Are VCRs the World's Cheapest Hi-Fi Reel-to-Reel?

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evilash1996

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Are VCRs the World's Cheapest Hi-Fi Reel-to-Reel?

This may sound like a clickbait title to some, but how far off from the truth is it? You may say I am stretching the definition of what defines a "Reel to Reel", but think about it for a second. How different is a VHS tape being "spun" in your VCR than your tapes on your Tascam Half Track? I guess by that logic you can also call a cassette player a Reel to Reel....

OKAY FINE, I will admit I don't consider a cassette player a Reel to Reel. But still, a VCR capable of Hi-Fi audio is sonically superior to a cassette. This may come to a surprise to most, but some old tape heads out there know this too be true. When this Hi-Fi audio technology hit the market, many home recordists took full advantage of the full range frequency (20Hz - 20KHz) and the dynamic range of 90db!! There's a little more nuisance to the audio quality, but hopefully I can get a conversation going and get some input from people who have used VCRs for mixdowns and bouncedowns in the past.

I made a video on the topic where I go into more details. I also do some tests where I compare several mixdowns that were done on my VCR (I go through the Hi-Fi audio system as well as the "Lo-Fi"). It's a fun one for sure and I hope you all can enjoy it.

VCR Mixdown Video

Cheers,
Mario
 
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I have not much to say really, only that I have used an RCA VHS unit for mixdowns off a Tascam 688. The major PITA for me was the excruciatingly slow switching between transport modes. I thought the sound quality was much improved over my Harman Kardon cassette deck.
 
I’ve done it. It can work quite well, assuming: A) the machine doesn’t do AGC or let’s you turn it off and 2) you often have to give it some sort of actual video input so that it will track correctly. Like I said, I have done a few mixes back in the day before I got a DAT machine, and I’ve also used VHS to record live things with indefinite duration because it’ll do like 6 hours before you have to worry about changing the tape. Don’t expect any extra special tape vibe out of it, but if you‘re looking for clean and flat, a good hifi vcr will do it.

Not sure exactly how cheap it is nowadays. Finding a machine in good working order and new tapes could be an issue.
 
I bought (from work) a damaged JVC Hi Fi VHS machine. There was a cracked front PCB and I spent hours bridging uber fine tracks. Could NOT do that now!

My son used it to make mix downs from a Teac A3440 and the results were superb. The JVC had excellent LED meters and a switchable limiter, no AGC. Later machine had AGC and few allowed you to turn it off. IRRC it did not need a video input? Later machines, YMMD.

One use even today for VHS recorder would be as a 'logging' machine. Hung on the 'everything' stereo output of a mixer say you would have 6 hours of high quality recording. In extremis you could dub in a lost part but more usefully perhaps you would have a record of who TF said what about "***" !

Dave.
 
I watched the youtube video and I was a bit shocked really. OK, it's easy to misunderstand old technology when you're young, but you sort of missed a few vital things. Helical scan had incredible bandwidth from a slow moving tape, exactly because those tracks are slanted across it, and the head rotation means the heads are folllowing that track and really, really fast speed - enough to record signals not measured in KHz but MHz. I was present when the first VHS and Beta machines hit the public and Video Home System was absolutely the marketing. The engineers all talked about helical scan of course, but nobody added 'vertical' to it to make a new acronym. We never even thought about that one. For what it is worth, AM and FM forms of audio recording and transmission both have strong points, but FM is relatively immune to the actual level through the air as radio/TV and via tape. Thin spots in the media layer on the tape reduce he level, but as the information is recovered by changes in frequency, not amplitude - it's better. As Dave points out limiters and AGC are not something audio enthusiasts want turned on, with no off switch.

I had to stop your video as soon as I saw the crazy over levels on the RTR and then your suggestion that you push it further onto the hifi VHS recorder. That, plus the simple awful choice of music with deliberate distortion due to the genre - totally wipes out any point in the test? Recording is always about hum, noise and distortion - and minimising it. Sure, we'd push levels sometimes for specific purposes, but never to generate distortion, often it just moved the recording to the non-linear portions of the bias S curve, and for some music this compressed/expanded the audio. The minute it flat-topped a waveform, we'd gone too far. I was totally with your points until you went to crazy mode and what was the point after that? Is it distorted? yes? What caused it? No idea - too out of control to even guess - recodr or replay amps in the MT, the very cheap front end of the hifi machine? Or maybe some of the distortion was processing, effects style on the recording. If you have distortion on the original, how do you assess the end product? A sine wave can be looked at and distortion even measured. Sawtooth and Square waves generate harmonics anyway, so how do you tell?

