Does Hi-Fi VHS tape have that warm "analog sound", IYHO?

Yep, that was the Alesis ADAT format. It used S-VHS tapes as the storage medium. IIRC, it was a 16/48 system. I think it debuted in 1991, though.

 

Definitely pre-ADAT, although it could have been a forefather of the format. We recorded and mixed in 1987...regular VHS tapes, as I still have the master somewhere.

 

Interesting thread. There isn't many posts on VHS playback on any websites. I am one of the few vhsphiles out there I guess. I grew up with VHS and watched the launch of MTV and first music video they played. My parents had that big old clunky VHS player and we recorded soooo many movies and tv shows over the years. Well, being an audiophile that has a high end turntable system and a lover of analog with a degree in TV Production I have a little known thing for 70's and early 80's VHS movies. First off, many 70's movies are hard to find and are not available on Netflix or Blu-Ray. Many are available on DVD and sometimes you will catch a movie on cable TV. But, the sound of analog tape as we all know sounds amazing. Thats what VHS tape is, its analog 1/4" tape. The sound of a Woody Allen movie from the 70's like Annie Hall is simply stunning. It is a night and day differant between watching the same movie on cable tv and the VHS tape. I can turn down the sound and hear clear, effortless dialog and music of the movie that it transports you back in time to the days of those movies. To further take me back I bought a 79 Zenith 20" TV in solid wood cabinet. The analog sound coming from such a heavy dense cabinet sounds really good! Its as if im watching Smokey and the Bandit all over again after grade school before my parents got home from work! Also, with a smaller TV the 220 lines of resolution isn't as much an issue as if you tried to play the VHS movie on a modern 55" LED TV.
This is a perfect bedroom system. Usually i want to relax, read or fall alseep watching a vintage movie from the 70's. The VCR as low or high volumnes is perfect for that. Its not for cirtical videophile movie watching. But immersive casual back in the day watching of a long lost movie favorite. I still can't get over how good original 70's and early 80';s VHS movies sound. BTW, VHS movies remastered or mastered after 1988 are all digital and recorded poorly. THey are not the same as the original versions.

 

It may be' warm' but its full of noise,companding errors , drop outs and head switching.
Euphonic distortion at its finest.

 

My first VHS-HiFi deck sent my X-1000R to the back burner. I thought it sounded as good or better, was much more convenient, offered the same long play, and I would create video with track info on my old Apple //c and send that to the video input. I though it was an excellent solution, though I sure wish I hadn't tossed the R2R some years later without ever giving it another chance!

Though in reality VHS-HiFi arrived at the same time for me as CD and my use of tape slipped away pretty quickly.

 

2" 16 and 24 track tape provides for some saturation that results in compression. It's particularly effective when tracking drums. Some people still use big tape and then transfer to a DAW.

The HI FI VHS tape system provides nothing like this.

At one time, it did represent a reasonable way to record and archive music, especially long program material. It's frequency response was good (20Hz to 20khz) but signal to noise ratio was 70 db. CD is 90db by reference.

Many home recordists using 4 trak cassette decks would use a VHS HI FI to ping pong traks as well as using as a master 2 track recorder. (I did both).

The audio was captured through an auto frequency modulation system and it had its own not unpleasant "sound"

I would describe as having a thick, but not terribly accurate low end, and the highs seemingly rounded off a bit. It was good stuff in 1986, but I wouldn't bother with it today.

 

That deck is SICK dude !!!

I have a poorman's version of it (not SVHS) and have transferred many a VHS tape onto dvd with terrific success.

 

I agree, could never get any sound worth having.

 

You are terribly misinformed.

VHS linear audio sounded awful even when it was brand-new in the 1970s. SP tapes were only going at 1.5ips, so it was even worse fidelity than audio cassettes. The track width was very narrow, and the distortion specs were through the roof, typically over 5%. Wow and flutter made 8-track cartridges sound like high fidelity by comparison.

You can make an argument that under ideal circumstances, VHS Hi-Fi could sound acceptable, but only if the tracking was really precise, which it rarely was. Head-switching issues usually marred the Hi-Fi track quite a bit with wideband modulation noise (in harmonics based on 60Hz). But the linear audio was just atrocious. From Wikipedia:

In the original VHS specification, audio was recorded as baseband in a single linear track, at the upper edge of the tape, similar to how an audio compact cassette operates. The recorded frequency range was dependent on the linear tape speed. For the VHS SP mode, which already uses a lower tape speed than the compact cassette, this resulted in a mediocre frequency response of roughly 100 Hz to 10 kHz for NTSC; frequency response for PAL VHS with its lower standard tape speed was somewhat worse. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) was an acceptable 42 dB. Both parameters degraded significantly with VHS's longer play modes, with EP/NTSC frequency response peaking at 4 kHz.

