![]() He licensed popular music albums from the major record companies and duplicated them on these four-track cartridges, or "CARtridges", as they were first advertised. ![]() The four tracks were divided into two "programs", typically corresponding to the two sides of an LP record, with each program comprising two tracks read simultaneously for stereo playback. In 1962 he introduced his Stereo-Pak four-track cartridge stereo system and tapes, mostly in California and Florida. Entrepreneur Earl "Madman" Muntz of Los Angeles, California, however, saw a potential in these "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 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 cartridge design in 1953, called the Fidelipac cartridge. He would be inspired by Earl Muntz's four-track design in the early 1960s.) (Bill Lear had tried to create an endless-loop wire recorder in the 1940s, but gave up in 1946. Program starts and stops were signaled by a one-inch-long metal foil that activates 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 (10 cm) per second. Prerecorded stereophonic music cartridges were available, and blank cartridges could be used to make recordings at home, but the format failed to gain popularity. The first tape cartridge designed for general consumer use, including music reproduction, was the Sound Tape or Magazine Loading Cartridge (RCA tape cartridge), introduced in 1958 by RCA. Most were intended only for low-fidelity voice recording in dictation machines. To eliminate the nuisance of tape-threading, various manufacturers introduced cartridges that held the tape inside a metal or plastic housing to eliminate handling. Because in early years each tape had to be dubbed from the master tape in real-time to maintain good sound quality, prerecorded tapes were more expensive to manufacture, and costlier to buy, than vinyl records which could be stamped much quicker than their own playing time. Loading a reel of tape onto the machine and threading it through the various guides and rollers proved daunting to some casual users-certainly, it was more difficult than putting a vinyl record on a record player and flicking a switch. The original format for magnetic tape sound reproduction was the reel-to-reel tape recorder, first available in the US 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 was announced by RCA in April 1970 and first known as Quad-8, then later changed to just Q8. It was a further development of the similar Stereo-Pak four-track cartridge introduced by Earl "Madman" Muntz, which was adapted by Muntz from the Fidelipac cartridge developed by George Eash. Stereo 8 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). The format is regarded as an obsolete technology, and was relatively unknown outside the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and Japan. 8-track tape (formally Stereo 8: commonly known as the eight-track cartridge, eight-track tape, or simply eight-track) is a magnetic tape sound recording technology that was popular in the United States from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s when the Compact Cassette format took over.
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