In 1962, he introduced his Stereo-Pak four-track cartridge stereo system and tapes, mostly in California and Florida. However, entrepreneur, marketer and television set dealer, Earl 'Madman' Muntz, of Los Angeles, California, saw a potential in the 'broadcast carts' for an automobile music system. There were several attempts to sell music systems for cars, beginning with the Chrysler Highway Hi-Fi of the late 1950s, which used discs. Eash later formed the Fidelipac Corporation to manufacture and market tapes and recorders, as did several others, including Audio-Pak (Audio Devices Corp.). Fidelipac cartridges (nicknamed 'carts' by DJs and radio engineers) were used by many radio stations for commercials, jingles, and other short items. The Eash cartridge was later licensed by manufacturers, notably the Collins Radio Company, which first introduced a cartridge system for broadcasting at the National Association of Broadcasters 1959 annual show. Inventor George Eash invented a design in 1953, called the Fidelipac cartridge. Program starts and stops were signaled by a one-inch-long metal foil that activated the track-change sensor. The endless loop tape cartridge was first designed in 1952 by Bernard Cousino around a single reel carrying a continuous loop of standard 1/4-inch, plastic, oxide-coated recording tape, running at 3.75 in (9.53 cm) per second. Pre-recorded stereophonic music cartridges were available, and blank cartridges could be used to make recordings at home, but the format failed to gain popularity.īlank cartridges could be used to make recordings at home.

The first tape cartridge designed for general consumer use, including music reproduction, was the Sound Tape or Magazine Loading Tape Cartridge ( RCA tape cartridge), introduced in 1958. Most were intended only for low-fidelity voice recording in dictation machines. To eliminate the inconvenience of tape-threading, various manufacturers introduced cartridges that held the tape inside a metal or plastic housing, thereby eliminating handling. Loading a reel of tape onto the machine and threading it through the various guides and rollers for playback was more difficult than putting an LP on a record player.

Because, in the early years, each tape had to be dubbed from the master tape in real-time to maintain good sound quality, pre-recorded tapes were more expensive to manufacture and costlier to buy than vinyl records which could be stamped far more quickly than their own playing time. The original format for magnetic tape sound reproduction was the reel-to-reel tape recorder, first available in the United States in the late 1940s, but too expensive and bulky to be practical for amateur home use until well into the 1950s. A later quadraphonic version of the format, with four-channel sound, as opposed to earlier, more widely used stereo/two-channel sound, was announced by RCA in April 1970 and called first Quad-8 and later Q8. Muntz's design had itself been adapted from the Fidelipac cartridge, which in turn had been developed by George Eash. Lear had tried to create an endless-loop wire recorder in the 1940s but gave up in 1946, only to be re-inspired by Muntz's four-track design in 1963. It was a further development of the similar Stereo-Pak four-track cartridge, which had been introduced by pioneering businessman and engineer Earl 'Madman' Muntz, who promoted and sold consumer electronics to the American public at the time. The Stereo 8 Cartridge was created in 1964 by a consortium led by Bill Lear, of Lear Jet Corporation, along with Ampex, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Motorola, and RCA Victor Records ( RCA - Radio Corporation of America). The main advantage of the 8-track tape cartridge was that it did not have to be 'flipped over' to play other tracks. The format is obsolete and was relatively unknown outside the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Mexico, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden and Japan. The 8-track tape (formally Stereo 8 commonly called eight-track cartridge, eight-track tape, and eight-track) is a magnetic tape sound recording technology that was popular from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s, when the compact cassette, which pre-dated the 8-track system, surpassed it in popularity for pre-recorded music. The black rubber pinch roller is at upper right.

8 track tape