VHS sound better than digital?

[Paul Adsett]

Last night I played an old VHS film on my home theater set up and was immediately struck by the superb quality of the VHS HI FI stereo sound. I was not even thinking about sound quality when I started the film, but it really stood out in terms of smoothness of dialogue ( no sharp peaking that you get with digital) and the stereo music quality was so full and warm with wonderful separation. I have a 5.2 digital surround sound system but I'm seriously questioning whether VHS uncompressed analogue sound is superior to DVD and Blu Ray compressed sound.

[Lee McCaffrey]

VHS Hi-Fi can sound very good provided the tape is in good condition with no drop-outs etc. Due to the helical scan the effective tape speed is pretty high, especially compared to the standard linear mono audio track. It was quite common for vinyl enthusiasts to archive LPs to VHS Hi-Fi to save wear on the groove.
Technically the lossless formats on blu ray should trounce older formats like laserdisc and VHS, but all too often the soundtracks have been remixed and sound nowhere near as good as the older formats.

[Osi Osgood]

My main issue is the always present tape hiss on any analogue tape. Even using a Dolby unit to reduce hiss, it will also reduce clarity of audio.

[Martin Davey]

Dolby should only be used when the sourced has been encoded with it, and not switched in for any analogue, non Dolby source to act as a noise filter. Thats why the sound would be dull as a result of the way the noise reduction works. As a very simplistic description, a Dolby recording has the higher frequencies enhanced on the recording and lowered on the play back, although a lot more goes on.
However moving on to video, VHS HiFi did not use Dolby as that was was only for the old linear tracks with limited range, playable on legacy VHS players, with the Hi Fi tracks having a super signal to noise ratio and impressive dynamic range. I remember getting my first VHS Hi Fi machine back in 1985 and and it sounded terrific.
Regarding analogue sound I remember an American laserdisc magazine that was very technical in nature with its articles and disc reviews. Discs for NTSC had both digital and analogue tracks (unlike us in the UK, because of the higher bandwidth PAL signal). Often the reviewers would say how better the analogue tracks were in comparison to the DD tracks.

[Oliver Feld]

There are some films on VHS which sound much better than the digital ones. For example: in Germany „WarGames“ had been released on VHS in Stereo and only in Mono on DVD/BluRay. Also my old VHS Stereo release from 77-„Star Wars“ sounds more powerful than the later digital releases.

[Brian Fretwell]

I thought that VHS HiFi sound was an FM signal so should be as good as FM radio. I have seen a Philips VHS recorder advert when looking through some old magazines that advertised CD quality sound.

[Martin Davey]

I used to set the recorder in audio only mode and record friends CD's. Could not hear any difference between the original and copy.

[Joe Taffis]

In my experience BETA HI-FI was the best audio back then. I remember that for a time it was even marketed as an audio only media because of the high quality sound.

[Lee McCaffrey]

VHS and laserdisc are both stored as a FM radio signal, even the digital PCM stereo audio on laserdisc (using eight-to-fourteen modulation much like CDs).
NTSC laserdiscs could hold 2 channels each of analogue and digital audio whereas PAL laserdiscs could only have one or the other due to the extra bandwidth required for the picture. on a side note VHS cassettes were used during the mastering of the first CDs, with the audio being stored as a video signal using special adaptors. It was this method that ultimately wound up with CDs using a sample rate of 16bit 44.1kHz.
Laserdisc analogue audio can be pretty noisy with a 'surface noise' much like vinyl records, later pressings were CX encoded which improved the noise floor considerably. A lot of laserdisc enthusiasts will tell you the way to get the best analogue sound out of laserdiscs is to use one of the earlier player models with the helium-neon laser tubes.

[Osi Osgood]

I am learning things I never knew about my laserdisc player!

[Brian Fretwell]

In my experience BETA HI-FI was the best audio back then. I remember that for a time it was even marketed as an audio only media because of the high quality sound.

I know the Portable Sony Beta (F2?) had a PCM audio only adapter and was use for many live concert recordings.

[Ed Gordon]

VHS was also used to do computer data backups. A VHS tape cassette could hold over 300 GB of data.

...the standard VHS has a "helical scan" where the head is on a mechanical drum spinning at an angle to the tape. The spinning drum has to be synchronized to the video scan, on in your case to the Arduino. Fine tuning the synchronization of this mechanical drum is what the VHS "tracking" control does.

As @cyberteque points out that an analog cassette tape with its stationary head would be much less complicated. There are also VHS recorders that have non-spinning heads, they cannot record video, but in a 911 center a recorder is used that has 10 or 20 channel stationary head to record audio phone calls and voice radio calls on regular VHS cassettes. They can fit 20 audio lines x 24 hours on one cassette. If you want to record data on a VHS cassette it would be much easier to start with one of these rather than a regular VCR.

They are amazingly expensive new, but now that call centers are changing over to digital recording on hard disk, I bet these VHS tape units show up cheap on surplus and even free if you look in the right dumpster.

A 20 track VHS unit from a call center could record 16 parallel bits, plus a data clock and 3 error correction bits. Recording 16 bit data at 2kHz would give a capacity of about 345 GBytes per cassette.

Source: https://forum.arduino.cc/t/vhs-data-storage/22747/2

[Ed Gordon]

...Technically the lossless formats on blu ray should trounce older formats like laserdisc and VHS, but all too often the soundtracks have been remixed and sound nowhere near as good as the older formats.

It is not just the remixing that is a problem. Someone figured out that if the volume on all channels was dropped about 10% to 20% the volume would have to be turned up just to hear the dialogue. That 20% savings in headroom can then be used to enhance all special effects by making them much louder. If you listen to digital audio from a Bluray, and then switch your receiver over to FM tuner, you will notice that the volume for listening to the tuner is much too high.

[Lee Mannering]

Beta Hi-Fi had a higher writing speed hence the apparent quality. Dad swore by Betamax and for our money the Sanyo M40 was the best Stereo machine back then. Over here Comet were selling them off at the end for £99. Good memories.

[Ken Finch]

I suffer from hearing loss particularly the higher frequencis and have hearing aids to correct this and also increase the volume. I have no problems when watching older films but with more recent ones the dialogue is sometimes uninteligible because of the accents and mumbling. Often it is competing with monotenous and unnecessary background music. I also find the volume of surround sound effects are much too loud. Ken Finch.