the box that has evaporated now rising towards the box.

I can feel it has a good 70's heft to it. It's very solid, doesn't hurt like modern gear, for all I know, I could be unpacking the only box of these in it. world, which is quite exciting, the label at the top here, this piece of card again tells many to keep those heads up, so that's something that seems very important to them on the back, it has the standard international plug but it has the ability to change the voltage to the UK. Which is one of the reasons I chose this particular model, there don't seem to be many home eight track players sold in the UK.

Now looking at the machine itself, it is an absolutely wonderful piece of technology. Now it is for me anyway, maybe you won't. Okay, but I just like the build quality on the metal features of this, all those buttons there and metal caps, not plastic, everything has a really solid click on the back. I have a standard photo, so I can just plug it in. Right on my computer, let's just put a tape on it. I haven't attached it to my arm, but we just want to see how it works. You can see the machine turns on and starts playing the tape meter.

There I can move between programs with that. big clunky sound now the fast forward button the fast forwards are only double the normal speed but it's too much for this tape your Polti comes off the metal splice that's a common problem and I'll show you how I fix it later , but no I'll plug the 8 track into my amp and system now let's play something I'm going to play Lionel Richie can't slow down this is the most recent 8 track album I have to date from 1983 The problem is I'm going to have to talk a little bit about this because I don't want YouTube to do a content match and then flag me as some kind of pirate.

I'm sorry for the fact that you can't really listen. This is all well and good, but it's just one of those things anyway, as far as I'm concerned it works fine, as you can hear, I can jump between programs, a lot of sounds sound pretty good, now let's put Michael Jackson in there, just listen to it for a second. that didn't sound too bad, there is a lot of richness and body to the sound, although there is a noticeable hiss that is present throughout, but you only pick it up during the quiet parts of each track, now there is another problem with some 8-bit cartridges. tracks listen to this drug beat and see if you hear another track playing in the background.

Yes, sometimes the tape doesn't line up perfectly with the head and you'll hear a little leaking of the next track and then there are other tanks that are a little worse, but you shouldn't judge an eight-track record by its cover art or its horrible green hue. because this one sounds pretty good. Now it's time to record my own eight-track mixtape, now this particular one records it. It has manual level input control, but it also has an automatic level control that, if you press it, will make all tracks sound good. I put in my new 90-odd minute 8-track cartridge, there we have an option to record just one of those shows or all of them from start to finish or just do them over and over again for some reason.

I'm doing the ending, we just record the whole cartridge and then stop. I have a Playlist of 90 odd minutes of my solos ready to play on the back of the recorder. I thought it would be quite interesting to play some music from the last 12 months or so because it seems a bit unusual to me to record a brand better. new 8 track interval music from 2013, after 92 minutes it stops, reaches the end of the tape and then the next morning I put the cartridge back in the player to listen to it and it sounded serious, that's a lot of the previous. etched cartridges I have now, let's try to fix that cartridge I broke earlier when I fast-forwarded it and it came off the joint.

I'm sure most people would just throw it in the trash, but with a little time and patience it can come back to life now. Avenue Eight Track supplies a small kit that will repair most problems with most eight tracks. First get into your 8 tracks. Take out the sponge. You will notice that it will crumble like this one does. On fingers, this has happened to almost every cartridge I've opened in the ER. All the sponges seem to have disintegrated. Clean that piece of plastic. Get one of the supplied adhesive sponges. Simply glue it to the piece of plastic to repair the sponge. but obviously this is not what we put in the cartridge because we were repairing that tear in the tape, so once it's in place we can move on to fixing the tape first, cut the parts in the middle that were holding the metal splice. so we have to clean up bits of tape, we're not going to erase any part of the recording here, by the way, there's always a space around that splice where there's nothing recorded, it's just silence, here they supply the sticky bits of metallic material that just put the tape on, if you do it carefully you can stick both pieces of tape together and it will be good as new again, so it's just a matter of putting the tape back into the cartridge making sure it's tight in there. and then put the cartridge back together, so let's test the tape and see how it passes the splice that I just put together so that the job is good.

Well, I encourage you to go and take a look at another of my cartridges. recent, Lionel Richie wants how to look inside that and sure enough, even on that cartridge that is not that old, I guess well, 30 years the sponge has crumbled, so it seems that each of the 8 tracks that you buy you are going to I need to replace that little piece that's a pain because that means you'll have to buy a bunch of those sponges and also know how to take apart the cartridges without breaking them, so it really is a bit of a pain.

This means that Lionel lives to dance on another roof another day. Believe it or not, there are still some sealed 8-tracks available on eBay, but even without wrapping one of these I found that the sponge had fallen off the little metal section there, so the fact that that cartridge had been sealed all That time is still no guarantee that it will work perfectly on your machine; will need repair.I guess that's what happens if you put something in shrink wrap and leave it there for 40 years. Sometimes it's not much fun with 8 tracks, in fact I bought this Robert Parma album.

The first one he recorded was with the bottom meters. He wanted to listen to it, but the machine made some kind of terrible sound. It sounded like the tape was being chewed. I took a look inside the cartridge and the Lal tape fell off the spool in the middle and got tangled in some air. I tried to repair it and this is what happened now, believe it or not, there is a solution to this problem is to quit iTunes and download the album, it's cheaper, faster and sounds better. There is another problem when it comes to collecting 8 tracks and is that they generally look quite chatzi.

Every once in a while you'll find a really nice one that's new in the box and plays perfectly, but most of the time you'll get them where all the papers bubbled up on the label. I think they must have used bad glue or something, but it seems that whatever year you buy, you will encounter the same problem. Some of them come in these cases that prevent the tape from being damaged. but more often than not, no, people have thrown them away, they just kept the cartridge, but you can't always blame people because some of them didn't even come with the proper case to begin with, It's not all doom and gloom, although where else do you go if I want a disco version of the Superman theme or a disco version of the Jaws 2 theme, so there's some fun to be had and I really like that album.

I think it's a beautiful piece of kit. The way it is put together is brilliant. It's just nice to have something new from the 1970s that works perfectly. It looks great at night too and I like to record my own 8 tracks. It's fun to play the latest hits on an 8-track unit. I'm even prepared to live. with the 8 track hiss or the fact that the album reel was rearranged when some of the tracks are split in half, I think it's actually quite charming, what I don't like is the price of the blank cartridges , blank cartridges are very Expensive and hard to find also prerecorded albums on eBay and they should seem pretty cheap but because I'm importing a lot from the US the shipping price is prohibitive, most cartridges that you get tend to look pretty good.

The bad thing is that they don't stack well on a shelf, they don't make a good display item, pretty much every one you buy will need some sort of repair work and not all flaws can be repaired, so I guess given the fact that The sound quality isn't that good and all the other problems that come with the cartridge probably aren't worth it, so I guess the young MC really knew what he was talking about after all, so that's it for now, As always, thanks for watching.