You have lots of nice older gear - but you're using it way differently to how it was really intended. Some of those MT tracks must be really hard to record over - don't you waste lots of tape?

History is important. You mentioned the longitudinal tracks being dreadful, but they weren't. Many buyers of hifi machines never ever even heard the hifi tracks because they had old tapes with no hifi audio, so they switched them to analogue and never switched them back. 10K or even a bit less on TV speakers sounded OK. Probably better than the distorted hard track you selected to demonstrate how good it was? I'm not complaining about the recording or the genre or the band - but for demonstrating 'quality' it failed miserably. Sorry - but if you want to let people hear how good something actually is - which VHS/Beta hifi machines were - the play something where they can turn the volume up and listen for the subtle differences. PS you missed the big annoyances of VHS longitudinal tracks, mono and stereo. Wow and flutter - listening to piano was pretty warbly, and the dynamic range quite limited and of course AGC'd and limited - so pretty squashed. The hifi track really came into play on music videos. You weren't around then, so you can only guess what people actually wanted - but old and new hifi folk don't want noise, hums and buzzes and absolutely no distortion.
 
Yes Rob early analogue VHS/BETA audio was pretty dire and Beta slightly worse because the liear tape speed was slower than VHS, even the slower even than cassette IIRC but 'tis SO long ago! Audio was further disadvantaged because video tape is not 'grain oriented' along the tape as is audio tape.

The VHS/BETA battle was interesting for me as my works retail outlet kept a double inventry of films and we had both machines out for rental and sales. Beta WAS better videowise because the big, heavy Sony machines were very well made. Vhs was a bit cheaper to make but when some really poor Beta machines came out VHS one out. Plus, THE biggets telly rentals firm Radio Rentals plumped for VHS and that pretty much killed off Beta. The Philips 2000 'flip over challenge lasted barely two years but was an excellent system. I still have a stereo power amp that uses one of the chunky power traffs!

Dave.
 
To think that a Hi FI VCR is the same as a 1/2 track reel to reel is nonsense. Now I worked for Tascam and run my own repair company to repair these but then I have worked for a Sony Authorized service company as well as both Sony service facility near Chicago plus I was a Engineer for VCA Teletronix where we kept 1500 machines going of the VHS type.
The initial specs of VHS Hi Fi seem good until you start finding out about the switching noise that can enter in as well as interchange and the lack of parts for these helical scan formats. It is no reason a well mainteined 1/2 track deck can beat out a Hi Fi VCR with all of the complications and complexities involved in the FM recording on video tape. One item that many people forget about a format is where are you going to get this thing fixed and will there be parts support for it- what if you get all your masters locked up in a format that has no more machines to play it like DAT. 1/2 track reels have been around 60 years and will probably be around the next 20 if the format survives. The Ballfinger and some other company are making 1/2 track reel decks. Who is making any parts for VHS decks now- no one. Same condition as Akai heads none available.
 
skywaveTDR said:
To think that a Hi FI VCR is the same as a 1/2 track reel to reel is nonsense. Now I worked for Tascam and run my own repair company to repair these but then I have worked for a Sony Authorized service company as well as both Sony service facility near Chicago plus I was a Engineer for VCA Teletronix where we kept 1500 machines going of the VHS type.
The initial specs of VHS Hi Fi seem good until you start finding out about the switching noise that can enter in as well as interchange and the lack of parts for these helical scan formats. It is no reason a well mainteined 1/2 track deck can beat out a Hi Fi VCR with all of the complications and complexities involved in the FM recording on video tape. One item that many people forget about a format is where are you going to get this thing fixed and will there be parts support for it- what if you get all your masters locked up in a format that has no more machines to play it like DAT. 1/2 track reels have been around 60 years and will probably be around the next 20 if the format survives. The Ballfinger and some other company are making 1/2 track reel decks. Who is making any parts for VHS decks now- no one. Same condition as Akai heads none available.
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I totally agree Sky but I was talking of my experience of hi fi VHS when they were current. The noise levels were way below our 15ips 4 track Teac. Son could bounce a mix to VHS and back to tape with no obvious loss. Be interesting to specc' one against 16 bit .wav?

The repair issue is an important one. I have a very nice but faulty Sony cassette deck but I know of no one locally who can fix it. I am no longer up to such tasks.

Dave.
 
