Craig 8 track tape player8/8/2023 ![]() 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. This happened until it was heavily weighed-down, a process which made playing easier but which swiftly wore out the records. 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. But by then he had returned to his first loves-audio and cars. Muntz television sales then started to drift downwards, and he finally sold off his telly division in 1959. 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. What went wrong is easily explained with hindsight-though it seemed mysterious at the time.Ĭrazy it may have been, but it worked spectacularly. 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. ![]() 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. ![]() 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). 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. ![]()
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