Embracing VHS Hi-Fi as an audio medium only

[eea123]

This sounds right. Cassettes were like 55db no NR, 65 with Dobly B and maybe 70+ with Dolby C. Straight head VHS HiFi was at least 70db. You probably could add an outbound dBX box to boost that even further. The TEAC 2000XR 1/4" reel to reel with built in dBX claimed something like 90dB S/N.

I understood tape speed to be the big key to good recordings. Reel to reel at 15ips = the best. 7-1/2 and 3-3/4 ips degraded the sound. Weren't cassettes like 1-7/8ips and only 1/8" wide? If that holds, which I'm pretty sure it does, you'll want to use SP not EP for VHS HiFi recordings. Seemed like alignment issues were a drawback to using VHS HiFi and reel to reel units were well established with audiofiles. Neither format was moblie. And then, we enter the digital age with CD, DAT, CD-R, ...

[Barry777]

VHS Hi-Fi is fully capable of reproducing the full human hearing range, and then some. When you figure that the video heads spin at 1800 RPM, and the fact that the tape is in contact with roughly 75% of the head drum, that translates to some pretty heavy inches-per-second. As mentioned previously, Hi-Fi units are much more critical in terms of mechanical alignment to avoid dropouts, which can make interchangeability somewhat risky.

Another nice thing about VHS Hi-Fi is that it leaves the linear audio tracks free for other uses - time code, narration, audio cues, etc. One important point is that a video signal should be fed in also while recording, as this is your best timing reference. This will prevent any speed variations and keep the machine locked in better. Any video signal (even just black) will work fine.

[eea123]

Good to know on the video. The public radio station engineer I worked at in the late 80s was considering switching over to VHS HiFi from reel to reel for their recording of delayed broadcasts off the PBS sat feed. He mentioned that he was looking at some sort of outbound digital converter upstream of a standard VHS HiFi deck, I suppose the pseudo forerunner of the D-VHS medium sans the video?

Can't offer much more than that, I moved over to the student radio station after that semester and back to Ampex 15ips RTR. I played a little bit with recording on our home VHS HiFi in the early 90s, but the wife didn't appreciate the patch cables criss-crossing from the TV cabinet to the stereo and back again.

I've just dropped so far away from recording anything analog since the advent of computer CD burners. I have a Yamaha CDR-1000S in my rack that I've haven't made one CD on since I bought a computer CD burner in '03. CDR-Audio blanks will probably go way before I know it.

[Chad Hauris]

In the 90's I used VHS Hi-Fi to record radio programs for 6 hours at SLP and for the most part got great sound quality...the problem was that there was often drop-outs on the tape and the sound would change back to the really low quality linear audio too often. I eventually quit doing it because the drop-outs were too annoying. Maybe on the higher tape speed of SP it wouldn't be such a problem.