Stereo-Pak

~ the goodbye ~

This format was finished fourteen years before I was born, which puts it outside anything I can claim to remember and inside the part of audio history that explains why the things I did use looked the way they did. I came up on cassettes and then on MP3s downloaded in an internet cafe. The cartridge is the ancestor of the first of those, and it is the reason cars had tape slots at all.

Earl Muntz was a Los Angeles used-car dealer already manufacturing televisions under his own name, and known as Madman Muntz because that was the character he played in his own advertising. In 1962 he introduced the Stereo-Pak 4-Track Stereo Tape Cartridge System. He did not design the cartridge. George Eash had built the Fidelipac in 1954 for radio stations, a plastic shell holding a continuous loop of quarter-inch tape that a disc jockey could drop into a deck and fire instantly. Muntz took that shell, slowed the tape to 3.75 inches per second, and laid four tracks across it so it carried two stereo programs instead of one mono jingle. Eash worked on the adaptation himself.

The second half of the business was content, and that is what separated a format from a gadget. Muntz licensed albums from the major record companies and duplicated them onto his cartridges, so a buyer walked out with a player and something to put in it. The players were branded Autostereo and they went into cars, including a well-publicized set of cars belonging to film people, which was exactly the kind of endorsement a man who had built a career out of his own advertising knew how to use.

For roughly three years, choosing your own music in a car meant buying one of these. Before Stereo-Pak the dashboard offered you the radio and nothing else.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the decline ~

Bill Lear, of the business jets, had an employee at Lear Jet Corporation rework the cartridge into a version with eight tracks, a single capstan and a pinch roller built into the deck rather than the shell. The Stereo 8 held twice as much program and cost less to manufacture. More importantly, Lear understood where the decision actually got made, and he sold Ford and General Motors on offering his format as factory-installed equipment. Muntz had been selling players to drivers one at a time.

~ the inheritance ~

Once the carmakers picked 8-track the labels had no reason to press two kinds of cartridge, and support drained away across the late 1960s. Columbia held on longest and dropped 4-track in 1970, which is the year the format stops having a commercial life. Muntz cut the tape speed twice to defend his costs, first to 1 7/8 inches per second and then to 15/16, which saved tape and audibly wrecked the product.

Stray cartridges kept getting made for a while after the obituary, overlapping the early quadraphonic 8-tracks, the way formats always trail off rather than stop. The larger B and C shells had a quieter second career in background music systems, running at reduced speed with the stereo folded down to mono, and some of those installations were still turning into the early 1990s before digital playback replaced them.

The 8-track that beat it is the famous one, remembered mostly as a joke about cartridges that changed programs in the middle of a song. It was a redesign of a redesign of a radio station device, and the middle step is this one. Muntz lost the format war and still gets the credit that matters: he is the person who established that a car is a place where people want to pick the music.

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