My recent working reel to reel actually had it's first brand new reel of tape on it today - my God it's expensive - inc shipping £50! So I took a 48K 24 bit audio file and recorded it to tape. The orginal has visual content at 18K and so does the recording, and no noise I can detect - BUT - and this goes against everything I've always maintained, there is 'something' about the sound. Not better, not worse, but just different in a nice way. Not nice wenought for me to abandon digital, but I think in a blind test I could identify totally digital agains the analogue recording. My memory of hifi recorders of both beta and VHS is that they were worthy of the word hifi, compared with dedicated audio recorder of the time. Sort of neutral and good. Dave - I worked for a very similar firm at the same period as you I think - Hughes based in Norfolk and Suffolk and my opinion (being able to take any of the stock home) was that I liked betamax better - Sony 8000 and the SL:-C7 in particular. Sky mentioned ½" - I bought some second hand tape on ebay for the 10.5" spools - one arrived today described as 10.5" ampex recording tape. It is - but NOT ¼" - I got a spool of half inch! Plonker!
 
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Interesting topic..So funny, I went Beta back in the 80's rather than VHS starting out and believed that not only the video but the audio was just as good..guess that is totally not the case. I bought a 10" Teac reel to reel in the 70's and recorded some musical ideas on it..long since sold the machine but kept the reel with the recordings on it. I picked up a smaller reel to reel from a customer of mine about 25 years ago. He also gave me several reels of tape..I have never once ran the dang thing. Always thought it'd be fun to transfer the recording from the old Teac into digital..This thread kind of inspires me to give it a try..we'll see
 
rob aylestone said:
I worked for a very similar firm at the same period as you I think - Hughes based in Norfolk and Suffolk
Click to expand...

I'm fairly sure that's where my Philips N4515 reel to reel came from back in 1979. They were the only people who had one in stock in the whole country it seemed. Probably the best performing reel to reel at 1 7/8ips that I've ever encountered.

Going back to the original subject - I bought myself a Philips VHS hifi machine in the late 80s and took it into work to do some measurements (they were interested in finding something to record sonar signals). I seem to remember that it had around 90dB signal to noise ratio with a frequency response 3dB down at something like 40kHz with still detectable output at 90kHz. I used it to back up master tapes at the studio and also for recording party tapes where I could just hit play at the start of the evening and the tape would run right until the early hours of the morning.
 
TAE said:
Interesting topic..So funny, I went Beta back in the 80's rather than VHS starting out and believed that not only the video but the audio was just as good..guess that is totally not the case. I bought a 10" Teac reel to reel in the 70's and recorded some musical ideas on it..long since sold the machine but kept the reel with the recordings on it. I picked up a smaller reel to reel from a customer of mine about 25 years ago. He also gave me several reels of tape..I have never once ran the dang thing. Always thought it'd be fun to transfer the recording from the old Teac into digital..This thread kind of inspires me to give it a try..we'll see
Click to expand...
I've been doing exactly that, see the thread about It Lives - Sony TC650. However the tapes that I'm digitizing are from my dad's recordings from 1954-1963. I've already digitized the VHS transfers he did of the 8mm film he took, as well as all of my family's Hi8 videos. I've also scanned in couple of hundred photos going back to the 1930s and 40s. It takes a lot of time, but its something to do when it starts snowing and the temps are in the 20s and teens (something you probaby don't have to worry about in sunny CAL).
 
rob aylestone said:
I watched the youtube video and I was a bit shocked really. OK, it's easy to misunderstand old technology when you're young, but you sort of missed a few vital things. Helical scan had incredible bandwidth from a slow moving tape, exactly because those tracks are slanted across it, and the head rotation means the heads are folllowing that track and really, really fast speed - enough to record signals not measured in KHz but MHz. I was present when the first VHS and Beta machines hit the public and Video Home System was absolutely the marketing. The engineers all talked about helical scan of course, but nobody added 'vertical' to it to make a new acronym. We never even thought about that one. For what it is worth, AM and FM forms of audio recording and transmission both have strong points, but FM is relatively immune to the actual level through the air as radio/TV and via tape. Thin spots in the media layer on the tape reduce he level, but as the information is recovered by changes in frequency, not amplitude - it's better. As Dave points out limiters and AGC are not something audio enthusiasts want turned on, with no off switch.

I had to stop your video as soon as I saw the crazy over levels on the RTR and then your suggestion that you push it further onto the hifi VHS recorder. That, plus the simple awful choice of music with deliberate distortion due to the genre - totally wipes out any point in the test? Recording is always about hum, noise and distortion - and minimising it. Sure, we'd push levels sometimes for specific purposes, but never to generate distortion, often it just moved the recording to the non-linear portions of the bias S curve, and for some music this compressed/expanded the audio. The minute it flat-topped a waveform, we'd gone too far. I was totally with your points until you went to crazy mode and what was the point after that? Is it distorted? yes? What caused it? No idea - too out of control to even guess - recodr or replay amps in the MT, the very cheap front end of the hifi machine? Or maybe some of the distortion was processing, effects style on the recording. If you have distortion on the original, how do you assess the end product? A sine wave can be looked at and distortion even measured. Sawtooth and Square waves generate harmonics anyway, so how do you tell?

