Until cheap digital recording became available in the mid 2000's, LP Hi-Fi VHS was how many commercial radio stations would archive their output for the mandated 42 days required by the Radio Authority. I still have many of our old tapes and even at LP, providing the machine wasn't hitting its limiter, the quality is actually very good.
In the USA commercial TV stations often logged their air feed for proof commercials ran. They initially used reel to reel security video tape recorders but when 6hr VHS came along they jumped on that. far cheaper and reliable than those old security camera recorders.
@@jamiey5779 You are far more susceptible to dropout and other tape damage. Nothing quite like the farting noises of some dropout that might not have impacted an SP recording.
Since I've used VHS quite a bit for two channel analog audio, here's a nugget of information regarding the EP/SLP speed. The bottom line is, the sound quality itself is basically the same. There is little if any difference. However, tracking is fussier. In audio tapes recorded at that speed, a bit of tracking adjustment on other VCRs is normal. At SP it is much more forgiving.
Very true, essentially all VHS speeds will lay down the same amount of audio signal, but tracking, as you've rightly pointed out was a pain between machines outside of SP speed. I run a video transfer business and am blessed to have a stack of professional rack-mount studio S-VHS machines (AG7350/7650/7750) as well as a Betamax SL-HF950 Hifi machine too, and a very late stereo V2000 machine. I also have a very rare DAV unit (a relative of Video 8) which although digital is quite cool to play with and delivers fantastic quality for a 1985 domestic digital tape, 8 Stereo tracks simultaneously too. I'm posting a video up in a few weeks comparing them all for sonic use, the results might be quite interesting.
Once Used a HIFI VHS deck to record a Jazz Concert at "The Rhythmic Club" Islington. I basically did this by asking the in house PA engineer to give me an output feed from his desk and then fed this into the line inputs of my HIFI VHS deck. This actually work really well. Very nice recording which I later mastered to DAT and CD back home.
Please don't bin the fried Panasonic VCR. Those NV-70s are great decks, definitely worth a repair. If you are not interested in reparing it or get it gepaired, give it to someone who is interested.
@@djsherz Unfortunatelly, nowadays these are much more problematic. They are not drying, but leaking and corroding the board. And often not just on the PSU, but on *every* boards. Pinch roller is usually shot, and broken loading motor clutch is a very common failure, and quite PITA to fix in this variant of the G-mechanism, IIRC you have to disassemble the whole cam gear assembly to get access. This one was playing well a day before it blown up, so it is confirmed that mechanically it is OK-ish, so it's a good candidate for a repair-refurb.
i would not either common for psu,s to go due to bad caps on panasonics quite a desirable machine i have a few panasonics a 1985 nv730 an nv f55 and a f75 i would not bother with the later mid mount machines there mostly cheaply made junk.
They have been for a while now.... the prices shown here were from unfinished Ebay auctions; these decks go for a fair bit more, and have done for some time - between £50 - £100 quite often! Good value for a HiFi recorder, but still expensive for 'just' a VHS deck!!
I doubt it. Those of us who were there at the time know just how badly implemented this was on many video recorders. It could often be beaten by a reasonably high end cassette deck.
This was a well kept secret that I shared with a lot of people when I was into this format. I used to record music for parties, 4 hours of music on one cassette and let it play. Of course this was days before CD changers. On top of that, the quality was nearly as clean as digital, depending on the source. Back when everyone was striving to get digital quality music on cassette, I was recording everything I had on VHS cassettes. It was a mostly a convenience factor along with high quality audio. I used to call it my poor man's DAT, even though it is an analog recording, but a damn good one. I could not afford a DAT in the late 80s when they slowly started to get released after the RIAA Sony thing resolved. Anyway, I still have several cassettes with music on them and a few HiFi VCRs. I still play them today, even though I have a real DAT. I still think these VCRs are great and way less finicky than a DAT. One thing I did test was the quality difference between SP, EP and SLP. Aside from losing hours of recording time, I did not hear a enough of a significant difference in the quality to record at a higher tape speed. Could just be my subjective opinion though.
if you share a "secret" with a lot of people - doesn't this defeat the purpose of a "secret"? it certainly isn't a "well kept" secret any more then. :)
Well I sure didn't get that secret tip. And I really could have used it. Way before 1997 when a friend who had come back from the US bought a Yamaha 4-track for "our band"... Living in a Third World country back then was a bit different and definitely harder from where most of you guys are from, in soo many respects...
You're right, it's essentially a non-issue as the control-track takes care of the micro-adjustments during playback, video-tape by nature had to be very finely timed for it work. I'm putting up a video myself in the New Year comparing various 'novel' analogue recording methods compared to compact cassette. I have a Panasonic AG-7750 sitting next to me which is about to record a test on to a brand new archival grade S-VHS cassette.
@@musmodtos I always have to turn my amp down about a 1/3 from the DVD audio level when watching a VHS tape. The THX sound on a VHS tapes still gets me fired up.
@@ET3Roberts i assume you have to turn your amp down because most VHS movie's audio tracks are a bit more compressed (and thus "louder") than their DVD counterparts - this did bleed over to VHS at some point shortly before VHS became obsolete. i guess at that time they just didn't bother to apply another mixing pass for the different media releases at least that is what i observed. while we had the loudness war in the music world and everything got compressed and loudened way too much, the exact opposite happened in home video. since the late 90's or so, the difference between soft and loud parts in movies is almost too much for casual movie watching at home IMO. i always have to engage DRC on my surround reciever when i want to watch a movie at night (or during the day even) because i usually wanna be able to understand what people are saying so i turn that thing up to where "normal talking" in movies is equally loud to "normal talking" in real life ... and then the talking is over and the next scene involves explosions and collapsing buildings ... and suddenly my sound system in the living room (including a 15" sub) rattles the plates in the kitchen.
@@lauratiso Very true but NICAM was a transmission format, it wasn't used for recording on tapes, that was always done at FM Stereo in the case of VHS Hifi. NICAM wasn't encoded on to the tape.
VHS HiFi has some dynamic compression issues, but otherwise sounds good. It also can have audible buzz, caused both by crosstalk from the video sync, and from the head switching of the HiFi audio heads. Non of these issues were very audible in this experiment, although the very beginning showed a bit of the dynamic compression issue.
@@danieldaniels7571 Yes, most of it is caused by the ALC, but I think some kind of limiter is built into the manual level control models as well, to prevent overmodulation. But maybe, if you are very gentle with the rec level, that limiter might not kick in. I should test it, I have three NV-F70s (one genuine Panasonic, and two Blaupunkt rebadged RTV-810s), but all of them are very broken currently.
@@mrnmrn1 I’ve never had that problem recording with a deck that has VU meters, but always made a point not to go more than a tiny bit into the red. The noise floor is so low on VHS HiFi that there’s no need to push the levels.
I'm here because I saw an interview with DJ Stretch Armstrong talking about how he would use hifi vhs to record broadcasts of the Stretch and Bobbito radio show on wkcr. Used to mess around with it a bit in the 00s. Recorded my cassettes onto vhs to free up cassettes. Now as a producer I'm interested in doing it as a mastering technique.
Brings back memories, used to have a couple of VHS HIFI tapes with music for parties, I think it was up to 8 hours in LP mode and it was still pretty good quality.
What you did not mention was that VHS HiFi started the whole home cinema craze. Prerecorded cassettes came out with HiFi tracks so films had superb audio. Dolby noticed this and as many releases on VHS had the surround info embedded in the two HiFi tracks, they brought out a 'Dolby surround' chip, later followed by a Dolby prologic' one, for amp manufacturers to incorporate into units, creating the first AV amps. I was a teenager at the time and took advantage of this development, and boy, was it fun!
Actually, Beta Hi-Fi had that distinction. If i remember right, VHS Hi-Fi came about six months to a year after Beta Hi-fi's debut. VHS HiFi did put that kind of audio quality into a lot more peoples' hands than Beta did, just by way of VHS' domination of the market, and between those two formats and Laserdisc, audio manufacturers decided that maybe they'd better take advantage of that. Interestingly enough, the foundation of Dolby surround had actually been around for ages; about the only thing Dolby really added to it was the Dolby part, the noise reduction. The technology was based on the old matrixed quad formats like SQ and QS (I believe it was QS, so they wouldn't have to pay royalties to CBS for SQ), so in a pinch, anyone who had an old quad receiver that could do SQ or QS could have surround sound too. I had an old Hitachi quad receiver that I used for just that. Paid virtually nothing for it because the owner just wanted to be rid of it; they all but gave it to me. Their mistake, my gain :)
The first album that the band Primus released in 1989, "Suck on This", was a live album that was recorded on-location (at the Berkeley Square club in Berkeley, CA) to a Tascam Portastudio 388 (8 tracks on 1/4" open-reel tape), and mixed down to 2-channel stereo on--you guessed it--Hi-Fi VHS, with the LP and CD releases mastered from it. The album sounds pretty good overall.
That's pretty cool!! Musos who are screaming to get outta the garage can be very clever, utilising the small amount of pooled equipment in ways that can have outstanding results. U hrd oysterhead? Claypool and Stewart Copeland, I don't remember other member, apologies..!!
Years ago the only way I could get a recording of the long version of Deep Forest's "While The Earth Sleeps" (with Peter Gabriel) was from the end credits of the film it was made for - Strange Days (Ralph Feinnes and Angela Basset) so I recorded it from the VHS over to my tape deck and was blown away at how clear and good the source was. Was pretty much CD quality to my untrained ears...
For those interested: make sure you get a recorder with RCA in- and outputs (for line in and out), then it's very easy to incorporate in a normal hifi-setup, or to connect to a mixer. And no need to worry about any noise reduction! Looking back to living in Amsterdam in the 90s, I used a SONY SLV-E80 to record nighttime radio shows (mostly ambient house), relistened and indeed: re-recorded on regular compact cassette. The manual stated 80 Db signal-to-noise ratio, which was hard to match on a cassette deck. But... a midclass SONY cassettedeck cost a third of that videorecorder... Now I have recently bought a SONY SLV-E90 (which adds useless editing options, but also a display-upgrade and manual setting of recording levels) and I will indeed use it to record record playing sessions (I'm not saying I DJ :-) ) in a local restaurant. Used to do it with cassettes, but had to keep my eye on those, as the sessions are 6 hours long. On long play I will only need one tape! Prices in The Netherlands for a Hi-Fi unit are 30-50 euros, and upwards for higher spec JVC/Panasonic/Sony. So, in short: I didn't care about the all-talk video, I can totally relate!
VHS-hi FI had a built-in noise reduction system. Which should not be confused with a Salora's VHS that had Dalby but it also didn't have the tone head on the video drum. And didn't sound as good
Bruce Springsteen's first album was well recorded on cassette tape. or any of the first albums. They probably use noise reduction for cassette tapes without noise reduction having too high a noise level. Especially if you are going to use the cassette tape to create a commercial item like a Vinyl record
Yes, the early Hi-Fi VHS machines even had a Simulcast or 'Radio Record' mode that would let you feed-in stereo audio from a tuner, and then overlay it with the recorded picture (for example, Last Night Of The Proms with audio from Radio 3, or Top Of The Pops with audio from Radio 1). This was in the few years before the dawn of NICAM Digital Stereo, so recordings would usually be in mono. PS: Your NV-F70 probably has a dodgy low value start-up cap in the primary of the power supply (a common fault), or a shorted zener protection diode caused, again, by leaky capacitors drifting in value. Usually quite an easy fix in the right hands..
