This surprised me VHS

  • Thread starter Thread starter FrankD77
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The aim of all helical scan recorders was pretty much the same - to be able to record on a slow moving tape a signal with a frequency response as high as possible. Rich's explanation was a good one, simplifying a quite complex process. Instead of being an air traffic controller in the RAF (my intention after education) I somehow got a job selling the new fangled video recording gear. Sony U-Matic to businesses - like Shell, doing the installations and then training! Yes, we had to teach people how to put tapes in and press record! We had Philips domestic recorders being put into schools to record the schools programmes, and a tiny number of very rich domestic customers. To put it into perspective, a 1 hour cassette cost £20. I earned £22 a week, and the Philips recorders cost £620! The Sony's were over a grand for the playback only machine, the record button version more expensive. Frequency response set definition. The commercial machines could on some, replay NTSC 525 line tapes as well as our PAL 625 line system, but the recording system struggled to get much over 200 lines of resolution when measured. Reduced top end reduced the sharpness of the picture, and unlike audio, the noise in the signal didn't really impact that much. Newer versions of the commercial and domestic machines, gradually crept the resolution up as the specs morphed into new ones. The audio, however was terrible until the stereo FM system was introduced. Most end users had no idea at all. So many never even pressed the button and listened in low-fi mono for ever. Colour was sort of superimposed on the brightness info - this is what appeared to be the 'sharpness', and colour was plonked on top - controlled by a little burst in the waveform. If the entire waveform was a Volt, peak to peak, the little colour burst and sync pulse at the start of each frame/field was about 1/3 the level - enough to be recognised. When people copied the tapes, the resolution dropped, but these pulses also got mangled and you would lose the colour, or the lock, or both. Macrovision mangled it deliberately, just enough a recorder could still lock to, but copying the tape magnified the mangling. The secret was to run through a device that was designed to replace dodgy sync pulses and replace them with brand new nice ones - the early effects and vision mixers did this as part of the design, and defeated macrovision very well - inserting new syncs - just was the illegal copying industry needed. The commercial broadcast style VTRs often had more audio tracks - but audio was just sort of just good enough. The hifi machines were grabbed by audio folk because they just 'accidentally' did audio really well. Annoyingly many when they first came out had to have a valid video signal present. No video, no audio. Later ones detected the lack of video and recorded internally generated black.
 
Of course, when the first VCRs came out, audio quality wasn't a big issue. You were getting your sound from the 3x5 speaker on the side of the TV tube. The fact that you could record Star Trek and watch it any time you wanted was the important part!

It was rare that anyone ran sound through a proper audio system. Having full frequency response and high S/N was almost meaningless. As people figured out they could hook their VCR into the stereo systems, the audio became more important.
 
I tested the VHS to not F-up the sound completely but get a bit more "glue" in the sound. Still on the fence if i like "perfection" or "imperfection"
I have a bit of trouble with using terms like "glue". It's make me think everything has to be homogenized, which generally means compressed and restricted. Then the next comment is that it's more "open". For me, that's contrary to what I hear. Open, to me, means I can hear lots of dynamics. Loud things are loud, soft things are soft. Things aren't buried in noise, but quiet sounds sit on a bed of silence. It's not that compression is bad, it's just a question of why I'm using it. For me, dynamics in music is like depth of field in photography.

But they have become the buzzwords on internet forums, and get parroted ad infinitum. Open now means you can hear the quiet sections as easily as the loud sections. High dynamics are tamed.

RE: the recordings. I still hear distortion in the bass area, and I understand your comment about the swoosh of the cymbals. They sound distorted as well. Not knowing the specifics of the recording, I can't guess why they sound that way. I listened to both tracks again last night, and the drums overall sound distorted to me. Everything has a "grit" to it.

I wonder if you have the individual tracks. If you just play the drum track, does it sound clear? How about the bass track?

In any case, I don't hear the VHS as an improvement in this case. I would be looking at a different approach. It's not necessarily a damnation of the VHS HiFi process, but might be problems elsewhere. It might be as simple as proper levels.
 
Drumkit had a snare that was gritty
I'm still learning what to put where ;)
 
I think I am really competent to make comments on some things, but really useless on others. The meaning of words causes me so much grief. For years I could not hear compression until one day, I could - then I understood the words people talking about it used. Tape saturation was another - I was constantly listening for faults till I realised what I took to be perfectly normal sound on a reel to reel was actually saturation because I recorded hot.

My snag, since digital days started was that my music needs clean sound. No distortion from anything other than gizmos meant to wreak the purity. I was always hunting for distortion to find it and remove it. Anything waveform wise with sharp edges and flat tops was for me the enemy. I wanted NO hiss, no hum, no unwanted reverb, no rumbles, no distortion. Often a mistake leading to some tiny distortion mean a lengthy fix. When I could see the distortion flat top on a peak, I discovered I could manually draw it in and not hear the distortion - or the replacement samples I had drawn in. Over a long time I have got used to occasional tracks with compression, but have never used a limiter and never used any plug in to sort the end product out. I have got very modern in some areas and an absolute Luddite in others. My music would never survive being re-recorded too and from another machine for the 'processing'.

I always remember that Steely Dan lost track. They refused to ever do backups of tapes for sonic reasons and lost an entire song when it got wiped.
 
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