Queen on 8-track? “Thunderbolt and lighting, very, very frightening!” *KA-CHUNK*

I honestly cannot believe you found one of these! I remember reading in an early 70s HiFi/electronics magazine about the development of an 8-track machine that was supposed to draw the tape out of the cartridge. I never thought anything like it went into production as I've never seen any pictures or examples of such a machine! I would almost be surprised if that isn't a prototype. I can see the issues it would have with being rough on tighter tapes that just don't have the slack in the tape pack. Glad you got it working. Take good care of it.

Roberts aka. AKAI was always at the top of the consumer/professional audio industry. Setting the standard for the rest!

I believe that head on the left is the erase. It has only 2 wires and conected to that nearby coil that is probably the oscillator for erase. One hell of a find.

Next week on Techmoan...

The other head is the crossfield head (that's what X stands for in the model number). Basically, bias frequency is not mixed with the audio signal during recording, but instead is emitted by a different head, positioned at the back side of the tape. The technology was used only by Akai (a.k.a. Roberts) and Tandberg on reel to reel decks and I've never seen it implemented in an 8 track recorder. The crossfield technology offered lower distortion and higher quality recordings, but it was much harder to align, and eventually both the heads and electronics got better, eliminating the need for this technology.

Awesome machine.....I would love to have one of these. No telling how many times i've run across tapes with bad pressure pads and with a machine like this, you don't need to worry about them. Plus, it looks nice as well!

Quality bank vault build. Roberts was a very high end tape equipment manufacturer for decades. I think you should have a dignified service for the Roberts and let it pass into the universe.

That mystery head is probably the bias head. Akai was using "Cross Field" bias in those days where the bias was applied via a separate head that swung into place across from the record pole pieces, Combo record/play/erase heads had been available since at least 1964 and had become almost universal by the end of decade.

Hi. Denny Bowsher here. The extra head is the famous Akai--same same Robert's, "crosfield bias head that greatly increased the high frequency recording capablity of the tape. This was a truly great tape machine and was unique to Akai as in my 1800SD machine.

Though Roberts was an American company, their tape recorders were all made by AKAI.

Your eight track tapes would definitely last longer with this machine!! it’s an audiophile 8 track player!!😱

(being midway in the video) It's an Akai. See the "old style" "A" logo on the PCB shown at 1:03 Rebranded and / or made in corporation with Robert G. Metzner. The X stands for "X-field" (cross field heads) being a predecessor of the GX (Glass X'tal) heads. You can see the "dual head design" at 09:58 It only used it's "secondary head" when recording. The Crossfield principle being: a second (opposite) head was needed in order to record in better soundquality (upper bandwith: 10 kHz - 20 kHz), it provides the needed bias to recording, so it's not an erase head, it actually increases soundrecording quality. An 8 track tape doesn't allow a second head behind the tape (due to design of the physical cassette itself) thus the tape needed to be "pulled out" in order to accommodate the crossfield head. Some of the switches / knobs used come directly from the akai X-330 D RTR recorder (1968) The exact same "vent design" is also used on the akai AA-7000 / AA-7000-s (1968 - 1973) Your 848-X has a build in amplifier, so it indeed could be used as a "stand alone" deck, plug in a set of speakers and you were done. In "akai terms" it would've been known as a "non-D" deck, so it would imply that there also would've been a Roberts 848-X D version at the time (not sure)

That system make the tape run against two fixed posts that scrub the tape and can ruin it. Anyway it sounds very well. Very unusual drive system for an 8-Track machine :-)

Not sure if anyone else has mentioned but I think that extra head is for recording bias, not erase. The X in the model name is a giveaway. The method is called "cross-field bias" and was licensed from Tandberg in the 60s and 70s. Roberts, Tandberg and Akai all featured it at one time. For slower tape speeds, it's supposedly a more "accurate" way of applying the bias, by offsetting it slightly from the recording gap. I once had a Tandberg open reel deck that had it, and it was effective to a point... The problem was that alignment could be really difficult to keep steady and would vary with different tape coatings and thicknesses. In the end it was dumped for improvements in circuitry instead. (And now I'm seeing comments about this machine being built by Akai, so yes, I'm pretty sure it's a separate bias head)

Now that is one beautiful 8-track deck! Thanks for sharing it.

