Hi Fi Vhs for Audio,

Several years ago, I picked up my first Betamax machine, a SLO-323 top-loading industrial VTR, at the MIT Swapfest for $10. It was one of the first stereo-capable Beta VCRs, AFAIK, though it predated Beta Hi-Fi, using linear stereo instead. For the sheer hell of it, I decided to try recording audio with it. Bought a blank L750 tape at Radio Shack, hooked the SLO-323 to the tape outs of my stereo, and tried recording audio to it from a Rush LP.

To my dismay, the resulting recording yielded no sound. Someone suggested to me that the unit might require video sync in order to record, so I hooked the video output of (ironically) a Panasonic VHS camcorder to the SLO-323's video input, tried recording again, and was rewarded with a decent-sounding recording of 2112! :banana: Before long, I decided that the setup was too cumbersome, and discontinued the experiment, though I still have the SLO-323 (plus a few other Betamax VCRs, including the famed SL-HF900 mentioned above). Here's a picture of the SLO-323:
slo323_1.jpg
 
I always tried to record everything on to my HiFi VHS machine - it was awesome for sound quality and it was easier to use for extended listening than flipping vinyl every 20 mins. I have to say I have the Talking Heads movie Stop Making Sense on HiFiVHS and I haven't seen that sound quality anywhere else. I have the CD version, album version, and have watched the HD version on Youtube and the HiFi VHS version beats them all.

A
 
Early Hi-Fi VHS machines all had a selector switch, for audio-only recording. Later models used automatic switchover to internal reference if they couldn't detect video, but in both cases if no video signal was present, the machine could use the same quartz crystal internal reference for recording as it uses for playback. All video recorders have an internal quartz timing reference for playback purposes.
Deriving synch from 60Hz.. no... even in America the vertical field rate isn't 60Hz, and hasn't been since colour broadcasts. Its 59.94Hz
no no yo missed what I was saying, the fixed synch was DERIVED from the 60hz input line, which is why there was a SHARP delineation between equipment using 60hz NTSC and 50HZ PAL. very very few decks with (expensive at the time) circuitry could be dual voltage/hz (meaning evne if you had an NTSC deck using an NTSC tape in a PAL location with a proper step down, the timing signal was just flat out wrong)

It was later that a derivation from the color burst was used and I admit, I do not remember the math, it has been after all 20 years, but suffice to say the problem with 'never the same color' (NTSC - get it) was that its exact value shifts and the servo controls on the physical motors that drive the damn thing were not fast enuf to keep up, hence we got that distinct warbling in audio and frame chatter in video. (but at the same time the decks would run on different Hz power systems assuming proper voltage was supplied)

even earlier decks, whose audio track was dual continuous strips and not the striping (very important distinction here!) were not affected by this but the reality was, the audio is not better, and in fact oft worse than what could be put on a cassette, especially at SLP speeds.

FWIW, I had owned both types of decks in the past when I was sorta into 'AV' and the search for linear audio tapes got harder and harder, but no worries, dvd came out...
 

I'm a long time live music recordist; in two channel stereo.
Around 1983 these rigs started showing up at Grateful Dead concerts. I had a friend who was an early adopter of the technology.
We required all battery operation. It literally took car batteries to run these things, and we had to get them "up front" to where we were recording.
They also required portable microphone preamplifiers/48volt phantom power packs in order to power the mics.

I would take the masters, and run them onto my own HFi VHS copy, as I could not afford this rig, nor, the early portable DAT decks of the day.
We had a friend who went to Japan, and he bought a quantity of early Sony TCD-D10 DAT, as gray market decks when they were released, complete with all Japanese owners manuals. These decks made life so much easier to master, and, extract the recordings.
At this same time, the time of the earliest portable DAT's, the AC-powered / home units were still extremely expensive. In order to stay purely digital required two DAT decks, in order to clone the meters off to the downstream copies. I had a single DAT deck to do my transfers, but no second deck for dig-transfers.
Once again, I opted for DAT/digital->VHS-HiFi analog copies of all of our recordings.
It wasn't until the onset of the CD-R Audio master recorders that I was able to finally listen to the DAT versions in any form of digital sourcing.
When Tascam released the CDRW-700 meter CD-R burner, I gathered all of our masters, and, did proper D-D transfers of the masters.
I've spent a huge amount of time transferring the masters to different formats over the years. I've done a huge amount of the VHS thing long before I could afford digital.
 
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Only have two myself, a JVC HR-D750U and a Mitsubishi HS-U71.

Will eventually make some audio only recordings.
 
