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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Before that. Her breakthrough album was 1977 and Total Eclipse of the Heart came out in 1982, so it was more the 8-track era. It remained a staple of radio plays (remember those?) through the 80s and 90s though, and was remade by Nikki French into a chart-topping dance version in 1995.

A lot of HN is folks in their late 30s, 40s, and early 50s (and sometimes even older!), so many folks here would've overlapped with the radio era. A lot of folks here were involved in making YouTube/Instagram/TikTok, not listening to it.

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I'm old enough to remember Walkmans coming out in 1979, which was the start of the end of the boombox era. Approximately no-one was using 8-track at that point.

I'm not quite that old, but didn't people look down on cassettes due to their lower audio quality? Weren't most home systems (hi-fis) still vinyl or 8-track for a while longer?

A big driver of cassettes then was the write ability, unlike 8 tracks. You could borrow your friend's new vinyl album, pop in a new cassette tape on your hi-fi, and record a copy of the album to the tape. Of course the Walkman then made listening to your new album fully portable.

There were consumer 8-track writers, and you could buy blank 8-tracks. But it was more expensive and less common; just never caught on.

Did not know! Before my time I guess.

They did. However vinyl was considered better than 8 track. Cassette was a lot more portable than 8 track, and so where portability mattered it won. Elsewhere vinyl was considered better than 8 track and so it won (a few years latter CDs came and won).

Those who really cared about sound quality had reel to reel tape, but that was very rare. Almost no albums were ever released on reel to reel. You typically bought the vinyl and copied it to your own reels thus ensuring there were no scratches.

No one used 8-track for the quality. It was portable, and it would play continuously (it looped), great for sitting with your honey in a secluded area. And the physical quality of 8-tracks weren’t great. Based on the number of 8-track cartridges I saw on the side of the road while out running, the tape would apparently come loose from the cartridge and render it unusable.

By 1980, 8-tracks were relics being displaced by cassette.

The heads on 8-track players would move physically to access the 4 pairs of stereo and inevitably would mis-track as they aged.

This was more awful than just the marginal fidelity of a perfectly aligned 8-track machine.

https://public.tableau.com/static/images/U_/U_S_RecordedMusi...

In the USA, 8-track was always less than half vinyl singles sales, compact cassette exceeded 8-track's sales by 1980, and 8-track was dead by 1982.

What does that have to do with whether or not this should be on HN?

By your logic, literally anything from the '80s is appropriate for this site, which is obviously not correct lol.

The people in this thread are sundowning. They’ll upvote absolutely anything that reminds them of their distant youth.

> A lot of HN is folks in their late 30s, 40s, and early 50s (and sometimes even older!)

And? Doesn’t make it on topic.

> A lot of folks here were involved in making YouTube/Instagram/TikTok, not listening to it.

I hope they struggle to sleep at night.

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