I don't dispute that some people have great nostalgia and affection for VHS, but it's insane to claim that it ever looked and sounded good, especially in the face of a really decent DVD or Blu-ray disc today.

 

And to follow up on that: I have no idea what you're talking about. From about 1980-1989, we mastered a lot of films to 1"C analogue composite videotape, but from 1988 on there was a "Wild West" of standards, everything from 1" to D1 digital component to D2 digital composite to (eventually) Digital Betacam around 1993-1994. Everything pretty much switched to DigiBeta once that hit and everything else faded until HD picked up in 1999.

It's a folly to believe that all movies were "recorded poorly" after 1988, because there are so many different factors involved. Mastering techniques, scanning technology, color correction range... there are a lot of factors here, and it's a subject far, far more complicated than I suspect you imagine. I think for the most part mastering got better from the 1980s to the 1990s, and from the 1990s to the 2000s, but part of that is because of the technology and the other part is because the skill of the engineers also became better. I know I'm a better mastering engineer today than I was 30 years ago, but it's been an evolution over time.

And trust me when I say: there are some hideous, scum-sucking, unwatchable transfers from the 1980s. Just stunningly awful crap.

 

The one and only album I ever recorded/mixed/co-produced was mastered on a Sanyo Hi-Fi VCR in 1995. That analog master was transferred to DCC, and eventually to CD.

 

The Playhouse (TCF) video of the three Planet of the Apes sequels-Escape,Conquest and Battle sounded fanastic on Beta HiFi and it took until the isolated tracks on Bluray to beat it audibly. Planet(1968) never sounded good even till this day.
This was an incredibly fustrating thing for Apes fans especially when given the runaround by Fox videos Bart P. and Lewis L.
HBO/Cinemax had transfers that audibly sounded better than anything Fox released in those days. The reasons were ludicris especially when two track fantastic sounding audio for Planet(1968) was bootleged and around from a person who shall I say lived in Pennsylvania.
Fox was and still can be very lazy in finding good elements. Its sinfull that even today a good audio mix of Pota68 cant be found or made. BS!
Im going off topic slightly and Vidiot knows much about this as I have ranted about this before. My Sony SL-HF 1000 beta is the best machine for audio I had ever heard up until very recently. Playing the good soundtracks from films through this machine was a wonderfull and amazing event. I also used Sonys Best small beta for bootlegging audio at RadioCity with my Crazy Eddie cohorts. Fun Times, Take care, John M.

 

NEC made Yamaha's early machines and JVC made their later ones. Panasonic made Canon's. Both were rebrands of their corresponding models at the time, with some cosmetic changes. The Canon looked almost identical to the Panasonic and Quasar versions.

 

I still have my top of the line old Sony hi fi VHS deck, it has a flying erase head, and audio level controls. I did use it to do some bouncing from my cassette deck back in the day, and it gave pretty good audio results. I always used a high quality tape. I wouldn't say the results were any better than my top of the line cassette decks though.

 

In theory that was true - and you could certainly hear it sometimes right after hitting the record button - but in practice the switching noise was usually buried down around the noise threshold of any analog recording you were trying to copy to VHS Hi-Fi (especially vinyl). It was more of an issue with CD dubs, but even there, the switching noise was less audible - and less annoying - than analog tape hiss and Dolby artifacts.

Pick your poison...

 

Not if you played it on a different machine. The interchange problems were up the ying-yang -- that's a technical term. I wrote extensively on Beta Hi-Fi and VHS Hi-Fi for Video, Video Review, and other magazines in the 1980s when the systems were introduced and have very, very vivid memories of how awful those systems sounded. Just record silence and listen to that with headphones, and tell me what you hear. This is a prime example of manufacturers who cook up a new standard and then fudge with the numbers as a sales gimmick.

We were so stunned by how bad the distortion specs were on the first machine we tested at Video Review, it took four or five days of haggling before the powers-that-be agreed to even run the review. It was quite a mess, even when the real numbers were kind of buried in the story, and we still had some very angry phone calls from JVC and Panasonic after that. Ultimately it didn't matter in the grand scheme of things. In truth, analogue laserdiscs had similar problems, also using subcarrier-based systems that were affected by bad RF tracking problems. Digital eliminated all of these problems (though created some new ones).

Great analogue audio from a full-track (or even half-track) 1/4" tape running at a decent speed has fewer than 1/10th of the problems of VHS Hi-Fi. They don't resemble each other in the slightest, except that both vaguely reproduce sound. Traditional analogue audio is an entirely separate issue, with far less processing and a far less torturous signal path.