I experimented with VHS HiFi audio recording back in the day... it does work very well.. although for some strange reason we tended to use open reel / high end cassette decks ... I also have a Sony PCM recorder like yours and its a lot more portable.. it would be interesting to AB between a live recording between a Sony PCM and one of these
I used my Mitsubishi Hi-Fi VHS to record the top 102 songs of the year from the radio on a six hour tape with indexing. If I remember correctly the SNR was better than most CD players of the day.
That is odd. I used to do exactly the same thing in the early 90s - bounce 4 tks down from Tascam to stereo on the Hifi VHS, then copy back up and add a couple more parts. Then I got a minidisc machine which did the job equally well.
@@TheChrisheath7 Yeah - all that went out the window when I got a Zoom digital multitrack with built in CD burner/drum machine/amp mods in 2000. Great little machine - made in Japan. These days, I'm using an iPad through a Focusrite iTrack dock (Focusrite preamps/Line/Midi /etc). for tracking. Much more convenient, lol.
I know right...you'd think since vhs is much wider in width than cassette they would've made a 4,8 or even 16 track machine. If they can fit 8 tracks on cassette, I own 2, then it should have been easy. Imagine a 16 track portable analog recorder. Also the tape is rarely exposed to air in vhs but cassettes easily get dirty and gunked up. Someone missed the boat so let's build one
A lot of us did this back in the day. We would record up to six hours of music on these then let play during at cookout or Church gatherings. All you needed was a VHS HiFi system and you were ready to go. I still have three VHS tapes with 18 hours of Music on them. This was my original "External Drive" for Music storage.
Back in the old days, I used VHS hifi for copying CD audio. Had audio cassette decks but they couldn't match CD quality. But VHS hifi could come very close. And the VCRs and tapes were cheap, compared to DAT which nobody I knew could afford. It worked resonably well for home use. The main problem was having to play the CD into the VCR in real time. It took hours to record and hours to play it back. Nowadays, the problem is that I don't have a working VCR any more. Last time I moved, nearly all my VHS video and the VHS audio went to the landfill. Sad times.
I got my first dat recorder in 1999 for free. My college lecturer said that things been sat there for 8 years and never used. Just fucking take it. No way could i have afforded one otherwise.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, I used a Panasonic Hi-Fi VHS machine to record orchestral concerts from FM radio and I thought the sound quality was outstanding.
@@hafibeat834 it's not that simple. There were several standards used before DAT came and blew everything up. There were fully new formats like those used by AKAI Adam, Tascam and others, based on Hi 8mm tapes with completely different helicoil scanning and encoding that the one used for hometaping, and there were also professional VHS recorders that used the VHS Hifi tracks and encoding of the home camcorders. I can tell because I've personally used them. This "format" war was a craze from the first half of the 90s, very entertaining indeed.
@@fresita_jugosa Yeah, whatever. I used several (almost all) formats since the late 80ties too. But actually it's that simple: HIFI-Video is not a reliable format compared too open reel for it's HF-Modulation and wanky construction. And with 16Bit PCM - as the Sony open reels, the PCM-Decoders for VCR from Sony, and the DAT-Decks from the mid-eighties, every analog-format became fully obsolete. The format "craze" was long solved in the nineties, as nobody who could affort a (consumer) DAT-Deck used analog two-tracks anymore.
I remember once in the days of VHS that our families favorite radio station was having all day telethon charity fundraiser, so I recorded a continuous six hours of it by connecting the output of the radio to the sound input of the VCR set to SLP.
Used to run a mobile disco in the 80’s. We used a service called video pool that produced vhs tapes of all the current music on a monthly basis. Used 2x hifi videos and tv’s. Sound quality through the pa was brilliant.
One thing to note was I need a TV picture input in order to record the audio from the radio etc. In other words I couldn't just connect the audio to my tuner and expect it to record to VHS HiFi.
I used a Sony SLV-E700 and it didn't need a video signal to record Hi-Fi audio either. The problems came however when in more recent years I went for JVC and Panasonic decks with TBC. Those decks can't cope with audio only signals (even with TBC switched off). So I kept some non-TBC models to play back audio only tapes. The best being the Sony SLV-F900 which has digital everything except TBC and gives the most stable playback of absolutely anything thrown at it, video or audio only.
The reason, I think, that the audio sounds between so similar between LP and SP is because the record head for hi-fi audio is on the helical scan head, which is still moving at the same rate across the tape in a diagonal pattern as the tape moves along. SP was overkill.
Back in the 90's Panasonic made a 7750 Super VHS editing deck that was around. $5k, $8K in today's dollars. Two types of audio, one hi-fi with 90db of dynamic range and Dolby noise reduction which could be engaged. They sell for around $400 now, are built like tanks and I recall the audio being exceptional. And the had XLR inputs and outputs. Add an inexpensive mixer and some mic's and it would be a nice tool for recording bands live. I don't know where you could find SVHS tapes, though.
The reason a HIFI VHS tape still worked in a Ferguson top loader non HIFI VCR was not because FM is analogue, it was because even the last generation of VHS recorders still recorded a mono linear audio track (some did linear stereo too) along the edge of the tape, completely separate to the embedded HIFI audio. That older Ferguson had absolutely no way to read the embedded HIFI audio tracks, it just didn't know they were even there.
I still love VHS. There's nothing quite like a 1980s episode of Inspector Morse on VHS, seeing all the old cars and quiet streets. There's just something about the lack of colour and gloss I like too. Never recorded audio with one but will have to have a go now
Oh yeah, I did this all the time. The tape speed on a casette is 1 7/8 ips. With the helical scan of the VHS, the tape writing speed was something like 19 FEET per second. The sound was pretty amazing.
I love vhs hi fi audio recording. The sound is superb. It’s unfortunate that VCR’s stopped putting audio controls and VU meters on the units. Without them how do you know your input recorded volume? To low? to high? How do you record without volume controls?
This was my problem, too. My workaround: record 1 test run with short clips of each track, copy/pasted 9x, in incrementally increasing volume levels. (Loop the loudest part of each track, crop, normalize, copy/paste 9x, set clip volumes ascending from -9dB to -1dB.) This gave me a sample set of 9 versions to choose from, while allowing me to save space on tape. (I only wanted to use one 120-min tape and didn't want to re-record the whole thing 9x, making it more “used” with each recording.) Listening back, I took notes on which was my favorite track, then re-recorded the full length track [at the “best” gain level] back to tape. This way, I was able to limit myself to 1 VHS re-recording on a NOS TDK T-120 from 1980 via Sony SLV-775 HF. If you're interested, the album is called VHS Volume 2 and drops 12/23/2022. I'm @into.cassette. Cheers!
A secondary unit with VU will give you a great reference point (cassette deck will work). The record level is pretty close to 'line' anyway. But yea, set everything up and record a minute or two and have a listen.
VHS Hi-Fi is the ultimate analog audio format, accessible to all. No calibration needed, no bias adjustments, no noise reduction debates, no azimuth blues and absolutely no wow&flutter... Just high quality analog 20-20KHz bliss, and that's Hi-Fi! For vinyl recordings archive, home studio rehearsals, long play streaming selectas, or even as mixtapes masters. VHS-Hi-Fi is so good and soooo cheap today... Really sounds astonishing, great dinamics (>90db). An experience that any real tape head must enjoy. Cheers 🇵🇹
Sorry, the "ultimate" analog format would be Open Reel Tape with 15 ips. No professional used this format outside the video-world for a very good reason: The modulation that converts the audio-signal to HF - pls. see my comment above...
90dB is a myth. People shared real measurements. For 0dB input signal, THD is at about -70dB level. for -20dB input signal, THD stays at the same level. This is unavoidable due to a decoder IC (which is not high-end in any vhs recorder). They don't call it "noise", but in fact this isn't a sound either. Of course it's far from MC/R2R tape THD, but those highly integrated ICs can have additional side effects (like dynamics, tonal integrity, etc)
Calibration most definitely was needed if accurate playback was to be guaranteed on anyone else's machine, but it wasn't available. The overall frequency response also varied wildly between different machine implementations, so there was no guarantee of anything even remotely approaching a flat frequency response from 20Hz to 20kHz.
I was advised by a video dealer sales rep about using VHS HiFi as an audio format for recording long-form radio music shows, such as song countdown specials; where the recording length could be adjusted from two to six hours in length. When it came to audio quality, the VHS HiFi format didn't have the issues of tape hiss (during playback) that's been the bane with audio cassettes since day-one.
Adamo we made that I still have the master VHS still sounds amazing. All recorded live, everything bleeding through everything else, but man, it feels like it's a practice in front of you. Desk recordings at gigs dint always work as the output has bn made for the f.o.h. mix So sometimes the output is all vocals or drums, or no guitar. I have many of them, but when you luck out on a good live mix, it's AWESOME!!!
8:30 old vcr’s can play the audio recorded on a hifi deck because there is a separate mono audio track recorded on the edge of the tape that was supported on newer machines for the sake of backwards compatibility. I think they didn’t go with PCM beceause it wouldn’t be much of an improvement judging by the specs
To add to this, some pre-recorded VHS tapes have that linear audio in stereo. Sounds awful in LP, and not too many consumer VCRs have the ability to play back or record linear stereo, but at least it was something for those who couldn't afford the good AFM Hi-Fi decks. My parents had one of those.
The reality is that the HIFI soundtrack could sound good but it suffered from occasional pops and try recording a tympani type sound and you'll hear the upper frequencies pumping noise which was horrendous. Not noticed on recording pop music but with live sound with low frequencies it was not good. PCM was clean all the way.
Right on--I do the same myself for my remote's batteries. NiMh cells are practically leakproof (due to their composition, I'd reckon) and you can give 'em a recharge when dead--no need to keep using up alkaline cells. :)
I recall making 6-8hr music vhs tapes on our Samsung deck. Awesome sound - the vhs format added a lot of warmth to CD sound, and rolled off the harsh highs. Recently discovered that re-encoding audio to 24kbps HE-AAC+v2 sounds identical to vhs hifi
I have that NV-70 VCR too and mine did the same when I plugged it in once. I'm pretty sure that that fault is because of bad electrolytic capacitors in the power supply.
The main problem with this VCR is that there (at least on mine) are very little ventilation holes, which makes the PSU really hot, and thus the capacitors dry out. If you have the skill to repair it, I would do so, but since I dont have the skill, mine is sitting in storage.
Yes VHS and Betamax HiFi are analog but it's not the same clean simple process used in say a reel to reel or cassette recorder. Remember these consumer video formats ran at 1ips or less linear tape speed. You can't get HiFi sound via direct analog recording at that tape speed. So they they took the audio signal and modulated it to an FM frequency of around 1mhz. That was then recorded with the rotating video heads which equate to several hundred ips tape speed. But there were two major problems: 1) Because the audio FM had to share spectrum space with the video FM and color information, the deviation was limited. Low deviation with FM means more noise. So they fixed that by companding aka DBX process. The bad result was gain pumping. 2) The tape is only half wrapped around the video head disc. So to maintain constant tape contact they use two heads and switch back and forth between them. This happens 30 times a second (25 time in PAL). The head switch produces a DC offset in the FM carrier which is audible. It's very low but once you hear it, you will always hear it. In video this switch can be hidden between frames. Analog audio has no "frames" and is a linear signal. PCM audio recorded on VHS and Betamax did not have these uses because first, they didn't record video when in PCM mode and digital audio can be stored and written to tape in faster than real time thus getting around the head switch problem. In reality a good high end cassette deck of the mid 1980s would outperform Beta and VHS HiFi. True, the cassette didn't have the dynamic range or frequency response of the Beta/VHS HiFi, but it also did/t have the artifacts which many audiophiles found to be a non starter for Beta/VHS HiFi as a high end audio recorder.