You have lots of nice older gear - but you're using it way differently to how it was really intended. Some of those MT tracks must be really hard to record over - don't you waste lots of tape?

History is important. You mentioned the longitudinal tracks being dreadful, but they weren't. Many buyers of hifi machines never ever even heard the hifi tracks because they had old tapes with no hifi audio, so they switched them to analogue and never switched them back. 10K or even a bit less on TV speakers sounded OK. Probably better than the distorted hard track you selected to demonstrate how good it was? I'm not complaining about the recording or the genre or the band - but for demonstrating 'quality' it failed miserably. Sorry - but if you want to let people hear how good something actually is - which VHS/Beta hifi machines were - the play something where they can turn the volume up and listen for the subtle differences. PS you missed the big annoyances of VHS longitudinal tracks, mono and stereo. Wow and flutter - listening to piano was pretty warbly, and the dynamic range quite limited and of course AGC'd and limited - so pretty squashed. The hifi track really came into play on music videos. You weren't around then, so you can only guess what people actually wanted - but old and new hifi folk don't want noise, hums and buzzes and absolutely no distortion.
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Is this truly the attitude you choose to portray yourself with online? Clearly you missed some key themes in the video if this is your take away. The purpose of the video is stated a few times. My intention was never to do a scientific test. The objective was to inspire someone to brush the dust off of the VCR that they have tucked away in the attic that they haven't touched in 20 years. The tape I used in the video were dated 1985 for godsakes, I was recording over Jackie Kennedy making a speech live on television! Of course this isn't a true test to measure the subtle differences in distortion! The intent was to have fun and experiment. I am a mechanical engineer by trade, I have the ability to go deep into the technical details for video. But who would watch such a video? I have just the basics explained and the video is already longer than 20 minutes! An in depth discussion would easily double that. The average viewer is not going to care enough to watch an hour long video where I have an oscilloscope hooked up to the VCR and print some test tones to the tape. That's not the demographic I am aiming for. Keep in mind these videos also take a long time to make. It would be a full time job to make "quality" content. Do you see where I am coming from?

And no I am not seriously considering a VCR is anything compared to a Reel to Reel. It's a tongue in cheek title for a forum post to get some dialogue rolling. It only takes a small sense of humor to realize it was in jest, especially since I implied I don't consider it (or a cassette) one either.

And I don't know what you mean by MT tracks being hard to record over. I use fresh tape, SM911. I wouldn't consider recording songs as wasting tape. Furthermore, you may say I am pushing to crazy levels on my Multi track. You are correct, however the final result on every track should be based on ears and not visuals (That B Roll Footage wasn't even for that song regardless). You may think deliberate distortion in this manner is heresy but to each his own. Some genres require elevated levels. This is akin to my old classmates that wouldn't jam rock and roll with us because they would only play jazz as it was "superior". Me and my friends like the sound we get in my recordings and at the end of the day that's all that matters to us.

It's interesting that I usually get a divergent response to my videos depending on the platform: YouTube or forums. The response on Youtube is almost always positive, but on forums it's usually negative. From an objective standpoint I think this is due to age differences in the demographics for each platform. Older folks tend to be a tad uptight. These situations remind me a lot of when I was a young lad learning to play drums around town. A lot of the jam spots/clubs were primarily middled aged people. I found myself being discouraged a lot by some of the members in that age group. Wasn't sure why, I am a very friendly person and I can hold my own behind a kit so it always seem unwarranted. The "No, you're doing this wrong" attitude would have stopped many pioneers of any industry or art.

There are different ways to criticize someone and I think this mindset is the wrong approach. Back in the days before the internet, music was shared locally and people usually had the tack to be cordial in person. Anyway I said my piece, I don't think you'll see me posting anytime soon around here.

Cheers,
Mario
 
I can see Rob's point about the content not really doing the whole premise justice. You're presenting it as an alternative for high quality mastering, but the track you used is so distorted that I couldn't tell if was mastered on a cheap portable 1960s era cassette deck. You wouldn't demonstrate 1080P vs 4K vs 8K video by trying to duplicate a VHS tape recorded at EP speed! In audio terms, that's exactly what you did. Use a quality source, with clarity and full frequency spectrum and maybe the comparisons would have some validity.

