so for the past month i've been leaving old vhs movies on in the background while i work
i noticed that several tapes had faded audio that got worse over the course of the film, with a lot of humming in the background, to the point of being inaudible after a while. a few web searches suggested either a worn out vhs tape (which I feared), or a poorly tracked vcr (I adjusted the tracking, which didn't improve anything)
i did notice that my older JVC vcr never had the "stereo" light on when playing back movies, and had a suspicion:
so holy crap, til: most VHS tapes past a certain age have two audio tracks: an analog mono track, and a stereo hi-fi track
when the vcr can't track the stereo hi-fi track properly, it switches to the analog mono track on the edge of the tape.
my vcr was always downgrading to the analog track, which on several (ex-rental) tapes had degraded due to mishandling and abuse (being at the edge of the tape path)
i picked up a Sony SLV-778HF today for $20 just to see if switching VCRs would make a difference.
holy COW is this a huge improvement over my old 80s JVC vcr! not only did it pick up the stereo hi-fi track on all of the "bad" tapes perfectly, but it improved the video so much that it looks like a dvd.
@vga256 great idea! :) Wish I could digitize new VHS tapes again. It's a great experience and I still have my VHS-Video-Grabber. I'm using a program called VirtualDub.
@vga256 VHS hi-fi is really something. Some vcrs will let you record audio only on a tape and you get an even longer recording time. Also, it’s pretty much CD quality.
So many memories. As a teenager, that's how I dubbed borrowed CDs. I had 4 hours long mix tapes. The best part is that you could press a button while recording to place an inaudible "marker" that the VCR could use to go back to. So if I knew that a song was the 23rd on the tape, I'd tell it to reach the 23rd marker and it would fast-forward to it. The hi-fi audio used what I reckon is called NICAM encoding, and it was digital, so hiss-free etc.
@vga256 I've also encountered some homemade recording which only have a Hi-Fi audio track -- no linear audio at all. So if you played them on a mono VCR, or one with misaligned/worn out heads that defaulted to the linear track, you'd just get silence.
@vwestlife ah ha ha... i would have never realized that was possible until today. i'm guessing the heads on my old jvc need some cleaning or have some alignment issue.
@vga256 Sony was awesome! I had a SLV-715, and one cool thing it allowed was recording only the mono audio track, or the video+stereo track. That way, audio commentary could be added by replacing the mono audio. I can't remember if it allowed to play both simultaneously or just switch between them, but either way it was really cool.
After it broke down, I replaced it with a Grundig, and even after many years of tech development, it wasn't quite the same thing. Sony was really special.
@vga256 I get the suspicion that most people who say 'VHS had bad picture quality' only ever watched beat-up rentals, multi-generation dubs, and movies taped off TV. A good VCR setup still looks and sounds fine.
Add comment