 

Oh, I did a lot of work for Bart Pierce and Lewis. They were actually very nice people who did their best. That was my master on Beneath the Planet of the Apes, which I did in the early 1990s for Bart's boss, the late great Rick Montez at Fox.

I have to say, as much as I'm critical of this stuff, the HF1000 was an amazing machine for its time and was very well made and had less distortion than VHS Hi-Fi, though the HF1000 had problems with soft video heads that wore quickly and resulted in lots of dropouts over time. Beta Hi-Fi didn't have nearly the problems that VHS Hi-Fi did, but it's kind of like saying that dog doo doesn't smell quite as bad as elephant dung. Neither one is great.

 

Yup.

I hate to bash VHS, my gosh it gave me years of viewing joy and I was so thankful for it at the time, but.........

I don't have, nor have I ever seen a single VHS tape that I could say even looks or sounds even reasonably ok compared to DVD standards, to say nothing of blu ray.

Yeah.... VHS Hi Fi was a welcome thing, but it was not the end all be all either, just a welcome improvement at the time. And most folks had already bought their favorite movie on non hi fi VHS, so it was a bit of a bittersweet thing for the early adopters.

S-VHS was far too limited a format to even discuss for prerecorded tapes. My brother had a very expensive JVC S-VHS deck and it did not look or sound but marginally better than my Sony VHS Hi Fi Deck. And it was constantly in the shop for repairs. My Sony is still working fine decades later. His expensive JVC S-VHS deck went into the trash. I think I paid around $650 for my Sony, IIRC his JVC was $1200+.

I was playing my VHS & VHS HI FI purchased tapes on my top of the line Sony HI FI VHS deck into my top of the line Sony XBR CRT TV back then every day, and although I was happy as a clam to have movies to watch at my leisure, I realized they looked pretty bad overall.

I still have a few dozen movies on VHS that have not come to DVD yet, and occasionally I pull out the Sony deck and watch them, but it IS painful, they look and sound horrible.

Don't get me wrong, at one point I owned 300+ prerecorded movies on VHS, I played the living hell out of them and had very few self destruct, and I REALLY enjoyed the fact I could watch what I wanted to at my leisure, it was an amazing entertainment device to own at the time....but I knew all along the quality was far from great, even on the best prerecorded movies.

Now I'll have to pull out one of those old VHS movies still not on DVD/blu ray and watch it just because I feel bad for slamming the format, I just hope I don't grit my teeth too hard due to the poor quality, let me see, what do I have?



Hmmmmmmmmm.....Robo Warriors, 1996, James Remar. Here we go, get out the popcorn! (ok, it is on a region 2 DVD, but only in German language for some odd reason and they go for over $100).

 

Exactly. I can totally understand nostalgia for analogue formats like magnetic tape and vinyl and all that stuff, particularly material that's never been released and may never be released. And sound restoration and mastering has never been more important than it is today. But awful Betamax and VHS movies from the 1980s? Kill me now.

I don't think there's many humans alive who recorded more hours of Betamax or S-VHS tape than me in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, and I recorded a ton of material off-air during that period. But as DVD emerged in 1997, I began to realize that the tapes were so terribly flawed, there was no need to hang on to them -- except in cases of once-in-a-lifetime broadcasts that were very unusual. But stock movies and TV shows... naw. It looks and sounds like absolute garbage.

I miss a lot of things about the 1970s and 1980s, but analogue video is not one of them.

 

I'll see if I can dig out some of my old VHS Hi-Fi tapes to play on my newish VHS/DVD combo deck. I recall listening to them a few years back and thinking they sounded fantastic, though...

 

They might play ok, but probably not. Have fun.

 

VHS is a controversial format. Can you compare it to much? No. Perhaps the only thing worse was SD cable, which was infuriatingly bad. Before the advent of HDTV, I had 1" machines in my house, because watching good video where I worked off C-band and off formats like D2 spoiled me a bit. But, as a friend who worked as a top NYC bench tech for years explained(and I agree with him), the VHS picture CAN be enjoyable if you don't expect too much. Some of those professional Panasonic and JVC machines look decent. Would I demo my setup with it? Heck, no, but some tapes look ok. Is the picture on VHS great? Nope, but is anyone expecting a great picture?

Recently, in an effort to free up home space, I decided to go through hundreds of tapes I had amassed since 1983 or so, about 30 years' worth of tapes. Unbeknownst to me, my mother stored a whole bunch of tapes in an old room that was neither heated nor cooled. These tapes had white mold-looking stuff on them. You know what? Nearly all of them have played. I'm about 200 tapes in, and I have lost exactly one, a T-160 that understandably snapped. Being a TV guy of some 25 years, I am stunned at how these tapes have survived. They are every brand you could think of. Don't get me wrong; in no way am I saying that VHS is anything close to archival, but, while I am no believer in the format, it has taken far, far more of a beating than I thought was possible.