I used to use a 1991 JVC hifi VHS VCR that had a db meter with individual controls for each stereo channel, it had many other options such as smoothing and sharpening to make the video part better but the audio was where I used it like a recordable CD. I could record amazing stereo audio on it as is. But then came SVHS and DVHS which I never had, sadly... Also in 1981 there was a short lived Technics VCR that used VHS tapes to record audio onto them digitally!!!!! There are ways to store digital files onto a VHS tape today that makes a tape a large hard drive but on a long life tape. I regret throwing that JVC away into a bin in 2007 when it finally died. In hindsight, I could have fixed it! But I had 2x new Samsung Hifi VHS Vcrs... of which only one works now. 2:41 - those words will sound quite outdated now and even moreso in the future my man!
The evolution of VHS was pretty amazing. The first one my family owned was a toploader bought around 1981 and the earliest ones even had giant chunk-chunk tuners in them. They weighed like 50 pounds and there were thousands of parts in them. The last ones were so light that pushing in the tape would make them slide across your entertainment center and they were better in every way to the first ones. They went from a thousand 1975 dollars to 49 1998 dollars. I have a mitsubishi from the early 2000s that has auto-biasing and SVHS plus q-svhs that does outstanding high-res video on the cheapest oldest tapes I have. It was only like 150 dollars. The audio quality is outstanding too.
Tape speed doesn't matter on VHS Hi-Fi, the relative tape-head speed is way higher than any other analog audio recorder could dream of, SP or the slowest EP it's all the same.
@@JoshGarsideMeyers no... the stationary head attend to ordinarie audio track. In this case we're talking about Hi-Fi wich uses the video track as well, in other words, helicoidal scan.
I did often record music on my HiFi VHS. The were better than most of the casette decks back in the days. Also because of tape size an speed on a VHS mashine. Much less tape hiss, you did not need Dolby. The old mono tracks on VHS were really bad, but the Hifi tracks were a whole other level.
i still have a JVC Hi-Fi VHS that i bought in about 1985 stored up in the spare bedroom with all my old PC and audio gear i might just get it out and give it a try and i still have the remote and i took the Batteries out lol
@Cassette Comeback I definitely remember different VHS tape formulations back during the 1980s and early 90s. If you exposed the tape itself you could see the different color shades of dark brown or dark grey, and more or less polished tape surfaces as well. They would even advertise that fact on the labels, sorry it's been so long I can't recall the technical aspects of what those specs were.
You also have the SVHS standard, not sure how much difference the better tape/heads would potentially make to the HiFi audio and if they're basically the same standard audio-wise.
I discovered hi-fi audio back in the day and started to record mixtapes to be played back at home on my fathers vhs hifi… he had high end equipment, and it sounded as good as a cd with no background hiss
Back in the late 80s and early 90s, I used my Toshiba VHS hi-fi to record audio. I had my Amiga 500 plugged into the video input and I'd make video titles with Deluxe Paint to go over the audio. This made it easy to find a song in fast visual search mode. My Toshiba hi-fi was from the mid 80s and was a beautiful unit with level controls and LED VU meters. I wish I still had it.
I dug up my grandpa's old ep vcr and recorded about 4 hours of my music onto a blank. I didn't expect much, but I was blown away to hear the audio quality of that tape. 240 minutes of hifi sound on a single-sided tape that I didn't need to flip. I just put in the tape, listened to all 4 hours, and it auto rewound and ejected. Pushing that tape in to play once a day might become a bit of a habit of mine
I used a hi-fi vcr as part of my home recording set-up in the late 80’s/early 90’s alongside Tascam & Yamaha 4 track cassette recorders. Great way of keeping partial mixes available that you could go back to, loss of quality over a couple of generations was far better than could be achieved on cassette tapes. I still have my Aiwa hi-fi vcr just in case the need ever arises !
I first heard about this from Anadialog, and picked up a deck and tapes. It was so good and got hooked. No hiss and great dynamics, just have to allow time for the hifi signal to kick in. I've tried regular and hifi tapes, and I don't hear any difference. Maybe the hifi tapes are more durable. I use a preamp with volume control to adjust the recording level, as it seems what level I put in is what is recorded. I haven't tried the SP vs LP either because no remote, but have read it doesn't affect it much. I can put multiple albums of an artist on a tape and then listen for hours. And it is easy to move from one system to another. I still love my compact cassettes as the sound and experience is what appeals to me. I basically just love playing with all the different formats of music, from digital to analog to see what you can get out of them. Truly a fun hobby!
Yeah. If this was expensive, then I don't know if I'd be this enthusiastic, but they're literally giving these things away at the moment and they're brilliant for analogue recording.
Yeah, I get most of my gear through thrift stores. Don't have the budget otherwise, but its fun to hunt and see what can find. Well at least did before the pandemic. Not so easy right now. But will again when things are better.
I used to record all our gigs just by lining out to my vhs hi-fi from the desk. Still got them all, some mixes were great, I sometimes lined in a video camera but it was usually just hanging from the desk area..
Some radio stations used VHS HiFi recording to record and playback non stop music through the night when there were no programmes scheduled, and the recordings sounded good too.
7:50 The recordings are backwards compatible because the deck records one standard audio signal and one hifi signal. Non-hifi decks simply ignore the hifi signal and read the linear audio signal(s)
many of these HIFI VCRs have input and output audio RCA jacks, sometimes with a separate input/channel for audio, as if they intended to use the machine as a HIFI recorder/player since then
Those separate inputs were intended for stereo FM simulcast of TV broadcasting. In the early days, it was common that TV stations were still in mono, so they used an FM frequency to simulcast the stereo sound. Then, you hook up your FM tuner to the VCR.
I was doing this 20 years ago. Our local radio station had a 4 hour country music oldies show on Saturday morning, so I'd dutifully tape it every week.
This video has just reminded me that for a year or so before introducing a MiniDisc recorder into my home studio, I had a transition period where I’d moved away from ‘mastering’ on a Fostex X26, to a stereo video recorder (Nicam?) - which had far superior recording quality over that old 4-track. I’d totally forgotten about that and now I want to find my mid 90s ‘techno’ on those video tapes!! I’d completely forgotten this 😂.
Hifi VCRs record the audio to the linear mono track as well as the hifi with the video head so they can be backwards compatible with older decks.
4 года назад
In the mid 80s, we had a CD rental shop downtown. I owned a Panasonic NV-70s including full service documents. So, the project was, modifiing the FM sound to meet the highest standards. For this, I switched off the video signal and boosted the FM sound signal slightly. This modification got rid of the noise from the head switching, which is the only disadvantage with VHS HiFi. After this, I copied a large amount of CDs onto E240 tapes in LP. In the end, I had some 100 cassettes full with music. I documented it by hand into a notebook. At this time, I hoped, that there will be a chance one time to convert it to digital media. Well, I had to wait 'til 2003. By that time, batch converting to MP3 was possible via the Messer software, which divided the tracks. So each morning, after work and at bedtime I put in another tape. This took me several months. In the end, it ruined the old panasonic NV-70. So, for the last few tapes, I had to get another VCR. So, in the beginning, I started dumping it to CDs, later DVDs and then portable HDDs. And now, the whole stuff fits onto a SD card inside my smartphone. Minor drawback, still no ID tags since this has to be done manually. Instead, I scanned the pages of the old notebook and saved it next to the mp3s. :))))) Later, I dumped most of my videos to DVD just before the tapes deteriorated. Pew...
Good practice would be to monitor the input level to the VHS recorder via an output of a mixing desk, or even an output of a cassette deck in record standby mode. Test and trialing the output level of the desk/cassette deck until finding the perfect level that works. Great video Tony, and a great system for recording live onto a stereo recorder.. Not so great if you want to record individual instruments onto a multitrack and mix afterwards (Dare I even mention ADAT 🙈)
I had a Fischer, you could choose to only record sound on it if you wanted. For the LP mode on it only recorded sound not picture. The disadvantage, however, was that it had automatic adjustment of the sound level. i.e. there were smaller level differences between different sounds
In the 90's when I played in a band. We used a Panasonic VHS as a master tape for our live gigs. We played electronic music and as we needed playback for most of the music live we used the VHS and it was brilliant!
I use to have a teacher who used VHS for music recordings. Although this was at a time when cassettes were common. I also recall at the time people using (landline) phones to transfer music, where someone would play the music over the phone and the other person would tape record it.
I always recorded on VHS HiFi Stereo, Opus Radio from the Astra Satellite (beautiful classical music), Radio Luxembourg International via the Astra Satellite (which basically was Radio Luxembourg all day without the night time fade of 1440 kHz and whistling distorted reception of 49.26 metres Shortwave which got right around the world), Sky Radio for its high quality CD music and jingles / ad breaks, Quality Europe FM for the Tesug Satellite Surgery every Saturday afternoon, SWF3 for the English language music, Radio 10 Gold, Eclipse FM, Radio Nova Ireland in mono via Lifestyle on channel 5, Asda FM, Supergold, World Radio Network for the weekly broadcast of Radio Netherlands Media Network programme Thursdays, Radio Sweden Mediascan programme, Radio Vlaandren International for Radioworld, plus TV ident jingles too. I had flawless clear sound recordings because the Astra Satellite receiver I used was a decent quality Nokia Sat 1700 equipped with genuine (not soundalike) Wegener Panda 🐼 1 noise reduction fitted unlike the crappy Amstrads and other brands of satellite receiver with their useless non Panda 🐼 like noise reduction circuitry. Non genuine Panda like noise reduction circuitry fitted to other brands of Astra Satellite receiver often sounded slightly hissy or very hissy indeed. Wegener Panda 🐼 1 noise reduction compressed the analogue mono / multilingual / stereo sound before satellite transmission and the receiver circuitry would expand it restoring dynamic range without the hiss and noise, but if you didn't have genuine Panda 1 noise reduction fitted to your Astra Satellite receiver, you still got a fair amount of hiss and noise on the sound which made for unpleasant listening.
Hi Anthony, wondering if you still have these radio recordings from satellite? I'd be particularly interested in Radio Nova and Luxembourg. Great stations.
