I can assure you, music recorded on 1/4″ tape, uncompressed, DOES sound better than, say, highly compressed mp3s.
But sadly, most people under 40 or 50 will never get to hear it.

CD’s have a hugely better quality than mp3s, but are much harder to ‘pirate’ (That means STEAL, for you young folks.)

Spend years making your music, and 10 minutes after you release it- its all over the internet for free, compressed, and sounding crappy.

We ARE Devo.

The 8-track to cassette adapters are still sought after, for car owners who still don’t want to change the original factory radio.

While the tape will likely be new and somewhat reliable with this, as always, have your recording equipment set up if you’re trying to copy a old 8-track. You will likely only get one chance.

And that I suspect the folks that made the 8 track cartrdige were able to retrofit machines like those used in radio stations for commercials (the “carts” you sometimes hear DJs talking about)… While the digital revolution has hit the radio business, I think there is still an industry around those cartridges…

does that make it MORE authentic?

Back in the real day, we used to buy **4-TRACKS** to hear our music

I never heard of 4-tracks, so I googled, and found out that there were briefly 4-tracks, but they appear to have been an evolutionary step towards 8-tracks.

My personal experience with music technolgy biased me to think Dorothy was writing about 4-track recorders, like the Tascam 414 cassette recorder/mixer all-in-one, which records all four tracks at once by using both the stereo L+R channels from the A side and the B side at the same time.

Very, very true! But it can be a hard lesson to learn. There’s an appeal to having things emerge spontaneously/organically/surprisingly as you go along, but mostly this just leads to muddled projects.

The other hard lesson I’ve had to learn over and over again: Less is more. In my experience, most of the time it’s better to fix a piece by taking something away (a track, some measures, a process or effect) rather than adding something.

I hope that the song ‘Surrender’ is recorded so that half of it is on one track and the other half is on another such as the Pink Floyd 8 track ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ with the song ‘Time’.

Now, where did I put that 8-track player?

Unlike bands that release things on vinyl, they can’t possibly float the claim that the 8-track medium offers any inherent fidelity advantages over other media.

If they are going for the (very) retro nostalgia market, they would do much better with regular cassette tapes, since they are much cheaper to produce, and since retro nostalgia fans are much more likely to have a functioning cassette player than a functioning 8-track.

Maybe they are hoping to go down in history as the last commercial 8-track ever produced, but I don’t see much margin in that.

I had a less fancy version of that “back in the day.” It was my first home studio. One spent a lot of time bouncing down the tracks, thinking “How the hell did George Martin do this and make it seem so easy?!”

I bet I could still find some of my 4-track cassettes if I went digging. It would be a snap to convert these to digital too. Just record left and right from the cassette playing both ways, reverse the two backward tracks, and line them up.

This statement,

“We’re kind of more worried about being ignored than being ripped off.”

reflects the attitude that many more people in the industry should (IMO) embrace.

Finally, Rick Nielsen is one of the nicest rock stars I have had the pleasure of (briefly) meeting and working with.

Hoax-ish.

#5 Huh?

I work at Invisible Records in Chicago with Martin Atkins. His band Pigface decided to release their latest album, “6″, on 8-track about 7 months ago… You can check out the video announcement here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoKkdji75-k) . Maybe it’s a coincidence that both these bands had the same idea, but I think something must be in the water in Northern Illinois that’s making all these bands make CRAZY decisions.

All kinds of hipsters, tech geeks, nostalgiacs, and music snobs have working 8 track players – and the combined interest among them in buying a new release is probably greater than the combined interest the world had in buying a new Cheap Trick CD. Also, as anyone making money in music can tell you, the profits come from merchandising and sales of physical artificats. Releasing this would be a smart move, IMO.

But it looks like it’s not actually going to be for sale – just a promo-only for the “Classic Rock” record stations who, to be honest, were not going to play their new songs anyway. IMO, a very gentle F.U. to the industry from a cheeky, classy, classic act.

rev