The linear sound on both Beta and VHS is not good at all. I know that Dolby B was used on VHS and Marantz tried Dolby C on at least one model of Beta, but it all seemed below compact-cassette quality.


Dan

 

Great feedback everyone, looks like a lot of us are from the same era. I have a degree in video production and did my internship at a KPNX-TV12 back in 1992. I was a camera man, grip and boom operator, also produced, directed, edited and shot my own cable access and education channel tv shows on 1/2" tape for a few years. I remember vaguely these things but now im in IT the last 15 years and havn't really thought about it in a long time. I did work a job once for a video replicating facility and wedding video's. I remember all those Panasonic pro VHS decks so I bought one a few years ago in mint condition. I even remembered how to clean it! It plays great and sounds wonderful.

I would like to point out a few things with a differant viewpoint of a consumer that happens to be a vinyl audiophile.

First, I shouldn't have said 1988. I just made that number up. I should have said towards the late 80's and on the production companys like you mentioned previously pumped out millions of poorly made quick vhs copies for the masses. I haunt estate sales, yardsales and thrift stores often looking for vinyl and vhs and see these horrible digital vhs quick and dirty re-issues all the time. They sold them for next to nothing at Kmart all through the 90's. I have multiable versions of the same VHS movies and compared them. Good examples are 70's and early 80's movies like Willy Wonka or Annie Hall. The first pressings VHS made looked and sounded analog. Full saturated video and sound. The digital VHS copies they re-issued in the 90's were all digital remasters that sounded washed out with a glaze over the top. Harsh brittle and cable like.

Second, while watching a rare movie (not available on Netflix or Blu-Ray) on cox cable SD, I switched back and forth between the cable box and my VHS on my Panasonic machine on my 20" vintage 1979 Zenith commander tv set. The video was a tad softer on VHS but wasn't too bad since it was on a smaller tube set. (dialog movies like Woody Allen are fine like that) But the audio differant was staggering. It was like the differance between listening to the typical MP3 garbage kids download and an audiophile vinyl re-issue. The sound was so clear, transparent and dynamic that I was able to turn the volumne of the tv set way down and still hear the movie. There is so much noise in cox cable that you have to turn it way up to make out what people are saying. It's really nice to be able to play back a movie at low levels and hear everything in the movie so clearly. Expecially late night or when you are sick in bed all day with the flu!

To be clear, I have a 70's movie collection on VHS only. Early 80's too. I think I stop at the Pretty in Pink / Breakfast Club era. I dont do action movies but do love vintage SciFi. I managed to score a SEALED NOS copy of the original The Black Hole by Walk Disney. OMG it sounds so good! The music sound track and dialog is epic analog.

Movies from late 80's on up I try to only buy on Blu-Ray.

Vidiot, I agree 100% with everything you are saying. But the reality of the end product can be much differant. Sure, the best what engineers did back in the 90's could be a great product but 90% of the cheap VHS movies mass produced was very substandard. Ive seen thousands of these at thrift stores over the last 4 years for $1 a each. I avoid them like the plague. The best available over the years are usually in those expensive collectors box sets. Like that Aliens trilogy VHS box set with the Books and posters. Yes, that was well done. It even sells for good money these days on Ebay.

Some? I would say most off the shelf consumer re-issues.)

 

But it's not the work of the mastering engineer. You're basically annoyed by the bad "pressings" (if you can call a cheap VHS dub a pressing). The master itself is fine.

Towards the last 10 years of VHS, many companies cheaped-out their dubs and started making copies on low-ball 30- or 20-micron video head consumer decks, rather than the wider 60-micron head pro machines they should've used. As a result, noise and tracking problems increased substantially, and it got even worse when some ultra-cheap reissue firms started releasing EP-mode tapes. This had a terrible effect on video quality. High-speed VHS dubbing also resulted in uglier-looking videocassettes. But again, it's not the film transfer: it's the dub. Big difference.

The transfers themselves got better in the 1990s, and digital gear was a huge part of that.

 

Sadly a lot of movies on VHS have been ruined by digital... (Older movies,etc)

They either DIGITALLY RECORD IT OR DIGITALLY MASTER IT TO THE TAPE AND ITS AWEFUL!!

I LOVE VHS!!!!

ANALOGUE IS BEAUTIFUL...... I am grateful to have found as many movies as i have IN THIER ORIGINAL ANALOG FORMATS!!!


Dont worry,your not the only one bud!!

I LOVE PURITY!!