Take it from an old-timer like me. I'm a history making multi-major award nominated Audio Engineer/Producer. I've been doing this now for over 50 years. I started back in full track, Mono tape recorders. And I'm capable today of taking 72 simultaneous inputs to hard drives. So I've grown a bit. But back in the day! When I was starting out. In the early 1980s. Oh my God, 40 years ago. Where has the time gone? You must understand. I was one of the people, temporarily in charge. Of one of the most legendary studio and broadcast, tape-recorded manufacturers. And declined job offers from 2 of the other 4. But I digress. The whole point here is this. When you wanted to do a mix down from an analog multitrack. In the early 1980s. You actually had about three choices. Another analog tape recorder you are mixing down to. A brand-new, rather costly, PCM digital audio processor. That would record digital audio to videotape cassettes of Betamax or VHS. And within those early 1980s. Hi-fi formats above Betamax and VHS were introduced. And this was a much more affordable, high quality, stereo capture, recording. I found the hi-fi format video recorders to be a unique sounding, stereo recorder. In that, it's still actually an analog recording. In the FM frequency modulated domain. Which, similar to that of FM stereo radio. It had a razor blade flat, frequency response. It had a better than analog tape, signal to noise ratio. It had better than analog tape stereo separation and lower crosstalk. It had lower more acceptable distortion characteristics.. And contained attributes of both analog and digital recording specifications. As a far more affordable high quality stereo recorder. But it also depended, upon your choice of manufacturers and model types.. As they were not all the same. As in this example next. As a professional audio engineer I know what I wanted. I knew what I had to have. And realizing. The least expensive models that were the most affordable. Still offered up great hi-fi encoded sound but! They had, what is known as an AVC or, Automatic Volume Control. In my line of work. Those are referred to as dynamic range, compressing devices. And while they are very useful. And we cannot live without the making recordings. We don't usually want them built into our, recorders. Or at least the option. To switch that off. But then, where is the input volume control? There isn't any! And thus. The AVC was installed always on. No no and double no. In the end. I wanted a VHS hi-fi recorder. That had a manual input volume control knob. A balance control. And a switchable, limiter. Whereas, the limiter is similar to AVC. But only turns down the loud sounds from getting too loud. Rather than turning up all of the very soft passages as loud as the loud passages. Which was awful sounding. And so, I purchased 2 VHS hi-fi recorders, brand-new. One very inexpensive affordable consumer unit. I think it was Mitsubishi? And a high-end, consumer unit, from JVC. That was nearly $850.. Compared to the common consumer unit that was only, $250. And so what I would end up doing. I made my JVC VHS hi-fi, my master stereo recorder. To mix down upon or recorded live to. At the fast SP speed. And simultaneously with that. Using RCA plug Y adapters. I could feed my stereo signal to both machines,, simultaneously. To make a dual redundant, stereo recording of 2 masters. And because of anything should go wrong with one. And that could occasionally happen. I was always assured I'd have a backup. In fact I would use that backup Mitsubishi VHS hi-fi consumer recorder in the slow speed SLP mode. For six hours worth of continuous, no stop, archive logger. And in that respect. That AVC circuit. Would bring up the volume during very quiet background times. Actually making for a much better archival backup of the entire day. Because sometimes cool things would happen. That otherwise would have never been recorded or captured. Such as funny background conversation and consternation's. And those cussing who say they never cuss. That consumer machine was great for that! But not all that great capturing music without kind of sounding like a $29 battery-operated portable cassette recorder used to. And not necessarily a stereo recorder you would generally want to mix your masters to. But it could still be effective. Because when you're mixing down. Many of us use a stereo master bus limiter. And if you don't have one of those? Then that Automatic Volume Control circuit might just be the ticket! And there's your stereo master bus limiter and dynamic range compressor. Because it's going to do both. Then you'll say, hey. That doesn't sound like what's coming out of my mixer. It sounds better! Yay doggy! Woo hoo! And I am sure for you. It will. As I did have to rely upon that backup once. When my JVC failed. Yup. And nobody was the wiser. That my backup didn't sound exactly the way I wanted it to. But hey! It saved my ass on that job. When my JVC, ate the tape. My only audio gripe about the VHS hi-fi format and/or Betamax. As the heads rotate at 2000 RPM. And only scan the tape in a 180° arc.. It's automatically switching back and forth between 2 heads. And that switching sound, while way in the background. Can be audible could be noticeable by, nitpicky people. Who are always that way with everything. And so you can't please all of the people, all of the time. But it is a great high quality sounding low cost affordable alternative. That still, to this day, can hardly be beat. It works. It's effective. It makes financial sense. Old recorded over movie and TV tapes can make just fine blank tape. To record over. And what's that going to cost you? Absolfuckinglutely nothing. It's a win win win. Another pleasant VHS Sunday. By the Monkeys! Yay the Monkeys! Poor Davey and Peter. Don't erase those tapes. Keep them for Posterior. I always wanted to be a Monkey. I fancied myself like Mickey. The Circus Boy. And later he became a Monkey! How apropos. Bonobo what he's doing today? I'm just chimp ing away at things here. RemyRAD
@@danielkerryann I think Tony's presentation was good and I haven't seen many others really talk about recording analog music using these relic VHS machines...I myself done recordings way back in the mid 90's when I bought a Stereo VHS machine....Don't ask me now what I paid for it lol...But electronics of this sort was still pricey...I done some awesome recordings with good results..The dynamic range was a tad off but still pleasant music nevertheless...
The Nicam Decoder worked well in two of my video devices. However, not on a cheaper Super VHS video from JVC. there were sound disturbances. Nicam was apparently also used to send data, at least here in Sweden. that was probably the problem. If the unit did not have a good Nicam Deoder
One other major advantage of HiFi vhs, is that you can use it as a backup format if you’re also recording digitally. With digital recorders, there can be glitches during recording, or if the power fails and the file wasn’t finalized, the complete recording can be inaccessible. With a 4 hour tape on LP you have 8 hours, so you can just set it up and hit rec the moment you arrive at a venue, and let it run til the end of the evening with time to spare. It will record the rehearsal (always nice for some kind of blooper reel), and you won’t miss the first 2 songs because the engineer forgot to start the recording in time. If the power fails, everything you’ve recorded until then will still be on the tape.
The original low quality audio signal was recorded in a linear format like an audio tape, using a regular head (not a helical head). The first VCRs recorded audio like this, along with a corresponding drop in quality when recording in LP mode due to the decreased tape speed. When “Hifi VHS” was developed, the “hifi VHS” signal was recorded by an extra pair of heads helically in spare space next to the video tracks. All Hifi VHS recorders also recorded the old linear audio signal for compatibility with older players. So when you play a VHS Hifi tape in an old Ferguson top-loader, it’ll play the lower quality linear audio track and just ignore the FM recorded hifi track.
You could even record quadrophonic live recordings: 2 channels analogue from the VHS-Hifi, 2 channels digitally with a PCM encoder in the "picture band".
I could hear no discernible difference between the original and the VHS. Interesting. I have a tascam portastudio that I use for mastering effects. I record to a Zoom r24 multitrack and master down to cassette, but I think VHS might be more practical and better audio as it's not belt driven.
Lows are filtered out on VHS (in this particular recording). Something like 80Hz high pass filter. May be it's a matter of a better output capacitor, or a higher input impedance
I used to make lots of audio recordings on HIFI VHS from CDs and LPs in the late 80´s. The sound was almost indistinguishable from the source. In addition, my VCR had an indexing function where you could make a mark at the beginning of each track and use an automatic search function by track number to access any track. It worked fine but was painfully slow.
NICAM Digital Stereo was a hi-fi backwards standard which is compatible with Hi-fi as it had the same family components but it had all these dubbing options to make your own voiceovers and also have the ability to change your volumes. My JVC was weird you were able to listen to both a Mono and Nicam Digital Stereo or Hi-fi if Pre Recorded VHS audio modes at the same time in a sort of 3 channel as a 3rd audio option when it was a very warpy quality Mono the 3 channel mix sounded like shit but it was a fun mode to watch videos in sometimes for a different sound.
I my self was shocked when i recorded a few vinyl records and Cds on VHS especially when you use the High Grade TDK and Maxell high grade Tapes. I was blown away with the sound detail captured as clean as my source using a Sony HiFi VCR.
It was like having a reel to reel with half inch, instead of quarter inch tape, running at a (relative) tape speed of 5 m per second, with a perfect noise reduction system and with "dirt cheap" tapes, that could record up to 12 hours. The only thing that mattered in regard to the tapes: Drop outs. Bias adjustments were not needed, so you could use any tape from a reputable manufacturer. Genuine chrome (as from BASF, Agfa or PDM) or substitutes from TDK or Maxell all worked in the same good way.
I've been "quietly" building up my HIFI VHS setup for a little while now. Very few peeps talk about this in my circles. Yet, I'm a HUGE cassette tape,VHS, and MD fan. And this video just gave me inspiration to refocus on this project. Now is the time to actively test it on my end. Thx for the in depth video, and acknowledging that this IS STILL a thing. Peace...Netm8kr
Great job. Inspired me to pop my tape into my 86 Yamaha hifi VHS deck. Still sounds great. I recorded Cock Sparrer onto a JVC tape from a CD.. now this is fun because I plugged a PS1 into the VCR. So you can use the controller to change the video while recording both AV signal and make cool patterns to accompany the music. Try it it’s fun! Then you can play your artwork at parties for background 🤙🏻
How about this for an even more obscure alternative. I've got a bunch of Sony DMR-4000 digital master recorders which used UMATIC tape to record audio, they were crazy expensive new and found homes in some of the biggest studios in the world.
![Felix "Unfair" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Oswujxm2Ag0/mqdefault.jpg)
Until cheap digital recording became available in the mid 2000's, LP Hi-Fi VHS was how many commercial radio stations would archive their output for the mandated 42 days required by the Radio Authority. I still have many of our old tapes and even at LP, providing the machine wasn't hitting its limiter, the quality is actually very good.
In the USA commercial TV stations often logged their air feed for proof commercials ran. They initially used reel to reel security video tape recorders but when 6hr VHS came along they jumped on that. far cheaper and reliable than those old security camera recorders.
I did read somewhere that LP doesn't reduce audio quality of Hi-Fi VHS audio recordings? SP recordings apparently just use less tape overall.
@@jamiey5779 You are far more susceptible to dropout and other tape damage. Nothing quite like the farting noises of some dropout that might not have impacted an SP recording.
Albeit a little bit grainy video, the audio is fine. I would normally record in SP mode for 99% of my things. I have over 2000 VHS tapes.
Since I've used VHS quite a bit for two channel analog audio, here's a nugget of information regarding the EP/SLP speed. The bottom line is, the sound quality itself is basically the same. There is little if any difference. However, tracking is fussier. In audio tapes recorded at that speed, a bit of tracking adjustment on other VCRs is normal. At SP it is much more forgiving.
Very true, essentially all VHS speeds will lay down the same amount of audio signal, but tracking, as you've rightly pointed out was a pain between machines outside of SP speed.
I run a video transfer business and am blessed to have a stack of professional rack-mount studio S-VHS machines (AG7350/7650/7750) as well as a Betamax SL-HF950 Hifi machine too, and a very late stereo V2000 machine.
I also have a very rare DAV unit (a relative of Video 8) which although digital is quite cool to play with and delivers fantastic quality for a 1985 domestic digital tape, 8 Stereo tracks simultaneously too.
I'm posting a video up in a few weeks comparing them all for sonic use, the results might be quite interesting.
Once Used a HIFI VHS deck to record a Jazz Concert at "The Rhythmic Club" Islington. I basically did this by asking the in house PA engineer to give me an output feed from his desk and then fed this into the line inputs of my HIFI VHS deck. This actually work really well. Very nice recording which I later mastered to DAT and CD back home.
Please don't bin the fried Panasonic VCR. Those NV-70s are great decks, definitely worth a repair. If you are not interested in reparing it or get it gepaired, give it to someone who is interested.
Agreed. Chances are the electrolytics in the power supply module have dried up - common problem with those machines.
@@djsherz Unfortunatelly, nowadays these are much more problematic. They are not drying, but leaking and corroding the board. And often not just on the PSU, but on *every* boards. Pinch roller is usually shot, and broken loading motor clutch is a very common failure, and quite PITA to fix in this variant of the G-mechanism, IIRC you have to disassemble the whole cam gear assembly to get access.
This one was playing well a day before it blown up, so it is confirmed that mechanically it is OK-ish, so it's a good candidate for a repair-refurb.
i would not either common for psu,s to go due to bad caps on panasonics quite a desirable machine i have a few panasonics a 1985 nv730 an nv f55 and a f75 i would not bother with the later mid mount machines there mostly cheaply made junk.
