Greatest inventions you can't live without.....

[Gankaku]

Originally posted by hadaso
The wife ...

awwww....

[Bamb0]

8 track tapes

I remember in the 70s being in my aunts car and she put in some cartridges... I didnt know what they were then... I started collecting them about 10 yrs ago and they are just goregous!

The sound (if done right) is insanely good......

[JeremyNicoll]

electric motors - the basis of so many useful machines

[dryoldlime]

Common dental care personal products

[north]

.308 winchester

[JeremyNicoll]

Originally Posted by Bamb0

8 track tapes

I remember in the 70s being in my aunts car and she put in some cartridges... I didnt know what they were then... I started collecting them aboiut 10 yrs ago and they are just goregous!

The sound (if done right) is insanely good......

Where (in the description within): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8-track_cartridge does whatever you're talking about fall?

I don't see how the sound can be "insanely" good; 8 audio tracks spread across a 1/4" tape gives a track width & spacing the same as the 4 tracks across a 1/8" tape in compact cassettes.

That wikipedia article says the tape runs at 3.75 ips (so double the rate of a cassette tape) which would make some improvement over the equivelent tape formulation in a cassette.


But - back in the days when I recorded stuff on cassettes (mostly late 1970s thru 1980s) - there was a massive difference between results on ordinary blank tapes (sold eg by high-street supermarkets) and the very best of TDK's or Maxell's tapes. Development of cassette machines with adjustable bias & EQ - and in some - Dolby B &/or dbX NR helped

I see nothing in the wikipedia article suggesting that discerning users could use different qualities of tape - which suggests that that used would be "mass market" quality - ie not very good. Plus ... for a product initially mostly used in (noisy) cars there's no incentive for the manufacturers to aim for hi-fi (let alone audiophile or 'pro') quality. I doubt most cars of the period had (by modern standards) particularly good amps or speakers.



In a cartridge one channel of audio uses at most just under 1/8th of the full 1/4" width of the tape - so 1/32" x 3.75" per second.

Compare that with eg a ReVox half-track stereo machine using 1/4" tape at 7.5ips. One channel uses just under 1/8" x 7.5 ips ... which is 8 times the surface area of tape used per second. The ReVox will have a substantially-better engineered transport & electronics & only an idiot would use poor-quality tape.

If a cartridge is "insanely good" what is the ReVox (apart from bl**dy heavy)?

[sterdeus]

Originally Posted by dryoldlime

Common dental care personal products

Please elaborate. Does that include: toothbrush (electric or manual. And why arent they called teethbrush?), toothpaste, waterpick, mouthwash, floss and picks?

[dryoldlime]

Originally Posted by sterdeus

Please elaborate. Does that include: toothbrush (electric or manual. And why arent they called teethbrush?), toothpaste, waterpick, mouthwash, floss and picks?

Most of those. You choose! What you choose is mostly your personal choices and your needs.

[Bamb0]

Originally Posted by JeremyNicoll

That wikipedia article says the tape runs at 3.75 ips (so double the rate of a cassette tape) which would make some improvement over the equivelent tape formulation in a cassette.

i think the way 8 tracks come out of the cartridge and go back in and roll up again is amazing,.. How did they ever figure that out?

And I think its amazing Jeremy they can fit 4 different pieces of music on that 1 tape! (4 tracks,each with 2 channels)


Isnt it fascinating that they even work??

[JeremyNicoll]

Originally Posted by Bamb0

i think the way 8 tracks come out of the cartrisge and go back in and roll up again is amazing,.. How did they ever figure that out?

The tape doesn't come out (except maybe a few inches - like on a VCR) & then "roll-up again". It's a continuous loop which never gets unrolled.

Originally Posted by Bamb0

And I think its amazing Jeremy they can fit 4 different pieces of music on that 1 tape! (4 tracks,each with 2 channels)

Once someone figured out how to make a tape head that could handle more than one audio signal at a time (& keep the changing magnetic fields - which are very close to each other - from interfering with the adjacent one(s)) practical multitrack became possible.