What a lovely piece of engineering! Pretty sure that first head is just an erase head when you compare the wires running to the heads and the shielding or lack thereof..

What a strange creature, but a very high quality one. Can't say I've ever come across one of those. Talk about over - engineered to last forever ! Thanks for the upload.

See, kids, 8-Track really COULD sound good.

The other head is definitely an erase head! At first, i thought Akai/Roberts had devised a way to add 'Cross Field' recording to an 8 track. Still, since this doesn't rely on the cartridge pressure pads, or the azimuth of the cart to be correct, this would produce a superior result from a pre-recorded tape, and likely make some awesome sounding recordings as well. With the machine controlling the tape feed and head wrap, this would also reduce wow and flutter significantly. With the capstan in constant motion, this also improves tape start up, particularly for recording. An amazing machine and I would love to find one of my own! Great find!

I think Roberts was a English company we had a few of their bits from the 70s and was always impressed with them

that extra head is a Bias head. puts the bias signal on the back of the tape. I have a reel to reel that does the same thing. incredible sound

50Mhz or 60Mhz mains frequency... MHz??? That hertz...

The record head you mentioned only erases the tape before it passes over the "play" head (which is now acting as the record head).

Wow. Now that has got to be the king of 8-track players. All good quality 8 track players should've used this sort of mechanism.

To bad they could see dragging the tape over an INTERNAL pinch-roller! one of the big drawback of 8-tracks vs. the original 4-track tapes, was the inclusion of an in-cartridge pinch roller :(

That looks like a Perfect 8-track mechanism !

Probably the best quality 8 track player ever made

seems weird to hear an 8-track player with good highs.

We had one of these back in the day and damn this brings back memories.

I LOVE this machine - perfect design for 8-tracks. What I need to master my 8-tracks onto something else as most have no pads! Due to the design of this deck, 8-track never sounded so good, contact with the head is precise and constant.

I've never seen these 8 track players before. Those motors look like the type used on expensive 'cart' machines used by radio stations...

I grew up with 8-Track and I NEVER heard that kind of audio quality from an 8-Track, EVER!!!

From the days when they built gear with more metal than plastic. There were some observations made about the head compliment, that it was based on the same cross field technology Akai used in their open reel decks. I too was about to come to the same conclusion when I saw the heads come together around the 10:45 mark. Then I wondered how they could do cross field effectively through two layers of tape. Never mind the problems with having both layers of tape in contact with each other, and moving at opposite directions, but I digress. What counts though is when tape is loaded and moving. This is seen around 11:50, and shows the head on the left side of tape path being held in place by the tension of the moving tape. Hence the head on the left side is merely an erase head. The physics of magnetic head design dictate that cross field cannot work across a gap that large, and any magnetic field intense enough to try would affect the other tracks on the tape. As to resetting the counter, there appears to be a lever over the counters reset button, but it's unclear how it's activated. Maybe Techmoan can answer that one when he does his video on this deck. ;-)

Just a thought regarding the BB. Maybe when you had or someone else had replaced the belt there was some type of bearing ball there already, but when it was being disassembled/repaired it fell and no one noticed. Just a possibility. Great mechanism for feeding the tape to the heads. How come there is no FF button? Most 8 tracks had at least FF. How do you reset the tape counter? Did not see a reset button. Is there a glass or plastic cover over the window to the heads and counter? Thanks for saving this machine and giving it new life.

6:15 - Left is 'OUT', Right is 'PUT' :)

What a cool 8-track machine databits! Kind of sad you didn’t try dubbing an 8 track though... or maybe a future video is coming up? :)

Fantastic sound, indeed. It is crazy how those polyester tapes havent dissolved after 40 years

Just when I thought I saw it all

That really is a special machine and you are very lucky to have found it. Gives a great sound, nice idea's in its design. Thanks for posting!

I wonder why they didn't keep up with this particular transport and play system. It could sound as good as an open reel deck.

Never seen one of these!! A very rare and unique model.

Wow, that's one fancy 8 track deck!

I'm not sure if that's a good design. Pulling the tape out like that tends to unspool extra slack within the cartridge. When you press stop, the pinch roller is literally pushing the slack back into the cartridge and does not wind back onto the reel.

I've been trying to find one of these for years, many many years.