Could also be a fuse
Watch ebay prices skyrocket due to the techmoan effect
They have been for a while now.... the prices shown here were from unfinished Ebay auctions; these decks go for a fair bit more, and have done for some time - between £50 - £100 quite often! Good value for a HiFi recorder, but still expensive for 'just' a VHS deck!!
They are climbing.
I grabbed 3 yesterday on ebay before they went over 20$ Haha.
Mine are all Sony Combo Dvd/VHS Recorders.
I doubt it. Those of us who were there at the time know just how badly implemented this was on many video recorders. It could often be beaten by a reasonably high end cassette deck.
This was a well kept secret that I shared with a lot of people when I was into this format. I used to record music for parties, 4 hours of music on one cassette and let it play. Of course this was days before CD changers. On top of that, the quality was nearly as clean as digital, depending on the source. Back when everyone was striving to get digital quality music on cassette, I was recording everything I had on VHS cassettes. It was a mostly a convenience factor along with high quality audio. I used to call it my poor man's DAT, even though it is an analog recording, but a damn good one. I could not afford a DAT in the late 80s when they slowly started to get released after the RIAA Sony thing resolved. Anyway, I still have several cassettes with music on them and a few HiFi VCRs. I still play them today, even though I have a real DAT. I still think these VCRs are great and way less finicky than a DAT. One thing I did test was the quality difference between SP, EP and SLP. Aside from losing hours of recording time, I did not hear a enough of a significant difference in the quality to record at a higher tape speed. Could just be my subjective opinion though.
if you share a "secret" with a lot of people - doesn't this defeat the purpose of a "secret"? it certainly isn't a "well kept" secret any more then. :)
Well I sure didn't get that secret tip. And I really could have used it. Way before 1997 when a friend who had come back from the US bought a Yamaha 4-track for "our band"...
Living in a Third World country back then was a bit different and definitely harder from where most of you guys are from, in soo many respects...
Incredibly low wow and flutter in VHS, no azimuth settings, no speed issues. HiFi VHS is the best sounding analog format
You're right, it's essentially a non-issue as the control-track takes care of the micro-adjustments during playback, video-tape by nature had to be very finely timed for it work.
I'm putting up a video myself in the New Year comparing various 'novel' analogue recording methods compared to compact cassette.
I have a Panasonic AG-7750 sitting next to me which is about to record a test on to a brand new archival grade S-VHS cassette.
@@musmodtos I always have to turn my amp down about a 1/3 from the DVD audio level when watching a VHS tape. The THX sound on a VHS tapes still gets me fired up.
@@ET3Roberts i assume you have to turn your amp down because most VHS movie's audio tracks are a bit more compressed (and thus "louder") than their DVD counterparts - this did bleed over to VHS at some point shortly before VHS became obsolete. i guess at that time they just didn't bother to apply another mixing pass for the different media releases
at least that is what i observed.
while we had the loudness war in the music world and everything got compressed and loudened way too much, the exact opposite happened in home video.
since the late 90's or so, the difference between soft and loud parts in movies is almost too much for casual movie watching at home IMO.
i always have to engage DRC on my surround reciever when i want to watch a movie at night (or during the day even) because i usually wanna be able to understand what people are saying so i turn that thing up to where "normal talking" in movies is equally loud to "normal talking" in real life ... and then the talking is over and the next scene involves explosions and collapsing buildings ... and suddenly my sound system in the living room (including a 15" sub) rattles the plates in the kitchen.
There's no wow and flutter at all, since NICAM is a digital audio encoding :)
@@lauratiso Very true but NICAM was a transmission format, it wasn't used for recording on tapes, that was always done at FM Stereo in the case of VHS Hifi.
NICAM wasn't encoded on to the tape.
VHS HiFi has some dynamic compression issues, but otherwise sounds good. It also can have audible buzz, caused both by crosstalk from the video sync, and from the head switching of the HiFi audio heads. Non of these issues were very audible in this experiment, although the very beginning showed a bit of the dynamic compression issue.
Hifi Head Switching def. was a problem, especially with piano music.
The dynamic range compression is coming from he decks automatic level recording. Decks with manual recording levels and VU meters didn’t do that.
@@danieldaniels7571 Yes, most of it is caused by the ALC, but I think some kind of limiter is built into the manual level control models as well, to prevent overmodulation. But maybe, if you are very gentle with the rec level, that limiter might not kick in. I should test it, I have three NV-F70s (one genuine Panasonic, and two Blaupunkt rebadged RTV-810s), but all of them are very broken currently.
@@mrnmrn1 I’ve never had that problem recording with a deck that has VU meters, but always made a point not to go more than a tiny bit into the red. The noise floor is so low on VHS HiFi that there’s no need to push the levels.
I’ve used VHS for audio since the 90’s and just now it’s starting to come up on the internet.
I'm here because I saw an interview with DJ Stretch Armstrong talking about how he would use hifi vhs to record broadcasts of the Stretch and Bobbito radio show on wkcr. Used to mess around with it a bit in the 00s. Recorded my cassettes onto vhs to free up cassettes. Now as a producer I'm interested in doing it as a mastering technique.
Brings back memories, used to have a couple of VHS HIFI tapes with music for parties, I think it was up to 8 hours in LP mode and it was still pretty good quality.
DVHS in LS3 MODE can record 24hours of DVD quality
What you did not mention was that VHS HiFi started the whole home cinema craze. Prerecorded cassettes came out with HiFi tracks so films had superb audio. Dolby noticed this and as many releases on VHS had the surround info embedded in the two HiFi tracks, they brought out a 'Dolby surround' chip, later followed by a Dolby prologic' one, for amp manufacturers to incorporate into units, creating the first AV amps. I was a teenager at the time and took advantage of this development, and boy, was it fun!
Actually, Beta Hi-Fi had that distinction. If i remember right, VHS Hi-Fi came about six months to a year after Beta Hi-fi's debut. VHS HiFi did put that kind of audio quality into a lot more peoples' hands than Beta did, just by way of VHS' domination of the market, and between those two formats and Laserdisc, audio manufacturers decided that maybe they'd better take advantage of that.
Interestingly enough, the foundation of Dolby surround had actually been around for ages; about the only thing Dolby really added to it was the Dolby part, the noise reduction. The technology was based on the old matrixed quad formats like SQ and QS (I believe it was QS, so they wouldn't have to pay royalties to CBS for SQ), so in a pinch, anyone who had an old quad receiver that could do SQ or QS could have surround sound too. I had an old Hitachi quad receiver that I used for just that. Paid virtually nothing for it because the owner just wanted to be rid of it; they all but gave it to me. Their mistake, my gain :)
The first album that the band Primus released in 1989, "Suck on This", was a live album that was recorded on-location (at the Berkeley Square club in Berkeley, CA) to a Tascam Portastudio 388 (8 tracks on 1/4" open-reel tape), and mixed down to 2-channel stereo on--you guessed it--Hi-Fi VHS, with the LP and CD releases mastered from it. The album sounds pretty good overall.
I had that tascam. It was a huge step down Fromm my 80-8 but still an awesome piece.
Strange, didn’t think I’d find a fellow Primus fan here
That's pretty cool!! Musos who are screaming to get outta the garage can be very clever, utilising the small amount of pooled equipment in ways that can have outstanding results. U hrd oysterhead? Claypool and Stewart Copeland, I don't remember other member, apologies..!!
Years ago the only way I could get a recording of the long version of Deep Forest's "While The Earth Sleeps" (with Peter Gabriel) was from the end credits of the film it was made for - Strange Days (Ralph Feinnes and Angela Basset) so I recorded it from the VHS over to my tape deck and was blown away at how clear and good the source was. Was pretty much CD quality to my untrained ears...
I used to use VHS tapes to record from the radio too.
Me too😎🍺🍕
For those interested: make sure you get a recorder with RCA in- and outputs (for line in and out), then it's very easy to incorporate in a normal hifi-setup, or to connect to a mixer. And no need to worry about any noise reduction!
Looking back to living in Amsterdam in the 90s, I used a SONY SLV-E80 to record nighttime radio shows (mostly ambient house), relistened and indeed: re-recorded on regular compact cassette. The manual stated 80 Db signal-to-noise ratio, which was hard to match on a cassette deck. But... a midclass SONY cassettedeck cost a third of that videorecorder...
Now I have recently bought a SONY SLV-E90 (which adds useless editing options, but also a display-upgrade and manual setting of recording levels) and I will indeed use it to record record playing sessions (I'm not saying I DJ :-) ) in a local restaurant. Used to do it with cassettes, but had to keep my eye on those, as the sessions are 6 hours long. On long play I will only need one tape!
Prices in The Netherlands for a Hi-Fi unit are 30-50 euros, and upwards for higher spec JVC/Panasonic/Sony.
So, in short: I didn't care about the all-talk video, I can totally relate!
VHS-hi FI had a built-in noise reduction system. Which should not be confused with a Salora's VHS that had Dalby but it also didn't have the tone head on the video drum. And didn't sound as good
Bruce Springsteen's first album was well recorded on cassette tape. or any of the first albums. They probably use noise reduction for cassette tapes without noise reduction having too high a noise level. Especially if you are going to use the cassette tape to create a commercial item like a Vinyl record
Yes, the early Hi-Fi VHS machines even had a Simulcast or 'Radio Record' mode that would let you feed-in stereo audio from a tuner, and then overlay it with the recorded picture (for example, Last Night Of The Proms with audio from Radio 3, or Top Of The Pops with audio from Radio 1). This was in the few years before the dawn of NICAM Digital Stereo, so recordings would usually be in mono.
PS: Your NV-F70 probably has a dodgy low value start-up cap in the primary of the power supply (a common fault), or a shorted zener protection diode caused, again, by leaky capacitors drifting in value. Usually quite an easy fix in the right hands..
I experimented with VHS HiFi audio recording back in the day... it does work very well.. although for some strange reason we tended to use open reel / high end cassette decks ... I also have a Sony PCM recorder like yours and its a lot more portable.. it would be interesting to AB between a live recording between a Sony PCM and one of these
I used my Mitsubishi Hi-Fi VHS to record the top 102 songs of the year from the radio on a six hour tape with indexing. If I remember correctly the SNR was better than most CD players of the day.
No, it was far far away from 16 Bit PCM... It was not even better than a good cassette-deck with Dolby.
@@hafibeat834 it was substantially better than any cassette deck
Having a 240 minute tape using EP mode, we could have 16 hours of continuous play!
I used to use Hi-Fi VHS for all my cassette 4 track , two channel master mixdowns from my Fostex X-15 and later a Tascam. Thanks, Tony!
Always thought a four track based on vhs tape would be good. Wider track/faster speed. A moot point in the digital world
That is odd. I used to do exactly the same thing in the early 90s - bounce 4 tks down from Tascam to stereo on the Hifi VHS, then copy back up and add a couple more parts.
Then I got a minidisc machine which did the job equally well.
Fantastic frequency response and dynamic range. S/N ratio was like 90dB or something similarly insane.
@@TheChrisheath7 Yeah - all that went out the window when I got a Zoom digital multitrack with built in CD burner/drum machine/amp mods in 2000. Great little machine - made in Japan. These days, I'm using an iPad through a Focusrite iTrack dock (Focusrite preamps/Line/Midi /etc). for tracking. Much more convenient, lol.
