Vern Nolte is one claimed inventor, once an employee of the Automated Tape Company and a distant relative of 1980s' actor Nick Nolte-but the most cited creator is George Eash. The first significant answer to this mobile-audio problem came via the Fidelipac Cartridge, aka "the Cart." Rather like the car, and the moving-picture film-camera, the cartridge seems to have several separate parents. It was fine if the car was sitting in the garage or crawling along at 10mph, but that all rather defeated the purpose of a mobile Hi-Fi in the first place. This happened until it was heavily weighed-down, a process which made playing easier but which swiftly wore out the records. Peter Goldmark’s Highway Hi-Fi had caused a stir, but his in-car Hi-Fi system had one major snag: it was all based on vinyl records whose audio signal emerged via a needle, a needle which frequently jumped whenever the vehicle went over the slightest bump. But by then he had returned to his first loves-audio and cars. Muntz television sales then started to drift downwards, and he finally sold off his telly division in 1959. Muntz's TV sales grossed an amazing $49 million in 1951-52 alone-almost half a billion in today’s money-but his overheads were tight, and his bank unfriendly, and within two years he was posting losses of over one million dollars a year. What went wrong is easily explained with hindsight-though it seemed mysterious at the time.Ĭrazy it may have been, but it worked spectacularly. Yet within a few years of that expensive media blitz, the cartridge was dead in the water as far as the consumer market was concerned-and, by the mid-1990s, it was a rare antique even in broadcasting studios. Within a few years various megastars were using it, and it was swiftly installed in virtually every radio station in the western world-and, with rising domestic sales, it even had a massive ad campaign fronted by TV star Jimmie "Dy-no-mite!" Walker. And despite its roots in the Mad Men in-car market of the 1950s, it was seemingly future-proof, too, with a unique potential for quadraphonic sound (a potential later realised, in part). The 8-track cartridge, aka the Stereo 8, first appeared at trade shows in 1964, just 18 months after the cassette, and it did initially seem to have it all: it was comparatively small, portable, and had pretty good audio quality.
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