I was listening to my Phil Collins Concert I have on VHS again earlier :)

Oh my its goregous!! -- The original analogue concert audio is on the linear track and it sounds incredibly beautiful!!!

I cant believe they left the analogue soundtrack there... Probably figured no one would hear it anyway (Most VCRs are HIFI -- Im glad Mine isnt)

The HIFI track is digital trash of the concert which I dont wanna hear.....

Phil Collins has an excellent concert and all his 80s music is in glorious analogue!! (I havent ever heard most of those songs so nice)

For 1990 its amazing they left it there!! (The video is composite analogue so the analogue audio is there already but they could have taken it off and put the digi crap there (They probably figured no one listens to the linear track)

IT SOUNDS SO MUCH BETTER THAN DIGITAL TRASH!!!!!!

:lmao: VHS Hi-Fi IS ANALOG! VHS Hi-Fi is analog audio FM modulated then recorded and played back off the video head drum (which has better bandwidth, dynamic range and noise floor than the linear audio tracks).
Hell, VHS Hi-Fi is supposedly the BEST ANALOG recording format ever offered, with better linearity, frequency response, and noise floor than Reel Tape or CD.

VHS, and S-VHS tape are both 100% analog formats in the US...They don't have any digital audio or video tracks.
There's only 2 ways you can even convey digital audio over VHS in the US:
1.) PCM which is an audio only format... Basically PCM takes the digital audio signal and converts it to a "video" signal that looks like a black screen with white dashes that flicker on and off in turn with the digital data....PCM tapes in the NTSC region can't hold any video to accompany the PCM audio so there are no movies or concerts with video that have digital audio.
2.) If you convert a digital recording in the mastering/duplication studio to analog and record the analog audio to VHS...But its no longer digital at that point. Also unless a tape is dual language duplication facilities that made VHS tapes would dub the same tracks of the master onto BOTH the Hi-Fi AND THE LINEAR tracks!...So if the Hi-Fi analog tracks are a dub of some digital master tape then the linear tracks are too....So either way you're listening to an analog dub of a digital master tape... You're just choosing the lowest quality pair (the linear tracks) of the 4 channels of analog audio VHS carries.

You probably didn't understand half of what I said and won't learn anything from it given your track record.

But you come across as stupid as a some one who bought a 4 cylinder Ford Mustang instead of the V8 claiming their 4 cylinder Mustang is faster than a Tesla. Not only are you wrong but you're bragging about the worst version of what you like being better without knowing you have the worst version. You're as laughable as the emperor bragging about his new clothing that only idiots can't see.

My Impala SS is faster than the Tesla but it doesn't sound as good as Beta HiFi

But the HIFI track on the Phil Collins tape IS A DIGITALLY SOURCED recording.. (Like listening to a CD)


The linear track is the original composite analogue sourced recording and to me is beautiful..

The phrase "Composite analog sourced" is non-sensical. Composite is a term applicable to composite video, which carries no audio whatsoever.

Is this the tape you have?
https://www.discogs.com/release/9335...Live-In-Berlin

I can find no indication that the linear tracks and the Hi-Fi came from different sources.

Unless they specifically say something to the effect of 'digital audio on Hi-Fi track, analog audio on linear track' on the tape and or jacket, there's a 99.9% chance the same digital master recording was fed to both the linear audio track input and the Hi-Fi input of the industrial machine that made your tape...Some of those industrial machines that made mass-produced tape releases didn't even have provisions for recording different audio onto the linear tracks.

If the tape doesn't specifically say there's a difference between the sources for the linear and Hi-Fi tracks, then there almost certainly isn't.

@Dude111 --

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serious_Hits..._Live!

The LP, cassette, and CD album was a composite of different venues in the tour; while the VHS, Beta, and DVD were the Berlin venue only. There is no reason to assume that the master sources for the linear tracks and Hi-Fi tracks were any different.

Do you have documentation to the contrary?

Yep nothing like some wow & flutter, harmonic distortion, and a few occasional dropouts to enhance the sound!

Seriously cannot figure out where all the people who love ANY analog stuff including horrible low-speed high-noise high-W&F garbage come from. Digital has been a revelation, a great improvement across the board and an equalizer in that both rich and poor can now get the same great quality for peanuts. Before the digital age, good analog quality did cost a pretty penny, and good analog video quality was not accessible even to wealthy people unless they owned a personal TV studio.

In terms of audio, the best consumer analog media was sourced from digital sources, like DDD/Digalog audio cassettes, they were the best.

@Dude111 --

I repeat:

Do you have documentation to the contrary?

I am happy to be corrected if there is real evidence.

Of course, there is no different source for the two tracks. The linear track sounds mediocre, therefore it is "better" to the OP.

