1980 Sound System Options Brochure

[Tiggie]

Tomorrow is National 8-Track day here in the USA just in case anyone gets the urge to celebrate...

[Birdofprey]

Tomorrow is National 8-Track day here in the USA just in case anyone gets the urge to celebrate...

Happy National 8-Track Day.

[DerekTheGreat]

Aww, due to copyright bullshit whoever made that photo was forced to not show labels. Horseshit.

[Mainemantom]

Happy National 8-Track Day.

I had this exact 8 track radio ! If I remember it was not a really good brand, like soundesign, or the like. I could only play music at home if I had the headphones on. My parents said the music was not soothing.

[DerekTheGreat]

LoL it looks like a shit piece, no offense.

So why would higher tape speed offer higher sound quality? To my ignorant brain it seems the slower things go, the more resolution there is to pick up but there's probably a very good reason why that's not true. I feel the same way about records. That the stylus has more time to follow grooves so therefore higher resolution & quality. It certainly seems that way when I play 45's vs 33.3's. 45's sound like the difference between FM & CD..

[sly]

With tape... higher speed means more data. This is also true for records. High speed means more information can be packed in the groove. The problem with 45s is that they were not all good quality to begin with. 33s tended to be made with better quality materials (at least from my experience). The real way to see the difference in speed is to see the fidelity difference between reel to reel professional systems that record at high speeds and compare that to the same systems running low speed for vocal only. In the digital world, it's real easy to hear the difference. Play an MP3 encoded at 256k bitrate and then the same one encoded at 64k bitrate.

[DerekTheGreat]

Ah, that makes sense.

Oh yeah, MP3's are crap to my ears, noise floor is usually too high for me and the upper frequencies sound distorted, even at 320kbs. I'm .WAV guy. I get what you mean with 45's, those that I have are all hard & seemingly brittle while the 33.3's seem supple & flexible.

[Birdofprey]

That one is kinda goofy looking. I like the space ball.

[gadget73]

yeah, fancy re-releases of records are sometimes cut at 45 rpm on 12" discs of high quality vinyl. Better sound quality. A lot of 45 singles were polystyrene, which just doesn't perform as well.

Higher media speed basically spreads out the signal, makes it less "cramped". Off the top of my head I want to say cassette is 1 7/8 inch per second, 8 track is 3 3/4, good reel to reel is 7 1/2 or 15 ips, depends what you're doing. 3 3/4 was considered fairly low quality, 1 7/8 was suitable only for dictation and the like. Thats where cassettes actually came from, they were never intended to be a hifi medium. A lot of electronic and chemical tricks were applied to make them not be an absolute horror.

[DerekTheGreat]

Man, good info. Thanks fellas for clearing up my ignorance on this matter, what you're saying makes sense and now I'm rather embarrassed I thought what I thought haha.