Video tape

Outlaws

New member
Since I know you can record on VHS tapes with Adat machines, I'm thinking I can record with my VCR. :D But if I sent a signal into my VCR and just recorded like that, how much track width do I have?

What is it comparable to?

I am think of tracking my acoustic guitar. I am going to do it anyways just to try it out, but am wondering how much room of that tape is actually audio.


Now ADATs are digital, and I know Studer makes a digital tape machine, but there are no A/D converters in VCRs right?

One more thing....

How fast does the tape move? Come to think of it, this might not be as cool as I think. But movies still sound good......when they are new.....:rolleyes:
 
VHS HI-FI at SP speed has pretty good specs and good potential for recording. Beta HI-FI is better, but I assume you probably have VHS. HI-FI VCR used to be pretty popular for mastering and still has many fans.

The effective tape speed is much faster than the actual tape speed because of the rotating heads. Beta uses the video head to record the stereo AFM HI-FI signal between the chrominance and luminance signals. The effective tape speed is around 270 ips.

Dynamic range - nearly 90 dB
S/N ratio - around 78 dB
Wow & flutter – 0.005
THD 0.1%

VHS uses two additional rotating video heads to handle the stereo HI-FI signal. The specs are similar to Beta. The automatic level control can be a problem if your VCR has that.

We are talking about HI-FI, right? If you just have a VHS stereo machine it’s not the same.

TBeck :cool:
 
One issue with the FM-based (frequency-modulated) recording mechanism of HiFi VHS is that it doesn't handle transient sounds (hi-hats, shakers, etc....) very well, resulting in noisy artifacts during quiet instances of those sounds.
 
Outlaws said:
It also uses AGC, ( Automatic Gain Control), which will kill your peak signals with compression. Not really the ideal choice for quality sound recording.

Find an older beast with manual recording level controls if you must use a VCR for audio recording and make sure it has an index write read feature so you can mark the head of tracks and find them afterward with an index search feature. Usually 99 points can be written and searched per tape. Without it, you will have to make meticulous records of time readings for each song to find it afterward on the tape.

Cheers! :)
 
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