[laumars]

> I think we all forget though just how poor the quality was back then

I don’t think anyone has forgotten how crappy VHS was/is.

At least with vinyl, the sound quality was good even if the medium was bulky. But VHS just sucked in every way imaginable. Even in the 80s I hated VHS. It was the best we had but it always felt like a game of chance whether your recordings worked. I don’t miss a single thing about recording and playing video back then.

> The only problem has been keeping up with resolution changes

A lot of the time content is just upscaled rather than remastered anyway. Particularly with TV shows but plenty of “HD” movies were just upscaled from DVDs rather than remastered from the original film rolls.

[jacobsievers]

I don't know, VHS Hi-Fi wasn't bad. It had a frequency response of 20Hz to 20kHz and signal-to-noise ratio about 70 dB.

[laumars]

Maybe. That wasn’t used by regular VHS rigs though was it (ie PAL or NTSC recordings)?

I just remember VHS audio sounding muffled after the tape had been used a few times.

To be fair, recording stuff from RF wouldn’t have helped much either.

[actionfromafar]

VHS has a mono track and a stereo track. Some copies have only the mono track, some setups use only the mono track, ever. My Harry Potter 2 copy has a garbled stereo track, so I manually switch to mono when watching that.

[laumars]

From why I understand of VHS (and I could be wrong here since I’ve not written software to read VHS tapes) is that they don’t have a separate audio track. They just encode NTSC or PAL signals as it would be broadcast over the airwaves. That means audio will be encoded in the signal after the video frame. It also means Teletext is also recorded too (which has been useful for Teletext achievers / historians).

Stereo audio, like colour video, was an advancement that came after broadcasting had already been standardised. Which means they had to find room in the signal to squeeze that additional information in (this is why TV sets that aren’t sync with the broadcasting feed go black and white). Stereo was a relatively recent addition, maybe late 80s or early 90s (I remember really clearly when the technology was turned on but can’t recall how old I was) so it wouldn’t surprise me if stereo audio was subject to the same syncing issues as colour video.

VHS HiFi seems to be a different format entirely but which also used the same storage media (like how CDs have a few different storage formats supported by the same hardware optical discs)

[actionfromafar]

Eh, no. Think about it. If the audio was encoded in the video signal, it would need to be buffered. (Such systems existed, but not in VHS.) Audio in VHS is a continuous analog thing.

But no need to speculate:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHS

[laumars]

You’re thinking digitally. PAL and NTSC are analogue formats. In fact that link you cited even says that’s VHS stores the PAL or NTSC signal verbatim and what I described is exactly how PAL and NTSC store audio.

To quote:

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

Edit: This a diagram here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTSC that illustrates how each transmissions frequency is divided up for different aspects of the broadcast.

[michaelcampbell]

I've known guys in the past that kept audio recordings on VHS, just for that reason.