Another format that I don't think has been mentioned is the Sony Hi8 PCM multi audio recording, which works pretty good. The EV-S800 will do 6 parallel tracks of stereo in LP mode (4hrs) mode equals 24 hours of music on one tape. You can only play one stereo track at time.
 
no no yo missed what I was saying, the fixed synch was DERIVED from the 60hz input line, which is why there was a SHARP delineation between equipment using 60hz NTSC and 50HZ PAL. very very few decks with (expensive at the time) circuitry could be dual voltage/hz (meaning evne if you had an NTSC deck using an NTSC tape in a PAL location with a proper step down, the timing signal was just flat out wrong)

It was later that a derivation from the color burst was used and I admit, I do not remember the math, it has been after all 20 years, but suffice to say the problem with 'never the same color' (NTSC - get it) was that its exact value shifts and the servo controls on the physical motors that drive the damn thing were not fast enuf to keep up, hence we got that distinct warbling in audio and frame chatter in video. (but at the same time the decks would run on different Hz power systems assuming proper voltage was supplied)

even earlier decks, whose audio track was dual continuous strips and not the striping (very important distinction here!) were not affected by this but the reality was, the audio is not better, and in fact oft worse than what could be put on a cassette, especially at SLP speeds.

FWIW, I had owned both types of decks in the past when I was sorta into 'AV' and the search for linear audio tapes got harder and harder, but no worries, dvd came out...

I got that's what you were saying, and I disagree. I think you are flat out wrong, and have a wrong understanding of how domestic video cassette recorders work. The just do not use the AC mains as a timing reference, and there are so many technical reasons why.
 
I got that's what you were saying, and I disagree. I think you are flat out wrong, and have a wrong understanding of how domestic video cassette recorders work. The just do not use the AC mains as a timing reference, and there are so many technical reasons why.
There is always a possibility that I am, in fact, the book of Revelations says that when I am wrong, the earth will be destroyed...and lets be honest, most of the technical detail of the machines is long gone and/or never made it to the web - dark or otherwise. however, we cannot ignore something

Each of the diagonal-angled tracks is a complete TV picture field, lasting 1/60th of a second (1/50th on PAL) on the display. One tape head records an entire picture field. The adjacent track, recorded by the second tape head, is another 1/60th or 1/50th of a second TV picture field, and so on. Thus one complete head rotation records an entire NTSC or PAL frame of two fields.

where or where, or rather, how oh how did they get that extremely coincidental 60 or 50hz time delineation?
 
Sure... heard of it and actually it was a great medium to store excellent audio to be cherished for years.... however.. :dunno:

Storage... !? It takes a lot of space to take one VHS cartridge, record, label, store and provide an environmental friendly environment. Also, what about multiple play?., not too many of those machines? So.. I think the idea was good but in the end impractical particularly when other smaller and more manageable recording media evolved onto the "music scene".

Recently, and in a conversation with a friend.. (of my age group). I mentioned to him I had a usable VCR HIFI component operational in my home theater system... he just laughed :idea:
 
where or where, or rather, how oh how did they get that extremely coincidental 60 or 50hz time delineation?
Because the video frequency needs to be matched (or extremely close to) the power line frequency, or else you'll get visible flicker on camera, especially under fluorescent lighting.

And in the very early days of black & white TV, it was actually synched to the power line. But as already mentioned, when color was introduced in the 1950s, the NTSC frequency was changed from 60 Hz to 59.94 Hz to prevent the color subcarrier with interfering with the sound carrier, so by then video equipment definitely had to provide its own time reference rather than using the power line frequency.
 
mebbe this helps, a lot of tech detail I have not found yet, as in the limitations of frequency dividing/multiplying, but the error between the NTSC colorburst and the power line signal was within the error margin of the TV.

AS I said before, sometime in the 90's when the de-referencing occured, the 3 things that must happen, were no longer in perfect synch and as such the tapes and audio warbled (by this time the audio was stereo on the linear tracks and also encoded as FM on the hifi tracks)

1) the control track containing the frame timing must be read in
2) the drive motor must provide the proper rotational speed to have the control track reading at the right time base
3) the rotating head must not only be sycnhed to the frame rate but also must be aligned to the tape, reading a 60hz frame between the frames' actual encoding is not advantageous

NTSC color encoding is used with the System M television signal, which consists of 30⁄1.001 (approximately 29.97) interlaced frames of video per second. Each frame is composed of two fields, each consisting of 262.5 scan lines, for a total of 525 scan lines. 483 scan lines make up the visible raster. The remainder (the vertical blanking interval) allow for vertical synchronization and retrace. This blanking interval was originally designed to simply blank the receiver's CRT to allow for the simple analog circuits and slow vertical retrace of early TV receivers. However, some of these lines may now contain other data such as closed captioning and vertical interval timecode (VITC). In the complete raster (disregarding half lines due to interlacing) the even-numbered scan lines (every other line that would be even if counted in the video signal, e.g. {2, 4, 6, ..., 524}) are drawn in the first field, and the odd-numbered (every other line that would be odd if counted in the video signal, e.g. {1, 3, 5, ..., 525}) are drawn in the second field, to yield a flicker-free image at the field refresh frequency of 60⁄1.001 Hz (approximately 59.94 Hz). For comparison, 576i systems such as PAL-B/G and SECAM use 625 lines (576 visible), and so have a higher vertical resolution, but a lower temporal resolution of 25 frames or 50 fields per second.