That's a great bit of kit. Yes, I'm listening to the audio through my phone. An interesting technology that spawned NAB broadcast cartridge variants as used in radio studios. Thanks for posting this 👍

Very interesting player. It would probably be good for people like techmoan always having to fix 8 track pads, haha.

Caught this link over on TH, very cool and thanks for taking the time to do the video. A.R.

Now if they had extracted the tape far enough to use its own pinch roller rather than the cartridge's own roller, it would have been fantastic! Really it bent the format a bit because there's a risk of getting tape slack.

Interesting as Roberts make DAB FM digital radios here.

A thing of beauty from back when stuff was made properly.

It's interesting that as soon as you inserted the cartridge into the machine, the tape counter started moving even though you hadn't yet pressed start/play.

The design of it looks a lot like my akai 1800d reel to reel player. from the vu meter to the plugs on the back

Super cool video and super cool bit of kit! Minor correction, UK mains is 230V, but 220/240V devices work just fine for reasons I won't pretend to know

The "X" in the model number indicates crossfield heads. The head that moves into place when you press "record" applies the bias signal when you record, which is the same idea as what they used on reel-to'reel decks like their 770X deck. It allows for better high frequency response when recording.

That is one WEIRD 8 track machine.

I've got a 8 track player with a play and a ff button. But this is pretty awesome

Great 8-Track Tape Recorder/Player!!!

8-Track is such a weirdass format for me. Being born in 1985 I only ever encountered 8-track cartridges in the shape of "rom pacs" for the Exidy Sorcerer II computer which actually used 8-track casings for their program carts.

There is a super BIG flywheel , unbelievable!

I could have bought a teac a few years ago had Dolby and big vu meters , I didn't have any tapes. I took the prerecorded tapes that had spliced them together and filled a 7" reel tape. In hindsight I probably should not have done that.

I'd like to see a review of the original MP3 cassettes like the MobiBlu and others from that era. Compare to the one or two crappy ones currently available. The very first model didn't have an SD slot, but the company quickly introduced a 2nd model with SD.

I'm wondering if the unit you have is an engineering prototype or a test production run? It looks hand made and a lot of the metal is raw unfinished. Note too the scribe marks where the screws are on the back. Was this ever a real product you could buy?

Wow. Actually sounds crisp and clear.

Listening to the camera feed over a mono smartphone speaker, I can tell there are phasing issues with the audio.

Never seen such an 8 track machine that actually pulls the tape out of the cartridge to play it,,,just like a vcr tape recorder!

i once found a cassette converter with no cassette jammed on the door inside an 8 track.

This is good. They are coming back

The word you're looking for is "incompatible", not "obsolete". Obsolete implies it was replaced by something better (or at least newer).

Bizarre! How do you reset the counter?

A nice tapedeck. I like the idea they used so it wouldn't need pressure pads.

That is a most incredible, excellent 8-track machines!! I believe it is a separate erase head and record/play head. They did have single erase/record/play heads (really two heads in one head container) at the time, but I believe they separated them out as this is a higher end machine, and probably (perhaps) to have slightly wider tracks on the erase head than on the R/PB head to better erase previous recordings (many times in my 8-track heyday (2005)) the erase did not do so good with alignment with the original recordings and the old recordings would bleed through if the azimuth and alignment was not really good. The pausing is good, as the motor pulling the tape when not in play mode is an annoying thing. The one thing that would have made this even a better unit is if the 8-track pinch roller was slightly pushed away from the capstan for pausing (the Realistic TR-801 is like that, so you have a smooth starting and stopping with its pause). Have you tried making any recordings on this unit yet?

Looks to be very well built indeed, I guess the idea must be to improve the tape to head contact, must have been expensive when new!