Yes! If it is lousy enough, it can even go from "analog" all the way to the nausea-inducing "analogooey" as the OP likes to use.

What if it ever is revealed that Phil Collins and his band and technicians used digital mixers in their shows for that tour? Will the OP then decide it is all garbage, and throw away the tape?

This "I love analog" (or worse, "analogooey") stuff gets really annoying after enough endless repeats.

I can see the appreciation for vinyl, but magnetic tape really was a lousy medium for video and audio.

Reel to reel could be excellent (so could cassette but you had to have a high quality player and a well mastered tape that wasn't abused), better than vinyl if regular playback was desired as it wouldn't wear nearly as much. For the analog era tape was about the best you could get for video... Especially if you wanted to record.

For an entirely analog, moderately-priced consumer format, Super VHS Hi-Fi can be pretty impressive relative to the limits of NTSC itself.

Back in the 80’s, JVC made a prosumer Svhs with TBC. (Time base correction generator). Supposed to be able to edit a tape from one deck to a second with virtually no loss. I remember reading somewhere that a few very low budget UHF stations were using them, versus the much more expensive Sony studio equipment. Seems like it started at $599. I still the one model under it that I paid $499 for.

I will counter this argument in that digital does not always mean "better" in terms of overall sound quality. During the 1980's digital revolution many of the recordings were sweetened and tailored to the medium giving them a very stark and edgy sound, just because the CD label said DDD that did not make it any better. Some labels were better at the digital mastering than others, Windham Hill and Telarc and DMP were a few of the early pioneers who set the bar that is still in place today.

I'm not going to argue that linear VHS stereo is anything better than dictation quality regardless of the recording, most decks after about 1985 thinned down the capstan flywheel throwing what little stability to the curb to save a few pennies. The early days of Betamax also had linear stereo and running in B-1 was roughly the same speed as a cassette tape.

AFM recordings be it VHS Betamax or BetacamSP are all analog mediums that are written along with the video content by the head drum, VHS uses depth multiplexing while Beta is mixed in between the chroma and luma carriers. Running at this recording rate the wow & flutter is on the bottom of the scale, dynamic range is in the mid 90 db's and it doesn't suffer from temporial aliasing when the upper end of the sampling rate is exceeded (22.050khz). There's no quantizitaion error or jitter with the AFM recording and the medium has been used for mastering.
I have both analog and digital recorders from the professional arenas and as a producer of training materials I prefer to stay with the digital side for the ease of NLE while my audio and video archival work is more analog oriented using BetacamSP as a capture medium.

What is considered "best" is really based on ones opinion and like comparing apples to apples it all comes down to prefrence, I like the juicy red ones.

Edgy sound and the loudness wars of the late 1990s early 2000s is not the problem of then new medium and encoding scheme. In fact, just because recording engineers could push digital much farther than analog says enough about new possibilities digital offered.
DDD were either as good or better. Cleaner. Editing became simpler. DDD audio cassettes were the best, of course Chrome tape with 120 µs EQ and Dolby helped.
I agree that 90 dB with flat 20-20K is more than enough, but Red Book is still better. Filters have been constantly improving and if you ask me, they could limit the frequency range at about 15K. Quantization errors of early ladder DACs have been eradicated by the early 1990s with the advent of delta-sigma DACs, and jitter was made a thing of the past with decoupling of mechanical CD transport from the DAC pipeline and by increasing the precision of the clock (jitter below -100 dB is a non-issue methinks).

Digital has three big things going for it:

• Ever increasing data storage capacity of digital media allows increasing bit rate, bit depth, sampling frequency. I don't care for hi-res audio but I can accept the usefulness of hi-res for mastering. But when the final product is done, Red Book is more than enough.
• The hardware and software constantly improves. Early ladder DACs struggled to resolve more than 13 bits. Granted, it was as good or better than LP, and Philips' proposal to use 14 bits made total sense. They had to use two or four DACs and then average between them. And then sigma-delta 1-bit DAC was developed, which singlehandedly improved DAC performance, and it was cheap, reliable and repeatable. No more laser trimming of resistors. Math has taken over (as if it has not played the major role in digital audio before). And math is constantly improving too. On contrary, analog audio and video cannot be pushed any further. Metal tape? Dolby C? Ok, but even a tiniest spec of dust on metal tape causes a pop or a spark, there is no error detection nor error recovery nor error masking.
• Analog audio and video suffers each time a copy is made. Digital does not. You can edit intra-frame digital video with straight cuts only - there is no re-compression, there is no degradation. With color under, after three generations it is barely usable. BetaSP - probably ten generations? IDK. With digital, you can have unlimited number of generations.

There are no redeeming qualities of analog video and audio. Its first generation can be almost as good as digital, but after that it is all downhill.