I know right...you'd think since vhs is much wider in width than cassette they would've made a 4,8 or even 16 track machine. If they can fit 8 tracks on cassette, I own 2, then it should have been easy. Imagine a 16 track portable analog recorder. Also the tape is rarely exposed to air in vhs but cassettes easily get dirty and gunked up. Someone missed the boat so let's build one
A lot of us did this back in the day. We would record up to six hours of music on these then let play during at cookout or Church gatherings. All you needed was a VHS HiFi system and you were ready to go. I still have three VHS tapes with 18 hours of Music on them. This was my original "External Drive" for Music storage.
Back in the old days, I used VHS hifi for copying CD audio. Had audio cassette decks but they couldn't match CD quality. But VHS hifi could come very close. And the VCRs and tapes were cheap, compared to DAT which nobody I knew could afford. It worked resonably well for home use. The main problem was having to play the CD into the VCR in real time. It took hours to record and hours to play it back. Nowadays, the problem is that I don't have a working VCR any more. Last time I moved, nearly all my VHS video and the VHS audio went to the landfill. Sad times.
I got my first dat recorder in 1999 for free. My college lecturer said that things been sat there for 8 years and never used. Just fucking take it. No way could i have afforded one otherwise.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, I used a Panasonic Hi-Fi VHS machine to record orchestral concerts from FM radio and I thought the sound quality was outstanding.
My VHs tapes from 1991 play today just as good as they ever did in 1991...
Still crappy
I am using HiFi VHS to record rare LPs my friends giving me to listen
There were actual professional studio equipment that recorded in vhs tapes, so it's not as crazy as it may seem
These professional VHS-Recorders used 16 or even 20 Bit PCM-Decoding. No comparition to "Hifi-VHS".
@@hafibeat834 it's not that simple. There were several standards used before DAT came and blew everything up. There were fully new formats like those used by AKAI Adam, Tascam and others, based on Hi 8mm tapes with completely different helicoil scanning and encoding that the one used for hometaping, and there were also professional VHS recorders that used the VHS Hifi tracks and encoding of the home camcorders. I can tell because I've personally used them. This "format" war was a craze from the first half of the 90s, very entertaining indeed.
@@fresita_jugosa Yeah, whatever. I used several (almost all) formats since the late 80ties too.
But actually it's that simple: HIFI-Video is not a reliable format compared too open reel for it's HF-Modulation and wanky construction. And with 16Bit PCM - as the Sony open reels, the PCM-Decoders for VCR from Sony, and the DAT-Decks from the mid-eighties, every analog-format became fully obsolete. The format "craze" was long solved in the nineties, as nobody who could affort a (consumer) DAT-Deck used analog two-tracks anymore.
@@hafibeat834 Yeah, whatever
I remember once in the days of VHS that our families favorite radio station was having all day telethon charity fundraiser, so I recorded a continuous six hours of it by connecting the output of the radio to the sound input of the VCR set to SLP.
Used to run a mobile disco in the 80’s. We used a service called video pool that produced vhs tapes of all the current music on a monthly basis. Used 2x hifi videos and tv’s. Sound quality through the pa was brilliant.
One thing to note was I need a TV picture input in order to record the audio from the radio etc. In other words I couldn't just connect the audio to my tuner and expect it to record to VHS HiFi.
I had a Zenith that was made to record in VHS HiFi without the need for a video input. Excellent audio and used it until the processor went.
My Mitsubishi Hi-Fi VCR didn't care, I would record 6 hours of audio off the radio.
I have a couple JVC VCRs that seem to record and play happily with no video input.
I used a Sony SLV-E700 and it didn't need a video signal to record Hi-Fi audio either. The problems came however when in more recent years I went for JVC and Panasonic decks with TBC. Those decks can't cope with audio only signals (even with TBC switched off). So I kept some non-TBC models to play back audio only tapes. The best being the Sony SLV-F900 which has digital everything except TBC and gives the most stable playback of absolutely anything thrown at it, video or audio only.
The reason, I think, that the audio sounds between so similar between LP and SP is because the record head for hi-fi audio is on the helical scan head, which is still moving at the same rate across the tape in a diagonal pattern as the tape moves along. SP was overkill.
Back in the 90's Panasonic made a 7750 Super VHS editing deck that was around. $5k, $8K in today's dollars. Two types of audio, one hi-fi with 90db of dynamic range and Dolby noise reduction which could be engaged. They sell for around $400 now, are built like tanks and I recall the audio being exceptional. And the had XLR inputs and outputs. Add an inexpensive mixer and some mic's and it would be a nice tool for recording bands live. I don't know where you could find SVHS tapes, though.
Thanks man, I saw your video just hours before I was set to buy a reel to reel recorder and you saved me $250 !!!
The reason a HIFI VHS tape still worked in a Ferguson top loader non HIFI VCR was not because FM is analogue, it was because even the last generation of VHS recorders still recorded a mono linear audio track (some did linear stereo too) along the edge of the tape, completely separate to the embedded HIFI audio. That older Ferguson had absolutely no way to read the embedded HIFI audio tracks, it just didn't know they were even there.
I still love VHS. There's nothing quite like a 1980s episode of Inspector Morse on VHS, seeing all the old cars and quiet streets. There's just something about the lack of colour and gloss I like too. Never recorded audio with one but will have to have a go now
Back around 1985, I used VHS-HiFi to record my dad's and friends' CDs. I used SLP (6-hour) mode. I played those tapes MANY times with NO degradation!
Oh yeah, I did this all the time. The tape speed on a casette is 1 7/8 ips. With the helical scan of the VHS, the tape writing speed was something like 19 FEET per second. The sound was pretty amazing.
VHS tapes have 20hz-20khz of audio range, a Reel to Reel at 7.5 ips is 30hz-24khz on my Akai GX220D. VHS Hi-FI was really really good.
I love vhs hi fi audio recording. The sound is superb. It’s unfortunate that VCR’s stopped putting audio controls and VU meters on the units. Without them how do you know your input recorded volume? To low? to high? How do you record without volume controls?
This was my problem, too.
My workaround: record 1 test run with short clips of each track, copy/pasted 9x, in incrementally increasing volume levels. (Loop the loudest part of each track, crop, normalize, copy/paste 9x, set clip volumes ascending from -9dB to -1dB.)
This gave me a sample set of 9 versions to choose from, while allowing me to save space on tape. (I only wanted to use one 120-min tape and didn't want to re-record the whole thing 9x, making it more “used” with each recording.)
Listening back, I took notes on which was my favorite track, then re-recorded the full length track [at the “best” gain level] back to tape.
This way, I was able to limit myself to 1 VHS re-recording on a NOS TDK T-120 from 1980 via Sony SLV-775 HF.
If you're interested, the album is called VHS Volume 2 and drops 12/23/2022. I'm @into.cassette. Cheers!
A VCR with manual audio recording levels and VU meters is essential to recording good audio tapes. The high-end decks had them until the very end.
A secondary unit with VU will give you a great reference point (cassette deck will work). The record level is pretty close to 'line' anyway.
But yea, set everything up and record a minute or two and have a listen.
I thought I was the only one who used the hifi "videos" for sound only back in the day.... Nice video and a tri down memory lane !!
VHS Hi-Fi is the ultimate analog audio format, accessible to all.
No calibration needed, no bias adjustments, no noise reduction debates, no azimuth blues and absolutely no wow&flutter...
Just high quality analog 20-20KHz bliss, and that's Hi-Fi!
For vinyl recordings archive, home studio rehearsals, long play streaming selectas, or even as mixtapes masters. VHS-Hi-Fi is so good and soooo cheap today...
Really sounds astonishing, great dinamics (>90db). An experience that any real tape head must enjoy.
Cheers 🇵🇹
Sorry, the "ultimate" analog format would be Open Reel Tape with 15 ips. No professional used this format outside the video-world for a very good reason: The modulation that converts the audio-signal to HF - pls. see my comment above...
Beware of long term corrosion degradation due to moisture, though...
90dB is a myth. People shared real measurements. For 0dB input signal, THD is at about -70dB level. for -20dB input signal, THD stays at the same level. This is unavoidable due to a decoder IC (which is not high-end in any vhs recorder). They don't call it "noise", but in fact this isn't a sound either. Of course it's far from MC/R2R tape THD, but those highly integrated ICs can have additional side effects (like dynamics, tonal integrity, etc)
@@chrisharding5447and heat.
Calibration most definitely was needed if accurate playback was to be guaranteed on anyone else's machine, but it wasn't available. The overall frequency response also varied wildly between different machine implementations, so there was no guarantee of anything even remotely approaching a flat frequency response from 20Hz to 20kHz.
I was advised by a video dealer sales rep about using VHS HiFi as an audio format for recording long-form radio music shows, such as song countdown specials; where the recording length could be adjusted from two to six hours in length. When it came to audio quality, the VHS HiFi format didn't have the issues of tape hiss (during playback) that's been the bane with audio cassettes since day-one.
This idea was mentioned in Stereophile 20 years ago. I have over a hundred VHS HIFI tapes that are music only. It is a great medium to record music!
They actually record when at the fastest speed .....close to that of a hirez RR deck.
Adamo we made that I still have the master VHS still sounds amazing. All recorded live, everything bleeding through everything else, but man, it feels like it's a practice in front of you. Desk recordings at gigs dint always work as the output has bn made for the f.o.h. mix
So sometimes the output is all vocals or drums, or no guitar. I have many of them, but when you luck out on a good live mix, it's AWESOME!!!
8:30 old vcr’s can play the audio recorded on a hifi deck because there is a separate mono audio track recorded on the edge of the tape that was supported on newer machines for the sake of backwards compatibility. I think they didn’t go with PCM beceause it wouldn’t be much of an improvement judging by the specs
To add to this, some pre-recorded VHS tapes have that linear audio in stereo. Sounds awful in LP, and not too many consumer VCRs have the ability to play back or record linear stereo, but at least it was something for those who couldn't afford the good AFM Hi-Fi decks. My parents had one of those.
The reality is that the HIFI soundtrack could sound good but it suffered from occasional pops and try recording a tympani type sound and you'll hear the upper frequencies pumping noise which was horrendous. Not noticed on recording pop music but with live sound with low frequencies it was not good. PCM was clean all the way.
@@Oklawolf those decks really never caught on
Tip: Use NiMh rechargeable batteries in your remotes, like I do... It saves me money, and is less likely to make a mess if forgotten.
Right on--I do the same myself for my remote's batteries. NiMh cells are practically leakproof (due to their composition, I'd reckon) and you can give 'em a recharge when dead--no need to keep using up alkaline cells. :)
I recall making 6-8hr music vhs tapes on our Samsung deck. Awesome sound - the vhs format added a lot of warmth to CD sound, and rolled off the harsh highs. Recently discovered that re-encoding audio to 24kbps HE-AAC+v2 sounds identical to vhs hifi
You must be either using a great encoder or you're half deaf.
i think SP means Standard Play? LP = Long Play
Yep! And EP - Extended Play or SLP - Super Long Play
Ep was not common in uk
Its mad they allowed pre recorded tapes in the US to be recorded in long play.
NTSC
Yes. It’s “Standard Play”, meaning default speed.
I have that NV-70 VCR too and mine did the same when I plugged it in once. I'm pretty sure that that fault is because of bad electrolytic capacitors in the power supply.
That seems to be the consensus. It's 30 years old so...
The main problem with this VCR is that there (at least on mine) are very little ventilation holes, which makes the PSU really hot, and thus the capacitors dry out. If you have the skill to repair it, I would do so, but since I dont have the skill, mine is sitting in storage.
I used to put all my records on vhs and use it for parties. You'd get 3hrs of music non stop.