It's not 4 tracks - it's 8 tracks ... hence the name "8 track". On multitrack machines (eg in studios) a (say) 24-track recorder can record 1-24 tracks/channels at a time.

Originally Posted by Bamb0

Isnt it fascinating that they even work??

It's surprising that the tape going back into the centre of the loose reel of tape inside doesn't wear-out or get stretched or have its edges bent.

[Bamb0]

Ya thats a problem......... 8 tracks can be high maintenence...

Have ya ever had any???

[JeremyNicoll]

Originally Posted by Bamb0

Ya thats a problem......... 8 tracks can be high maintenence... Have ya ever had any???

Yes - two. First: a "Tascam 38" - half-inch tape running at 15ips. I bought it cheaply from a local studio whose owner was retiring. It was no use to me for my primary interest - recording live classical music - because at 15ips you coudn't run it for long ... but (cheap) & I thought possibly useful in other situations (eg doing multiple takes of short pieces in the controlled situation of a recording session). Oh - VERY HEAVY.

(I /did/ use a similar "Tascam 34B" 1/4" 4-track 7.5 or 15ips in live recording if & when there'd be gaps in the concert where reels could be changed: at 7.5ips with external dBx NR it wasn't bad.) Because this one went places with me it had a wood & metal & foam flightcase - almost too heavy to lift - needed help or rolled it end-over-end.



Somewhat later - a "Tascam DA88" - bought new in the 1990s for about ?3700 IIRC. Eight tracks of CD-quality digital recording - just under 2 hours per tape - and it always knew where on a tape you were to the nearest 28th of a second or so (that's a common frames/sec rate in the film industry). It was much heavier than a cassette deck; flight-cased in a polycarbonate case so could be carried ok with one arm.

That 1/28th sec precision meant eg that you could ask it to loop between two specified points (if you wanted to listen to something over & over again perhaps while experimenting with mixing it). You could load a tape and have it find a specific hh:mm:ss.fr place. Working out lengths of parts of what you'd recorded was easy.

By the time I was using this I often hired mics - some worth up to ~ ?1500 each. I owned quite a few too - but I think the most I ever spent on a mic was a few hundred.

WIth the DA88 I stopped taking a mixer out to concert recordings (with a 4-track I had to to mix some of the mics' signals together.).

I'd normally put mic-splitters (passive unpowered devices which allow you to take the signal from one mic [powered from its preamp] & send it to two places) on the main stereo pair of mics & apart from sending them to two of the DA88's tracks also record them alone on a "Panasonic SV3900" DAT machine. The SV3900 was the big-brother to the SV3700; the 3900 had a wired remote control which - with dedicated buttons for various things - which made its indexing & "locate" functions (eg go to preset point "17" or move point "22" back by 0.4 second ) much easier to use.

These days I hardly ever record stuff - not well enough. But when I do I now just use a portable solid-state (no moving parts except control buttons) digital thing: another Tascam machine - an "HDP2". For live recordings I use a pair of Oktava MK012 mics; I also use the HDP2 for recordings (eg of radio broadcasts) made via a S/PDIF interface from a PC.

See: https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/tascam-hdp2


You can google for pictures of these things.

[mister]

Reminds me of my Sony 4 track reel to reel, sounded great. I remember this question being posed to a professor and his answer was refrigerated air freight( fresh produce year round)

[chrisretusn]

In this day and age. It's boiling down to a computer and cell phone. As must as I would like to say I could live without, I can't. A cell phone is needed for verification apps, the computer is managing accounts.

[dryoldlime]

Originally Posted by chrisretusn

In this day and age. It's boiling down to a computer and cell phone. As must as I would like to say I could live without, I can't. A cell phone is needed for verification apps, the computer is managing accounts.

Yes unfortunately becoming too true; and this one of the most damned irritating things!