Who remembers what a VHS is?

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Compact Cassettes were on the market before the Stereo 8, for what it's worth.

Compact Cassettes had poor sound quality at first, which led to the 8 track gaining more of a market hold for music initially.

I didn't know that

We had the player but I can't ever remember seeing any cassettes for it.

I've still got about half a dozen functioning VHS players and more than 300 tapes, some homemade, some commercially produced. From time to time I transfer the contents of a VHS tape to recordable dvd, and from there to a hard drive, but I still find it difficult to throw out a VHS tape when it's still in excellent condition, as most of mine are, even after thirty or more years. I'd gladly donate most of my homemade tapes to someone who would give them a good home, but finding such persons is probably close to impossible.

I don't think my folks have had an 8-track player in the house within my lifetime, although I know they've had them. I've only ever seen the tapes at second hand stores.

Meanwhile cassettes, we had a player when I was a kid (I've owned a boombox with one as well). I still have some Maxell tapes I've never opened. I've got about 40 mix tapes and about the same number of pre-recorded tapes.

I have Divine Intervention on cassette, with the booklet signed by all four members of Slayer at the time.

Still have ordinary cassette player but don't know 8 track.

This is an 8 track. Every time I think of VCRs I always think of the old 8 track as well for some reason.

phillips is a good brand

there are universities that have media departments/new/culture archives which might be interested in your tapes esp. if the adverts weren't edited out of them.

i have a quadraphonic 8 track with a quad amp built in to it. i have a small collection of original Q8 tapes that let me hear quad as it was meant to be heard.

back in the day, audio hobbyists who listened to late night radio programs [such as "coast to coast"] would use VHS-hifi vcr decks to record these programs in their entirety, up to 8 hours straight audio could be recorded on one of these babies.

I've also heard of VHS-hifi being used by home studio musicians back in the day for master recordings.

Over 60% of VHS movies never made it onto DVD or the internet. I was surprized by this.

I do. VHS tapes were still common in the 2000s because many people still didn't have DVD players so it was a big deal when stores started to quit carrying them. I am always surprised when young adults don't know what a VHS is given they were still common when they were little. I knew them from when I was 2. I knew what a 8 track was because my parents has them and I remembered my mom playing them. Did their parents not play any VHS tapes when they were little?

I remember when my family used to rent movies on VHS in the 1980s. I loved the smell of the tapes. The smell of plastic and the chemicals on the actual tape strip. Those were such fun days. I got my first DVD player in 2003.

problem with it was it was FM recording with no digital redundancy/error correction so after a few dozen [or less] tape passes, tape drop-outs [due to premature wear of the tape binder which kept the magnetic particles in place] became a problem. there were digital adaptor boxes that could encode an error-corrected digital signal onto these vhs decks which were far more reliable. panasonic made the first consumer all-in-one model back in the early 80s. it created true master-quality recordings. but i don't know how many machines or tapes survive today.

Here's one of the two VHS recorders I still use from time to time. It's a Toshiba V253, a pretty basic machine but very reliable. I bought it secondhand about 10 years ago from a charity shop in Blackburn for £5.