Yes VHS and Betamax HiFi are analog but it's not the same clean simple process used in say a reel to reel or cassette recorder. Remember these consumer video formats ran at 1ips or less linear tape speed. You can't get HiFi sound via direct analog recording at that tape speed. So they they took the audio signal and modulated it to an FM frequency of around 1mhz. That was then recorded with the rotating video heads which equate to several hundred ips tape speed. But there were two major problems:
1) Because the audio FM had to share spectrum space with the video FM and color information, the deviation was limited. Low deviation with FM means more noise. So they fixed that by companding aka DBX process. The bad result was gain pumping.
2) The tape is only half wrapped around the video head disc. So to maintain constant tape contact they use two heads and switch back and forth between them. This happens 30 times a second (25 time in PAL). The head switch produces a DC offset in the FM carrier which is audible. It's very low but once you hear it, you will always hear it. In video this switch can be hidden between frames. Analog audio has no "frames" and is a linear signal.
PCM audio recorded on VHS and Betamax did not have these uses because first, they didn't record video when in PCM mode and digital audio can be stored and written to tape in faster than real time thus getting around the head switch problem.
In reality a good high end cassette deck of the mid 1980s would outperform Beta and VHS HiFi. True, the cassette didn't have the dynamic range or frequency response of the Beta/VHS HiFi, but it also did/t have the artifacts which many audiophiles found to be a non starter for Beta/VHS HiFi as a high end audio recorder.
I used to use a 1991 JVC hifi VHS VCR that had a db meter with individual controls for each stereo channel, it had many other options such as smoothing and sharpening to make the video part better but the audio was where I used it like a recordable CD. I could record amazing stereo audio on it as is. But then came SVHS and DVHS which I never had, sadly... Also in 1981 there was a short lived Technics VCR that used VHS tapes to record audio onto them digitally!!!!! There are ways to store digital files onto a VHS tape today that makes a tape a large hard drive but on a long life tape. I regret throwing that JVC away into a bin in 2007 when it finally died. In hindsight, I could have fixed it! But I had 2x new Samsung Hifi VHS Vcrs... of which only one works now. 2:41 - those words will sound quite outdated now and even moreso in the future my man!
The evolution of VHS was pretty amazing. The first one my family owned was a toploader bought around 1981 and the earliest ones even had giant chunk-chunk tuners in them. They weighed like 50 pounds and there were thousands of parts in them. The last ones were so light that pushing in the tape would make them slide across your entertainment center and they were better in every way to the first ones. They went from a thousand 1975 dollars to 49 1998 dollars. I have a mitsubishi from the early 2000s that has auto-biasing and SVHS plus q-svhs that does outstanding high-res video on the cheapest oldest tapes I have. It was only like 150 dollars. The audio quality is outstanding too.
You should check out DVHS. It does digital HD at 1080i
Tape speed doesn't matter on VHS Hi-Fi, the relative tape-head speed is way higher than any other analog audio recorder could dream of, SP or the slowest EP it's all the same.
Doesn't that only apply to the video head since it is spinning, but not the audio head since it is stationary like any audio tape recorder?
@@JoshGarsideMeyers no... the stationary head attend to ordinarie audio track. In this case we're talking about Hi-Fi wich uses the video track as well, in other words, helicoidal scan.
I did often record music on my HiFi VHS. The were better than most of the casette decks back in the days. Also because of tape size an speed on a VHS mashine. Much less tape hiss, you did not need Dolby. The old mono tracks on VHS were really bad, but the Hifi tracks were a whole other level.
i still have a JVC Hi-Fi VHS that i bought in about 1985 stored up in the spare bedroom with all my old PC and audio gear i might just get it out and give it a try and i still have the remote and i took the Batteries out lol
@Cassette Comeback
I definitely remember different VHS tape formulations back during the 1980s and early 90s. If you exposed the tape itself you could see the different color shades of dark brown or dark grey, and more or less polished tape surfaces as well. They would even advertise that fact on the labels, sorry it's been so long I can't recall the technical aspects of what those specs were.
You also have the SVHS standard, not sure how much difference the better tape/heads would potentially make to the HiFi audio and if they're basically the same standard audio-wise.
I discovered hi-fi audio back in the day and started to record mixtapes to be played back at home on my fathers vhs hifi… he had high end equipment, and it sounded as good as a cd with no background hiss
Back in the late 80s and early 90s, I used my Toshiba VHS hi-fi to record audio. I had my Amiga 500 plugged into the video input and I'd make video titles with Deluxe Paint to go over the audio. This made it easy to find a song in fast visual search mode. My Toshiba hi-fi was from the mid 80s and was a beautiful unit with level controls and LED VU meters. I wish I still had it.
I dug up my grandpa's old ep vcr and recorded about 4 hours of my music onto a blank. I didn't expect much, but I was blown away to hear the audio quality of that tape. 240 minutes of hifi sound on a single-sided tape that I didn't need to flip. I just put in the tape, listened to all 4 hours, and it auto rewound and ejected.
Pushing that tape in to play once a day might become a bit of a habit of mine
I used a hi-fi vcr as part of my home recording set-up in the late 80’s/early 90’s alongside Tascam & Yamaha 4 track cassette recorders. Great way of keeping partial mixes available that you could go back to, loss of quality over a couple of generations was far better than could be achieved on cassette tapes. I still have my Aiwa hi-fi vcr just in case the need ever arises !
I first heard about this from Anadialog, and picked up a deck and tapes. It was so good and got hooked. No hiss and great dynamics, just have to allow time for the hifi signal to kick in. I've tried regular and hifi tapes, and I don't hear any difference. Maybe the hifi tapes are more durable. I use a preamp with volume control to adjust the recording level, as it seems what level I put in is what is recorded. I haven't tried the SP vs LP either because no remote, but have read it doesn't affect it much. I can put multiple albums of an artist on a tape and then listen for hours. And it is easy to move from one system to another. I still love my compact cassettes as the sound and experience is what appeals to me. I basically just love playing with all the different formats of music, from digital to analog to see what you can get out of them. Truly a fun hobby!
Yeah. If this was expensive, then I don't know if I'd be this enthusiastic, but they're literally giving these things away at the moment and they're brilliant for analogue recording.
Yeah, I get most of my gear through thrift stores. Don't have the budget otherwise, but its fun to hunt and see what can find. Well at least did before the pandemic. Not so easy right now. But will again when things are better.
I used to record all our gigs just by lining out to my vhs hi-fi from the desk. Still got them all, some mixes were great, I sometimes lined in a video camera but it was usually just hanging from the desk area..
Some radio stations used VHS HiFi recording to record and playback non stop music through the night when there were no programmes scheduled, and the recordings sounded good too.
7:50 The recordings are backwards compatible because the deck records one standard audio signal and one hifi signal. Non-hifi decks simply ignore the hifi signal and read the linear audio signal(s)
Theres a large British heart foundation charity store near me with dozens of video recorders in. Especially variants of that panasonic
Please tell me where it is
Hell... years ago I used VHS tapes as 8-track recording tapes... It's a shame it didn't last...
many of these HIFI VCRs have input and output audio RCA jacks, sometimes with a separate input/channel for audio, as if they intended to use the machine as a HIFI recorder/player since then
Those separate inputs were intended for stereo FM simulcast of TV broadcasting. In the early days, it was common that TV stations were still in mono, so they used an FM frequency to simulcast the stereo sound. Then, you hook up your FM tuner to the VCR.
I was doing this 20 years ago. Our local radio station had a 4 hour country music oldies show on Saturday morning, so I'd dutifully tape it every week.
This video has just reminded me that for a year or so before introducing a MiniDisc recorder into my home studio, I had a transition period where I’d moved away from ‘mastering’ on a Fostex X26, to a stereo video recorder (Nicam?) - which had far superior recording quality over that old 4-track. I’d totally forgotten about that and now I want to find my mid 90s ‘techno’ on those video tapes!! I’d completely forgotten this 😂.
There was some criticism regarding the noise reduction system used in HiFi VHS. Read something about it many years ago
Hifi VCRs record the audio to the linear mono track as well as the hifi with the video head so they can be backwards compatible with older decks.
In the mid 80s, we had a CD rental shop downtown. I owned a Panasonic NV-70s including full service documents. So, the project was, modifiing the FM sound to meet the highest standards. For this, I switched off the video signal and boosted the FM sound signal slightly. This modification got rid of the noise from the head switching, which is the only disadvantage with VHS HiFi. After this, I copied a large amount of CDs onto E240 tapes in LP. In the end, I had some 100 cassettes full with music. I documented it by hand into a notebook. At this time, I hoped, that there will be a chance one time to convert it to digital media.
Well, I had to wait 'til 2003. By that time, batch converting to MP3 was possible via the Messer software, which divided the tracks. So each morning, after work and at bedtime I put in another tape. This took me several months. In the end, it ruined the old panasonic NV-70. So, for the last few tapes, I had to get another VCR. So, in the beginning, I started dumping it to CDs, later DVDs and then portable HDDs. And now, the whole stuff fits onto a SD card inside my smartphone. Minor drawback, still no ID tags since this has to be done manually. Instead, I scanned the pages of the old notebook and saved it next to the mp3s. :)))))
Later, I dumped most of my videos to DVD just before the tapes deteriorated. Pew...
Used to do this to record my DJ mixes then play back from the Hi Fi VHS to cassette for high quality dubs :D
Good practice would be to monitor the input level to the VHS recorder via an output of a mixing desk, or even an output of a cassette deck in record standby mode. Test and trialing the output level of the desk/cassette deck until finding the perfect level that works. Great video Tony, and a great system for recording live onto a stereo recorder.. Not so great if you want to record individual instruments onto a multitrack and mix afterwards (Dare I even mention ADAT 🙈)
That's why I got the other Panasonic which has input controls and level meters...worked great for an hour...
I had a Fischer, you could choose to only record sound on it if you wanted. For the LP mode on it only recorded sound not picture. The disadvantage, however, was that it had automatic adjustment of the sound level. i.e. there were smaller level differences between different sounds
Now I never knew this actually was a format type!! Every day is a school day!!
A 90s kid would know
@@Ashivlogzz Child of the very early 70's.
That format passed me by!
@@derekporter7658 What format passed you by, you mean VHS or the fact that you could use it for audio-only?
@@xaverlustig3581 I knew vhs existed as a video recording format, but not an audio only format. Hope that explains my post.
however if I remember correctly there was a device you could buy for a certain Betamax so you could turn it into a digital recorder
That Panasonic deck is probably one of the best Vintage VCRs you could get
In the 90's when I played in a band. We used a Panasonic VHS as a master tape for our live gigs. We played electronic music and as we needed playback for most of the music live we used the VHS and it was brilliant!
I use to have a teacher who used VHS for music recordings. Although this was at a time when cassettes were common. I also recall at the time people using (landline) phones to transfer music, where someone would play the music over the phone and the other person would tape record it.
When I was giving up my turntable in the early 90s I transferred a bunch of albums to HIfi VHS. Sounded great.
I always recorded on VHS HiFi Stereo, Opus Radio from the Astra Satellite (beautiful classical music), Radio Luxembourg International via the Astra Satellite (which basically was Radio Luxembourg all day without the night time fade of 1440 kHz and whistling distorted reception of 49.26 metres Shortwave which got right around the world), Sky Radio for its high quality CD music and jingles / ad breaks, Quality Europe FM for the Tesug Satellite Surgery every Saturday afternoon, SWF3 for the English language music, Radio 10 Gold, Eclipse FM, Radio Nova Ireland in mono via Lifestyle on channel 5, Asda FM, Supergold, World Radio Network for the weekly broadcast of Radio Netherlands Media Network programme Thursdays, Radio Sweden Mediascan programme, Radio Vlaandren International for Radioworld, plus TV ident jingles too.