My only other comment is that it's 30 years too late. Digital recording was in it's infancy then, so having something that was capable of better quality than many consumer tape machines for cheap (VCR tapes were about $1.50 to $3 a pop) would have been great.

That's not the case today. I would never consider using VHS HiFi as a backup or mastering medium today. There's too much danger of losing the work. I can back up all my work on a couple of portable hard drives and the cloud. The quality won't change, and you don't have the issue that I ran into when I tried to digitize old VHS recordings and the machines didn't work anymore. I went through 3 recorders I owned before I found one that worked. My old Hi-8 Sony camera is toast, the newer one, which doesn't have the same quality worked, so I was at least able to retrieve the recordings.

It was also not apparent that your video was done tongue in cheek, or in jest. Maybe I missed something, since it was pretty long, and I skipped some of your "technical" parts. The problem with videos like this is that some people will take it as gospel, like you're an expert on audio matters and that could cause people to invest money thinking it's a real, valid path to use.

BTW, If anyone wants some free VHS tapes, I've got a few hundred that my dad made. They have TV shows from the 90s and early 2000s. Just pay for the shipping (those buggers are HEAVY when you have a box of about 50).
 
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It is interesting. I’ve read that apparently the SNR and dynamic range are better than R2R?? Also, the frequency response more accurately resembles the original signal??

That said, I’ve read that using VHS is not without its problems that R2R already had a solution for.
 
CrowsofFritz said:
It is interesting. I’ve read that apparently the SNR and dynamic range are better than R2R?? Also, the frequency response more accurately resembles the original signal??

That said, I’ve read that using VHS is not without its problems that R2R already had a solution for.
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SNR DR, frequency response and perhaps most important of all for some people, zero wow and flutter. I can headbang to Quo with the best of them but my main musical listening is to 'classical' music and Bach piano especially. This music demands the very best speed stability. The recording engineers of years ago were not trying to get a 'big' punchy sound, they were more concerned with reproducing as well as the then technology allowed, a faithful version of the music in the studio or hall. My reading back then was Studio Sound and AES journals and most recording studios moved to digital recording for classical stuff as soon as they practically could.

The coming of R&R and the 'Volume Wars' changed that for the mass market but I did not want my BWV 1001 peaking to 3%+THD thank you very much.

Cannot play that Spotify link.

Dave.
 
Well, first thing is to understand forums really are quite different to YouTube, and you already know this. No I’ll intent was made, but the three forums you posted the same copy on are inhabited by people who range from recording novices to people who already have opinions. You said you did tests and I found the video even though you tried hard to appeal to everyone, which I totally understand, lost it when the test didn’t test anything at all. How could we tell if it was a good medium or not? All the usual test conditions fail when the very thing you want to listen for are all masked. The things that you need to hear you can’t. Nothing wrong with the music or the recording, but it’s a genre full of distortion and no silence. Could we hear the hiss? Could we hear the quality of a voice? A no effects bass guitar, or the decay of a cymbal? Nop. So what did the video actually demonstrate?

what i meant about the multitrack was that they were very expensive to run because tape costs such a lot, and over recording levels meant erasure to reuse tape was sometimes impossible if a kick or bass guitar had been pushed over the usual limits. I remember having to always use the same channel for bass guitar because if I tried to record something else on that track, the imprint would still be there.

I absolutely was not criticising you, but just saying I thought your choice of music killed it. The whole purpose of your posts on forums was to attract viewer to the video, but you didn’t do what you sort of said you would. If I was going to consider mastering to hifi video recorders, which I tried and discarded when they first appeared, this video would not convince me. All the benefits are totally obscured by the content. Demonstrating a medium that has low noise, low distortion and high dynamic range with music that hides it is silly - in my old fashioned, non trendy viewpoint. I’m also very aware how long videos take to produce and extremely aware of how you never get upset by the comments. I’ve had some really interesting ones, some, with my dodgy back, exteremely difficult to imagine doing without severe pain. They’re just examples of how you sometimes miss why people are watching.

EDIT I can play the Spotify link and the recordings are very clean and would have showed the hifi machine off quite well.
 
Yes Rob. There is invariably a similar problem when noobs post (after MUCH cajoling as a rule!) a clip purporting to demonstrate a noise problem. We usually get either 20 seconds of guitar with no gaps or "Mary had...." again with no parts where the poster has STFUp!

Dave.
 
Made a demo tape for my band back in '92 on my Fostex X-26. We did our mixdown on VHS tape and used as a master to bounce back on cassettes to hand out to local clubs and bars for some work. I was surprised at how good it turned out. We were only doing covers so it didn't need to be perfect for what we were doing.
 
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