"You left out the 8-tracks." Yeah, I know it was deliberate on two counts. First, my post was pretty long and second, the topic was about Lou Ottens of Philip

"You left out the 8-tracks." Yeah, I know it was deliberate on two counts. First, my post was pretty long and second, the topic was about Lou Ottens of Philips, 8-track was RCA and others. Besides, 8-track never achieved the large following that the cassette did. Where I saw it being used most (and that was its professional variant) was in radio and TV stations for audio inserts, etc. The number of times I saw it used in say a car was trivial when compared with cassettes. That said, the quality was much better but ultimately it was doomed because it was too big and other commercial considerations. "<…>small reels of full-size 0.25 inch tape (you still had to thread them yourself).<…>" I remember those, the quality was pretty terrible and most of them didn't even have electronic [RF-driven] erase head, instead they used a permanent magnet erase head for the purpose. I think everyone was pleased to see the end of them. "Remember Woodstock came out on stereo LP's, 8-tracks and cassettes,<…>" Didn't know that but I'm hardly knowledgeable about 8-track releases. I saw the Woodstock movie sometime in 1970 and about four or five times since. I've been meaning to get a copy but not managed to do so yet. It really is a must-own movie given that incredible performance by Hendrix. "<…>By 1969 mono vinyl was not for any major releases.<…>" That's my recollection too. "<…>But FM still cost extra for years to come so plenty of cars were still shipped with the tradtitonal stock AM radio only.<…>" I'm very familiar with that situation, in the early 1970s I had a lot to do with the transmitting side of FM broadcasting. "<…>Capitol records, Sergeant Pepper was the only one made at the time.<…>" There were very few pre-recorded ones around where I was at the time, they were more popular in some areas of the world than others. "<…>Then Ampex got kicked out of the consumer market<…>" OK, I can't recall that incident at all. All I know is that the market narrowed for 8-track pretty quickly then essentially it all but disappeared (I never owned a player so I suppose my interest wasn't there to note). Anyway, Ampex wasn’t in the domestic recorder business much after the early 1960s, essentially it had become a pro-recorder only company. My first experience of Apex was with its VR-1000A and VR2000 2" quadruplex machines and the multi-track audio recorders. "<…>And they had just invented Memorex tape, before that you could not record a live rock concert very well.<…>" Well, Memorex tape was better than Ampex 406/407 and especially the rotten 'melting' Ampex 456 which shedded the coating in a sticky gooey mess. It was a disaster. "<…>The Dark Side of the Moon, which was Quadrophonic in concert and also available quad on vinyl.<…>" Wasn’t aware of quad on vinyl on that recording. About two years ago, I went to a friend's place who has an excellent hi-fi setup, he owned the vinyl recording of The Dark Side of the Moon and I the CD one. We did a critical listening test between the two recordings (I'm not going to enter the debate about which recording sounds best). Quad was just too much mucking about to take off.