I had flawless clear sound recordings because the Astra Satellite receiver I used was a decent quality Nokia Sat 1700 equipped with genuine (not soundalike) Wegener Panda 🐼 1 noise reduction fitted unlike the crappy Amstrads and other brands of satellite receiver with their useless non Panda 🐼 like noise reduction circuitry.
Non genuine Panda like noise reduction circuitry fitted to other brands of Astra Satellite receiver often sounded slightly hissy or very hissy indeed.
Wegener Panda 🐼 1 noise reduction compressed the analogue mono / multilingual / stereo sound before satellite transmission and the receiver circuitry would expand it restoring dynamic range without the hiss and noise, but if you didn't have genuine Panda 1 noise reduction fitted to your Astra Satellite receiver, you still got a fair amount of hiss and noise on the sound which made for unpleasant listening.
Hi Anthony, wondering if you still have these radio recordings from satellite? I'd be particularly interested in Radio Nova and Luxembourg. Great stations.
@@borderblaster Don't have the VHS cassettes anymore
As a bonus. With a bit of tinkering you can put artwork and text on the video signal. That way you can scan through it and see when songs change.
Take it from an old-timer like me. I'm a history making multi-major award nominated Audio Engineer/Producer. I've been doing this now for over 50 years. I started back in full track, Mono tape recorders. And I'm capable today of taking 72 simultaneous inputs to hard drives. So I've grown a bit. But back in the day! When I was starting out. In the early 1980s. Oh my God, 40 years ago. Where has the time gone?
You must understand. I was one of the people, temporarily in charge. Of one of the most legendary studio and broadcast, tape-recorded manufacturers. And declined job offers from 2 of the other 4. But I digress. The whole point here is this.
When you wanted to do a mix down from an analog multitrack. In the early 1980s. You actually had about three choices. Another analog tape recorder you are mixing down to. A brand-new, rather costly, PCM digital audio processor. That would record digital audio to videotape cassettes of Betamax or VHS. And within those early 1980s. Hi-fi formats above Betamax and VHS were introduced. And this was a much more affordable, high quality, stereo capture, recording.
I found the hi-fi format video recorders to be a unique sounding, stereo recorder. In that, it's still actually an analog recording. In the FM frequency modulated domain. Which, similar to that of FM stereo radio. It had a razor blade flat, frequency response. It had a better than analog tape, signal to noise ratio. It had better than analog tape stereo separation and lower crosstalk. It had lower more acceptable distortion characteristics.. And contained attributes of both analog and digital recording specifications. As a far more affordable high quality stereo recorder. But it also depended, upon your choice of manufacturers and model types.. As they were not all the same. As in this example next.
As a professional audio engineer I know what I wanted. I knew what I had to have. And realizing. The least expensive models that were the most affordable. Still offered up great hi-fi encoded sound but! They had, what is known as an AVC or, Automatic Volume Control. In my line of work. Those are referred to as dynamic range, compressing devices. And while they are very useful. And we cannot live without the making recordings. We don't usually want them built into our, recorders. Or at least the option. To switch that off. But then, where is the input volume control? There isn't any! And thus. The AVC was installed always on. No no and double no.
In the end. I wanted a VHS hi-fi recorder. That had a manual input volume control knob. A balance control. And a switchable, limiter. Whereas, the limiter is similar to AVC. But only turns down the loud sounds from getting too loud. Rather than turning up all of the very soft passages as loud as the loud passages. Which was awful sounding.
And so, I purchased 2 VHS hi-fi recorders, brand-new. One very inexpensive affordable consumer unit. I think it was Mitsubishi? And a high-end, consumer unit, from JVC. That was nearly $850.. Compared to the common consumer unit that was only, $250.
And so what I would end up doing. I made my JVC VHS hi-fi, my master stereo recorder. To mix down upon or recorded live to. At the fast SP speed. And simultaneously with that. Using RCA plug Y adapters. I could feed my stereo signal to both machines,, simultaneously. To make a dual redundant, stereo recording of 2 masters. And because of anything should go wrong with one. And that could occasionally happen. I was always assured I'd have a backup.
In fact I would use that backup Mitsubishi VHS hi-fi consumer recorder in the slow speed SLP mode. For six hours worth of continuous, no stop, archive logger. And in that respect. That AVC circuit. Would bring up the volume during very quiet background times. Actually making for a much better archival backup of the entire day. Because sometimes cool things would happen. That otherwise would have never been recorded or captured. Such as funny background conversation and consternation's. And those cussing who say they never cuss. That consumer machine was great for that! But not all that great capturing music without kind of sounding like a $29 battery-operated portable cassette recorder used to. And not necessarily a stereo recorder you would generally want to mix your masters to. But it could still be effective.
Because when you're mixing down. Many of us use a stereo master bus limiter. And if you don't have one of those? Then that Automatic Volume Control circuit might just be the ticket! And there's your stereo master bus limiter and dynamic range compressor. Because it's going to do both. Then you'll say, hey. That doesn't sound like what's coming out of my mixer. It sounds better! Yay doggy! Woo hoo! And I am sure for you. It will. As I did have to rely upon that backup once. When my JVC failed. Yup. And nobody was the wiser. That my backup didn't sound exactly the way I wanted it to. But hey! It saved my ass on that job. When my JVC, ate the tape.
My only audio gripe about the VHS hi-fi format and/or Betamax. As the heads rotate at 2000 RPM. And only scan the tape in a 180° arc.. It's automatically switching back and forth between 2 heads. And that switching sound, while way in the background. Can be audible could be noticeable by, nitpicky people. Who are always that way with everything. And so you can't please all of the people, all of the time. But it is a great high quality sounding low cost affordable alternative. That still, to this day, can hardly be beat. It works. It's effective. It makes financial sense. Old recorded over movie and TV tapes can make just fine blank tape. To record over. And what's that going to cost you? Absolfuckinglutely nothing.
It's a win win win. Another pleasant VHS Sunday. By the Monkeys! Yay the Monkeys! Poor Davey and Peter. Don't erase those tapes. Keep them for Posterior.
I always wanted to be a Monkey. I fancied myself like Mickey. The Circus Boy. And later he became a Monkey! How apropos. Bonobo what he's doing today?
I'm just chimp ing away at things here.
RemyRAD
I used to make compilations for parties on VHS... even in LP is sounded good and 6 hours worth of tunes! :-)
Awesome as you say for parties...If people are drinking no one gonna notice a glitch in the music all gonna be booging down...
@@sting64az and no one could work out where the music was coming from so couldn’t mess about and change it!!
@@danielkerryann I think Tony's presentation was good and I haven't seen many others really talk about recording analog music using these relic VHS machines...I myself done recordings way back in the mid 90's when I bought a Stereo VHS machine....Don't ask me now what I paid for it lol...But electronics of this sort was still pricey...I done some awesome recordings with good results..The dynamic range was a tad off but still pleasant music nevertheless...
The Nicam Decoder worked well in two of my video devices. However, not on a cheaper Super VHS video from JVC. there were sound disturbances. Nicam was apparently also used to send data, at least here in Sweden. that was probably the problem. If the unit did not have a good Nicam Deoder
Ideas are good and I left a box of VHS tape on the curb yesterday. Live and learn thank you for the lesson.
One other major advantage of HiFi vhs, is that you can use it as a backup format if you’re also recording digitally. With digital recorders, there can be glitches during recording, or if the power fails and the file wasn’t finalized, the complete recording can be inaccessible.
With a 4 hour tape on LP you have 8 hours, so you can just set it up and hit rec the moment you arrive at a venue, and let it run til the end of the evening with time to spare. It will record the rehearsal (always nice for some kind of blooper reel), and you won’t miss the first 2 songs because the engineer forgot to start the recording in time.
If the power fails, everything you’ve recorded until then will still be on the tape.
The original low quality audio signal was recorded in a linear format like an audio tape, using a regular head (not a helical head). The first VCRs recorded audio like this, along with a corresponding drop in quality when recording in LP mode due to the decreased tape speed. When “Hifi VHS” was developed, the “hifi VHS” signal was recorded by an extra pair of heads helically in spare space next to the video tracks. All Hifi VHS recorders also recorded the old linear audio signal for compatibility with older players. So when you play a VHS Hifi tape in an old Ferguson top-loader, it’ll play the lower quality linear audio track and just ignore the FM recorded hifi track.
Cheers
You could even record quadrophonic live recordings: 2 channels analogue from the VHS-Hifi, 2 channels digitally with a PCM encoder in the "picture band".
I could hear no discernible difference between the original and the VHS. Interesting. I have a tascam portastudio that I use for mastering effects. I record to a Zoom r24 multitrack and master down to cassette, but I think VHS might be more practical and better audio as it's not belt driven.
Lows are filtered out on VHS (in this particular recording). Something like 80Hz high pass filter. May be it's a matter of a better output capacitor, or a higher input impedance
I used to make lots of audio recordings on HIFI VHS from CDs and LPs in the late 80´s. The sound was almost indistinguishable from the source. In addition, my VCR had an indexing function where you could make a mark at the beginning of each track and use an automatic search function by track number to access any track. It worked fine but was painfully slow.
NICAM Digital Stereo was a hi-fi backwards standard which is compatible with Hi-fi as it had the same family components but it had all these dubbing options to make your own voiceovers and also have the ability to change your volumes.
My JVC was weird you were able to listen to both a Mono and Nicam Digital Stereo or Hi-fi if Pre Recorded VHS audio modes at the same time in a sort of 3 channel as a 3rd audio option when it was a very warpy quality Mono the 3 channel mix sounded like shit but it was a fun mode to watch videos in sometimes for a different sound.
I my self was shocked when i recorded a few vinyl records and Cds on VHS especially when you use the High Grade TDK and Maxell high grade Tapes. I was blown away with the sound detail captured as clean as my source using a Sony HiFi VCR.
It was like having a reel to reel with half inch, instead of quarter inch tape, running at a (relative) tape speed of 5 m per second, with a perfect noise reduction system and with "dirt cheap" tapes, that could record up to 12 hours. The only thing that mattered in regard to the tapes: Drop outs. Bias adjustments were not needed, so you could use any tape from a reputable manufacturer. Genuine chrome (as from BASF, Agfa or PDM) or substitutes from TDK or Maxell all worked in the same good way.
I've been "quietly" building up my HIFI VHS setup for a little while now. Very few peeps talk about this in my circles. Yet, I'm a HUGE cassette tape,VHS, and MD fan. And this video just gave me inspiration to refocus on this project. Now is the time to actively test it on my end. Thx for the in depth video, and acknowledging that this IS STILL a thing. Peace...Netm8kr
Great job. Inspired me to pop my tape into my 86 Yamaha hifi VHS deck. Still sounds great. I recorded Cock Sparrer onto a JVC tape from a CD.. now this is fun because I plugged a PS1 into the VCR. So you can use the controller to change the video while recording both AV signal and make cool patterns to accompany the music. Try it it’s fun! Then you can play your artwork at parties for background 🤙🏻
How about this for an even more obscure alternative. I've got a bunch of Sony DMR-4000 digital master recorders which used UMATIC tape to record audio, they were crazy expensive new and found homes in some of the biggest studios in the world.
Sure, but the point is that cheap and plentiful VCRs can do a good job.
I had a Stereo Hifi Zenith Camcorder in the 80's. The sound was incredible. Especially live music.