This is all just pointless. I’ll stick to my late ‘50’s tube amp stereo and enjoy my records on that. I bought a Sony PCM F-1 that pairs with a Betamax SL-2000. Still have but haven’t used for years. It was something pretty neat when it came out. Gone full circle back to a tube amp stereo playing my 60 year old records. Enough said.

I dont wanna make anyone mad buddy. Electronic M sounds like he is mad...

I listenend to the HIFI track on my GO VIDEO unit and it sounds thin and gross like its digital..... The Linear side sounds warmer and just goregous....

My ears can tell the difference and analogue sounds goregous http://www.videokarma.org/images/icons/icon7.gif

I can agree with the above :D

I'm not mad, just calling a preposterous statement....That still isn't backed up with any real evidence.

No just an opinion. I suppose the muffled cassette quality audio appeals to some giving it that "warm" tone quality they crave but it all comes down to ones opinion. Some decks may do better than others on the linear tracks but it's not something I'd use for prime broadcast.

Since this thread already discusses muffled sound... I have a question, two of them:

* is it possible to have Hi-Fi sound at LP and EP speeds? I don't see any technical restrictions for it, as it is recorded by heads on the drum.
* are there known commercial VHS releases at LP or EP speed with Hi-Fi audio? I have several pre-recorded tapes in LP and EP, but none of them says Hi-Fi.

Never seen a commercial release on LP or EP speeds due to incompatibility with some of the oldest decks but they might be out there.
No degrading of the FM HiFi at the lower speeds other than dropouts and tracking errors. I've used 8hr VHS HiFi for extended music runs before mp3s... dark days of Windows 3.11

VHS and S-VHS Hi-Fi both work fine at SP and EP speeds they're slightly more prone to noise and dropouts as is the video.

I have a release of Three Amigos that was put out in EP I forget if it was Hi-Fi or not (I'll have to dig it out now).

I've recorded tons of 8 hour and even 9 hour EP VHS and S-VHS Hi-Fi time shifts off of cable over the years.

I remember back around 2007 copying the A-Z weekend of a local FM station... Mostly on audio cassette, but when I needed to sleep I piped my stereo tuner audio and the video on my N64 into my Hi-Fi VCR and popped in an 8-Hour VHS tape. (Also used Reel to Reel for a ~4 hour waking stretch)
Of the 3 the VHS Hi-Fi sounded the best.

I used an 8hr tape as a pgm feed while doing an STL move, worked well enough for prime FM bcst.

VHS is for blind people...

https://www.lddb.com/laserdisc/24113...Live-in-Berlin

Ah man!!

Yea that would defiantly beat the VHS HiFI and linear tracks considering both were probably mastered from a Type-C or D2 format feeder depending on when the concert was actually captured.

VHS HiFi is analog, it is not digital. And is superior to linear audio tracks, especially when there's two channels crammed into the space of one. And some analog is better than others. Not all digital is junk. Not all analog is superior. Depends on a case by case basis.

100% correct! Digital, done right, sounds pretty transparent. If digital sounds bad, it's bad mastering or a bad recording. I suspect people who swear by analog like the distortion and maybe noise / hiss. These might be so low that you don't realize it's there. I suspect if you took an analog recording and digitized it to red book standards (not brickwalled), then played both back at the same time with matched levels, the person probably would not be able to tell the difference.

Yes but it is DIGITALLY SOURCED!!!!! (Like a DIGILOG cassette)

To ME it isnt as nice,I like the warmer analogue sounds on the linear side...... (Thats just me though)

It is not "warmer", it is just full of distortion of various kinds.

BTW, I have quite a few Digalog/DDD cassettes, and they sound great. I also have "Jesus Christ Superstar" made in mid-1970s without Dolby - full of hiss sounding as if it is played over phone line, and I mean analog phone line.

I dunno why so many have a hiss on thier 8tracks/cassettes.....

What do you have the vol ALL THE WAY UP??

None of mine have any hiss!

You still have not presented any evidence of your assertion beyond your own opinion after listening to it. Have you found any documentation on the tape stating there's digital processing on the Hi-Fi track?

It's hard to have faith in the hearing of someone who can't hear the tape hiss on an 8-track.

This quote just utterly "says it all"!

I may keep and use it for the rest of my life, every time I ever chat with an "analog lover" golden-ear-type person. :D

Honestly I don't think there was any technical difference between the linear and AFM HD audio feeds. I worked as a tape jockey at a dup house during the late 80's and everything was recorded using Panasonic 6810's on a common control. The only thing in the audio chain was a limiter/compressor feeding a Y-splitter on the RCA inputs. Consumer grade VHS was all about the profit regardless of the title.