The NTSC field refresh frequency in the black-and-white system originally exactly matched the nominal 60 Hz frequency of alternating current power used in the United States. Matching the field refresh rate to the power source avoided intermodulation (also called beating), which produces rolling bars on the screen. Synchronization of the refresh rate to the power incidentally helped kinescope cameras record early live television broadcasts, as it was very simple to synchronize a film camera to capture one frame of video on each film frame by using the alternating current frequency to set the speed of the synchronous AC motor-drive camera. When color was added to the system, the refresh frequency was shifted slightly downward by 0.1% to approximately 59.94 Hz to eliminate stationary dot patterns in the difference frequency between the sound and color carriers, as explained below in "Color encoding". By the time the frame rate changed to accommodate color, it was nearly as easy to trigger the camera shutter from the video signal itself.

The actual figure of 525 lines was chosen as a consequence of the limitations of the vacuum-tube-based technologies of the day. In early TV systems, a master voltage-controlled oscillator was run at twice the horizontal line frequency, and this frequency was divided down by the number of lines used (in this case 525) to give the field frequency (60 Hz in this case). This frequency was then compared with the 60 Hz power-line frequency and any discrepancy corrected by adjusting the frequency of the master oscillator. For interlaced scanning, an odd number of lines per frame was required in order to make the vertical retrace distance identical for the odd and even fields, which meant the master oscillator frequency had to be divided down by an odd number. At the time, the only practical method of frequency division was the use of a chain of vacuum tube multivibrators, the overall division ratio being the mathematical product of the division ratios of the chain. Since all the factors of an odd number also have to be odd numbers, it follows that all the dividers in the chain also had to divide by odd numbers, and these had to be relatively small due to the problems of thermal drift with vacuum tube devices. The closest practical sequence to 500 that meets these criteria was 3×5×5×7=525. (For the same reason, 625-line PAL-B/G and SECAM uses 5×5×5×5, the old British 405-line system used 3×3×3×3×5, the French 819-line system used 3×3×7×13 etc.)
 
AS I said before, sometime in the 90's when the de-referencing occured, the 3 things that must happen, were no longer in perfect synch and as such the tapes and audio warbled
I don't doubt you experienced that problem, but you are mistaken about its cause. VCRs have never had any part of their video signal timing referenced directly to the power line frequency. That's why time base correctors were a necessity in a TV studio, because every video camera and videotape machine had a slightly different video signal frequency and if you tried to switch or fade between them without a TBC, the picture would break up and roll. (Nor does the TBC derive its timing from the power line, either. The ones in my Amiga Video Toaster system run on 5 and 12 volts DC, so that is impossible.)

This site has some troubleshooting for the problem of warbling audio on VHS VCRs:

Excessive flutter on VHS linear (non-HiFi) audio playback

Fluttering or noisy HiFi audio
 
ironically enough, i have gone thru 150 vhs tapes transferring them to dvd(yes, i know that is dead also). now i have about 20 vhs tapes that include music my friends and i recorded from my 3340 many moons ago. these are going to be transferred to a hard drive tho. then off to goodwill to see if anyone cares.

play music!
 
and lets be honest, most of the technical detail of the machines is long gone and/or never made it to the web

The technical details of video recorders and VHS are all very well known, they are not some archaic mystery lost to science. The web is not the exclusive source or repository of all engineering knowledge. Nor is as large portion of so called knowledge on the www accurate, which is why universities will not accept web sources as credible citations.
 
The technical details of video recorders and VHS are all very well known, they are not some archaic mystery lost to science. The web is not the exclusive source or repository of all engineering knowledge. Nor is as large portion of so called knowledge on the www accurate, which is why universities will not accept web sources as credible citations.
ok thats fine, but of the 100's of thousands of models ever made, only a few hundred have service manuals that I have found and most of the usenet stuff is long gone or buried somewhere. things, have changed
 
Wait. What!!!! VHS and Beta are dead??? Next thing you know they will say 8track is no longer standard in new automobiles.

I remember playing around with hifi beta and stereo recording in the early 90’s. Sound quality was fine but the media was not all too convenient. Kind of like R2R. What was the point? Record my lps or cds to tape and then listen to the tape? Why not listen to the original Lp or cd? “Original
Source”. Yeah recording friends lps or cds saved money, but I prefers to own the original.
 
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