Accessing VHS Audio

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bmg

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Many years ago, I transferred some music to VHS tape.
With me recently obtaining a Song VCR, I've been watching some old shows, etc.

When I play the audio-only tapes, though, nothing is being reproduced; only silence.
Can this be an issue with how the audio track was recorded back then?

The unit was a Mitsubishi U-65, and the audio was recording straight into the deck through its L/R inputs.
(This was a higher-end unit S-VHS unit with a lot of options, which makes me think the audio is on the tape, but the current player is not able to access it.)
 
Was there a video signal recorded when you did the audio? Did you play it back after recording? You need to have a video signal on the tape for the system to lock sync, otherwise it will drift. A few times when I recorded audio to VHS, I just used the video output from my TI 99/4A to give a title page.

Does your Sony VCR do HiFi audio? If not, then you probably need to get a different deck. And while both use a linear audio track, if you had HiFi recording, it used an FM coded signal as well that gave a better quality stereo audio track. However, SVHS was different from plain vanilla VHS and standard VHS decks won't play S-VHS tapes. They encoded the video in different manners. Its like the situation where Blu-ray decks will play DVDs but DVD decks won't play Blu-ray.

S-VHS came pretty late and wasn't very widely used.

Here's some more info on VHS vs S-VHS.

web.archive.org

S-VHS vs VHS: Easily Learn the Difference Between VHS and S-VHS

Although the VHS and S-VHS tape formats look similar, their properties aren't. This article explains the difference between VHS and S-VHS.
web.archive.org web.archive.org
 
No video.
This Sony deck is playing the S-VHs tapes, which was a surprise, but the actual tape is HiFi TDK, so that may be the problem.
 
If you have no video signal, there is nothing for the system to lock sync. Did you ever try to play the tape back when you made it?
 
I think rich probably got it - the early hifi machines use FM audio, recorded by the helical heads with two extra heads. These were in normal definition and S-VHS. I'd guess the machine you are playing them on does not have the hifi tracks, hence the lack of sound.
 
Strange, because I thought I heard a quick snippet of audio when I first popped the tape in, but can't reproduce it.
 
That could also suggest that the alignment is wrong, and the tracking way out. Often they would get a bad output from the tape and switch back to the longitudinal tracks?

Try recording on the machine and see if that replays in stereo. If it does, then there is/was an alignment issue on one machine.
 
A different player than the one that recorded the tape may not be good at aligning to the track. It may need a video signal to lock onto it with the automatic tracking. If there's a manual tracking option try that, but that might not stay solidly locked to the audio-only track. A different deck might play it just fine.
 
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