Back in the early seventies I had a Wollensak 8-track recording tape deck. I always thought the Wollensak was the best, especially the later version that added Dolby B. The fidelity of the Wollensak was pretty good for the format. I'd like to know how this deck with it's unique tape to head isolation mechanism compared to the Wollensak ones? I added an outboard Teac AN-60 Dolby B unit to mine and I thought I was pretty cool as a young teen. By the late seventies the writing was on the wall that 8-track was passing with the quality of the compact cassette ramping up. While in college I switched to cassettes and like my bike when I got my driver's license I never looked (or listened) to the Wollensak again. I've been a tapehead since I was about 12 years old when I bought my first quarter track reel to reel. That was also a Wollensak unit and I remember being in middle school anxious to get home to play with it. I got it from a company few remember called Burstein & Aoolebee who specialized in liquidation of electronic gear as well as parts. I loved reel to reel so much I bought a Akai 4400 the summer before my senior year in 1976. How much did I love it? Well, my folks let me and my three best friends go to Panama City Florida on summer vacation loosely being chaperoned by some adult family friends who were actually there because one of our high school sororities called Ad Astra rented a house on the beach for the Ad Adstr gals. I took a receiver, my reel to reel and one of my friends brought a pair of Dynamo A-25 speakers. We were on the second floor of the not so famous Casa Loma Motel... so with the electronics in our room I ran speaker wire over the balcony and down to the pool where we had the Dynamo speakers for a pool party that lasted about an hour before we were told we'd have to stop! That's how much I was into stereo gear , tape recording, and music in general. Crazy in every sense of the word. We took the party to the room and got away with that for some reason! So, I'm a tape nut who wasn't averse to loading up my gear for whatever...and I still have a Pioneer 1020 R2R and multiple cassette decks. I thoroughly enjoyed your video on this unique deck. I'd still like to know if the frequency response and the signal to noise ratio of this deck was better than my old Wollensak, which until now I thought was the best ever made.

I can't believe Roberts used such a piss poor pause scheme! Here, the way they pause is to just cut power to the motor for the "Pause" button! In most other 8 track recorders (including the ones that sold for $100) back in the day, they used a mechanical pause.

Really beautiful machine from time when audio was played mechanically, not like today when everything fits in single boring chip. One thing is interesting @18:42 it is written "OUT PUT" as two words. I always thought that you would write "OUTPUT". Did that changed in the past 50 year?

It eliminates most of the inaccuracy of the regular push in to the head and change the track while wishing for the best alignment....Are you familiar with the channel Boz Fone? He restores 8 track machines of all makes..

Great video excellent close up shots of the mechanism

Guess one couldn't buy one BB w/o having to buy 2,399 more? :D

Now if only 8-Tracks had the pinch roller in the machine instead of the cart, like on 4-tracks.

i admit to licking washers in order to keep them together & in place

its possibly what gave sony the idea for the tape loading mechs as all video tape recorders were originally open reel like a reel to reel player

I hope you removed that broken tape that is wrapped around the capstan at 5:05. That could be the reason why you have a lot of wow and flutter. I owned several 8-track players and recorders (Panasonic, GE and Realistic) and none of them had a mechanism like that!

Sounds incredibly good for an 8-track player. The main problem in this format was the pad and this device bypass it. It's interesting to know if there's a risk of damaging the tape like some VCR's, otherwise this is best 8-track player (and recorder) ever made.

Great video. I’d love one of these so I didn’t have to replace every pad on every 8 track I buy.

Great video. What with the precarious nature of the eight track, this thing probably broke a lot of tape.

That's a nice 8-track tape splice testing machine 😆. If that 180 degree turn between the heads doesn't break a splice, nothing will. But a great concept anyway, trying to eliminate the need for a foam pad.

Is this the only machine of its type that exists or there are others that pulled the tape out that wasn't even aware 8 track made a machine like this very cool it's almost like a VCR

The head on the left is definitely erase only the playback head is also the record head. That big motor probably has dual windings to accommodate 50 or 60 Hertz. Megahertz is 1,000,000 Hertz. Nice tape deck. I think there were CrO2 8 tracks made for a bit.

Ohh man. This music gave me PTSD...this was the music playing over that covid dashboard app tracker at the beginning of the pandemic

"Pads? We don't need no stinking pads" lol

Ohhhh hell yes!!!! Of course it would be an Akai build!

That sounded FABULOUS!

That’s a cool unit well built equipment never see anything like that today

I'll be hearing that music in my nightmares. Thanks.

A really awesome find, but would playing an 8-Track too many times in this machine risk stretch out the tape?

This is, by far, the most epic video I’ve ever seen!!

Just wondering one thing, where is the screen on top? is it missing? got more pics? really interested! thnx!

Its so unusual it literally comes from Mars ,never seen an eight track player/recorded like that before

It's always, with no exception, record/play combined and erase seperately. It's either that, or a seperate record head, play head and erase head. This goes or any kind of analog recorder. That's about as good as an 8-track will sound :D.