Yeah, that’s all good until 20 years later there are 3 crates full of vinyl in your bedroom that are too heavy to move anywhere and your boyfriend won’t let you throw them away.

My husband and I have learned that it’s cheaper to buy vinyl from thrift stores and yard sales, especially if you’re into the music from the 70s/80s. So instead of buying 1 song at a time for 99 cents each from iTunes I get a whole Rolling Stones album for 80 cents.

CD sales have definitely been dropping due to the increase in MP3 sales/downloading over the internet. But I think that it would be going too far to say they are in danger on another front due to increases in vinyl sales. Vinyls are on the rise, thats a fact. But I think that rather than being a practical movement, vinyls are a nostalgic or “retro” movement, just like clothing or anything else would be.

There is nothing quite so endearing as lowering the turntable arm onto a record and then watching as the diamond tip skips and cuts a deep scratch across the record. Makes a nice metronome next time you play the record and brings back memories of Edison’s wax cylinders.

“I dunno if you know this but the 8-track has significantly better audio than your standard cassette tape and its only real problems were that recording wasn’t easy and it had no rewind mechanism. It was kinda the Betamax of the audio world.”

No. The only reason 8-track’s audio was superior to cassette was because it ran at twice the speed (3 3/4 IPS instead of 1 7/8). The mechanism was a real kludge: the endless loop (as somebody else pointed out) had tape sliding against tape the entire time it was playing, so needed extra lubrication. This tended to get onto the capstan pinch roller and make it less effective, and the tape wore out quickly. The tape was held against the capstan and the heads with a spring mechanism that needed to be able to release when pulled on. It was a tricky balance; my experience was that an 8-track player only lasted 6 months to a year before you started having real problems. You can’t rewind, yeah, well, you can fast-forward but not like a cassette — it was still driven by the capstan and you didn’t want to push that endless loop tape too quickly. Cassettes can FF/RW much more quickly because only the tape and the spindles are involved. The heads tended to go out of alignment easily. There were more tracks to switch between, yes (so faster track selection than cassette), but they tended to be half as long; a lot of commercial tapes would fade a song between tracks, which personally I found damned annoying. They were also physically much larger than cassettes.

Other than that, yeah, 8-tracks were better than cassettes.

Betamax? If you want to compare to a superior quality format, why not point out that reel-to-reel had none of the disadvantages of 8-track, all the advantages of cassette except cost and convenience, and your typical consumer deck would run at 7 1/2 IPS if not 15. (And you could choose to run at anything from 1 7/8 to 15 in steps of 2x, meaning you could choose between long recordings and quality.) It had wider tracks, too, so inherently had a higher S/N ratio than either of the other formats.

You know the real reason cassettes took over as the preferred format for decades? Because they were convenient and recordable and relatively reliable. Well, and cheap. For your average consumer the quality was Good Enough, and the convenience of being able to carry them around and use them in portable players trumped almost everything else. 8-tracks contained the seeds of their own destruction. R-R was too bulky and inconvenient. DAT was expensive and slow to load and, aside from quality, had no advantage over cassettes, and as I said earlier, the quality of cassettes was Good Enough for the masses. (And DAT was a late-comer in an entrenched market, too.)

And in the meantime, an awful lot of R&D was put into cassettes to the point where the quality actually exceeded the old reel-to-reel decks. Some audiophiles were actually starting to take them seriously, when suddenly CDs came out and basically blew them out of the water.

… And you can still get them, though they’re harder to find. I’ve still got a cassette deck in my car (mostly because I can’t afford a new player right now :). I can check out books on cassette at the local library (and video on VHS), I actually bought one recently (Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett). I still have a bunch of old music on cassette and I can record more — my home stereo tape deck still works, and I have blanks.

No, I’m not living in the past. I have a DVD recorder on top of my VHS deck, and CD and DVD burners, and I can rip and duplicate and convert with the best of them. I even have an MP3 player (which I can plug into my car stereo, which has an AUX input :). But this stuff still works, so I see no reason to throw it away.

Got rid of my last 8-track more than a decade ago. It was El Dorado by ELO. It was just hanging around in storage, taking up space.

Betamax was actually a superior format that lost due to marketing. Please don’t compare it to 8-track, which died because it was junk.