[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.

[actionfromafar]

I am not thinking digitally.

VHS stores the video as it was broadcast.

But how the audio is stored, has nothing to do with that.

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

There were different ways to transmit audio over the air waves, but it was done on a different frequency from the video. There were even schemes to broadcast the audio on regular FM stereo as. Some VCRs had a separate audio in so you could use a separate audio source for instance for dubbing. (But you had to record video at the same time, because of the head switching. So no going back and edit only the audio or only the video, with VHS.)

The audio on VHS was originally stored just like on audio cassette tapes, quoth the VHS wikipedia:

"audio was recorded as baseband in a single linear track, at the upper edge of the tape, similar to how an audio compact cassette operates."

HiFi quote from the same article:

"Hi-Fi audio is thus dependent on a much more exact alignment of the head switching point than is required for non-HiFi VHS machines. Misalignments may lead to imperfect joining of the signal, resulting in low-pitched buzzing"

The audio is not stored at the end or beginning of anything, it's continuous.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IF_rTTptah0

The HiFi audio is recorded "deeper" in the tape, then they video is laid down on top of that.

[laumars]

You're literally now just saying the same thing I was! It was a different frequency on the same signal. I never said it was chopped between frames! That's some weird conclusion you came to all by yourself. Hence why I said you're thinking digitally rather than of an analogue signal. Or at least not realising a broadcast transmission is broadband rather than narrowband.