Interview with Frank Schmidt Part Two                            Back

So how did he pull that off, taking the Muntz design and changing it, and getting a new patent?

(Laughs) That was one of the things Bill was good at! He didn’t believe too much in patents. I remember a discussion once where he said "Find a way to design around it, or we’ll go ahead and do it and fight it out in court later."

When he first started with the idea that we would go to 8 tracks on a ¼" tape, everyone told him it was crazy, can’t be done. We went with Nortronics and built the first tape. They said it was crazy, too! For the tape, we used Scotch. They had quite a few developments, including graphite-coated tapes. As far as I know, they are the only ones that made tape that was worth a damn!

The tape used in 8-track cartridges was different than reel-to-reel tape…

Oh, absolutely. You have to have graphite coating on the back side of the tape. Because you have to remember, on an endless loop 8-track, you’re pulling tape off the center of the platform hub, and you’re adding it to the outside of the platform hub, and you’ve got a speed difference. That roll of tape has to be loose because it’s constantly sliding against itself. You lose a lot of that lubricant over a period of time. That’s that black dust you get inside the tapes.

Another thing that happened was with the binder that binds the graphite to the back of the mylar tape. It starts to give out with age. There’s nothing you can do about it. If you play that tape over and over, that tape is going to wear out… it’s going to give up its lubricant and bind up tight. That’s one of the limitations of the 8-track system.

The other thing that aggravates it in car usage is temperature… it can be 120º inside a car in the summer and 5º below in the winter. The one thing we were working on, but never got around to, was the problem of the contact of the capstan and pinch roller under those circumstances. You cannot leave the cartridge shoved in the deck! It causes flat spots on the pinch roller. In the summertime, it actually adheres the tape to the pinch roller, so it glues itself together. When you start it up, it wraps itself around the capstan.

There’s another problem that 8-track hobbyists face: the melted pinch roller from some of the early carts.

Yeah, I worked like crazy on that! I worked through about 30 or 40 different rubber and elastic compounds, looking for the perfect material that wouldn’t flat spot in cold temperature and wouldn’t adhere to them in hot weather conditions. The one thing I wasn’t looking for was a 30- year lifespan on the cartridges! (laughs) You have to look at the materials that were available at that time. Very limited. Those rollers would barely last 5 years.

I understand that the early tapes were mainly purchased at car dealerships since they were being marketed for automobiles.

Well, Ford, GM and Sears were the first to offer it. Everyone had demo tapes, because you had to demonstrate the system. And that brings up another point – I don’t know why it gets badmouthed as being bad audio. It wasn’t. It was terrific! It was like nothing that had ever existed. We actually brought the best of the LP home stereo system to an automobile! Nobody had ever done it.

A Lear Jet in-dash model with AM radio

Up until then you really only had AM radio for your car… the 8-track allowed you to choose your music for the first time.

You had AM and FM… FM multiplex was just starting to come out.

But there wasn’t much programming on FM at that time.

Right… another thing people don’t remember was the reverberation units. The factory guys were putting them in… I remember in Detroit driving a brand new Cadillac convertible with one.

But also you have to remember that the lowest quality equipment you have today is ten times better than the best we had back then. We had good audio recording… we tried to put the best amplifier that we could within price limitations…. but where we fell down was with the speakers. You could get terrific sound but you had to have a speaker cabinet back then to get good sound. The small speakers were miserable! The cones were no good, the magnets were no good, the audio sucked… and then you had to put it in a car!

I think we were the first people to put speakers in the door panels. You have to remember too that the cars were miserable… water leaked into the door panel. We used to stick the speaker into a bread wrapper, glue it around the back, and cut it out around the speaker. It gave a little bit of protection for all that water that came into the door panel when it rained.

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