The Lofi Magic of VHS Audio [video](youtube.com) |
The Lofi Magic of VHS Audio [video](youtube.com) |
The other key part of the VHS sound is the pitch modulation caused by slight inconsistencies in the speed of the tape going past the heads. In a synthesizer, this can be mimicked (and often is, in "lo-fi" presets) with a sine wave modulating the oscillator frequencies.
Still, if you want to get that full, dreamy VHS shimmer, you don't necessarily have to dub your audio onto an actual machine. There are software emulations out there, my favorite of which is a user-created Reaktor effect called VHS Audio Degradation Suite: https://www.native-instruments.com/en/reaktor-community/reak... It gives you full control over an exhaustive set of VHS attributes, from flutter and wow to distortion and noise.
And for posterity there's also XLN's Retro Color and Abberant DSP's Sketch Cassette (which is pretty genius), also Waves' Abbey Road Vinyl is pretty good.
https://www.xlnaudio.com/products/addictive_fx/effect/rc-20_...
https://www.arturia.com/products/software-effects/tape-mello...
ChowDSP has an open-source tape plugin. I haven't used it too much (I use the iOS version), but it has a lot of parameters:
Haven't tried Sketch Cassette but have seen videos of it in action, sounds pretty awesome.
The other thing which I always failed to buy was a sequencer or midi to CV interface, synths and effects were just so much more fun than recording gear. Since I could not effectively play 4 tracks worth of synth and twiddle the knobs by myself I would make control tracks on the computer, ~15khz sine wave whose level I would control for the desired pitch/effect, stick a rudimentary envelope follower on the computers output and I now had sequencing for my synths. I would make 4 of these tracks, two would be dumped onto a cassette tape which gave me 4 tracks of sequencing and essentially 4 extra hands. The envelope followers each had an LED since I could not hear the click track on them and needed a way to sync them still.
It was not great sound, snr was poor with all the bouncing down, nothing was ever quite in sync (but at least I did not have to deal with midi jitter and lag with thru's!), the tapes all wore differently and it was labor intensive but it was fun and the end result certainly had a rather characteristic sound.
The music. It reminds me of a time and space I've actually never lived in. And it probably never existed like that. Yet growing up it is very much how I believed North America looked like.
To encode a character in this scheme, we first convert its ASCII code to binary. The binary representation of "u" is 01110101. We can see that the positions of the 1's are 0, 2, 3, and 6. Therefore, to encode the secret word, we italicize the first, third, fourth, and seventh words.
Sony made some for U-Matic (3/4 in), there were some for VHS, and some that were meant to use other broadcast grade formats.
Also, ADAT, which used a SVHS tape and mechanism to store multi-channel audio
I've been getting into old technology the past few years and a Panasonic AG-170 VHS Reporter camera was one item I had picked up. I've recorded a few social gatherings and trips with friends so far and plan to edit them into a 80s/90s styled montage. However, my camera recently stopped recording any video or audio with the viewfinder showing a black/blank image, which is a real bummer. I imagine there is an electronic component inside that may have failed.
Does anyone know of any forums where VHS enthusiasts gather? I'd love to dig around to see if I can find any resources for diagnosing and repairing this camera on my own. Unfortunately VHS repair shops are quite rare, if not nearly extinct in 2023.
I'd love to see him doing this with the VHS HiFi signals, which were.. IIRC, significantly better than MTS Stereo/FM Stereo (particularly in L/R channel separation) - so basically near CD Audio.
People also built data backup devices using VHS tape machines. At the time anyway, the data density of VHS tape was pretty good.
Funnily enough the same channel that made OP video also made a review on that pedal 6 weeks ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaX6WwV_d_s
Like this Ampex recreation I love to use with my Apollo and Luna:
https://www.uaudio.com/uad-plugins/luna-custom/ampex-atr-102...
Before DAT, Hi-Fi VCRs were by far the best audio recorder you could buy for home use. The only problem (which I pretty much never heard talked about) was a "purring" noise that would accompany high-frequency sounds. I suspect this was caused by switching between the audio heads on the spinning head drum.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089114/
The "More like this" section at the bottom has some other goodies, although a bit campy: Flight of the Navigator, *batteries not included, Short Circuit, Harry and the Hendersons, etc. Mainstream movies like The Goonies and The Breakfast Club are uncannily accurate. My friends and I basically rode BMXs and played Nintendo and drank Mtn Dew by the pool while REM played on the radio. We had analogs for everything today except the internet and cell phones, and much of it was actually more functional (didn't require instructions). And politics was a joke back then, like it was common knowledge that Reaganomics would dismantle Social Security and leave no money for Gen X (which hadn't been named yet) but we were rapidly heading for the 2015 Back to the Future Part II where we'd have our own fusion reactors so it wouldn't matter anyway.
Oh and my friend had a VCR that could pause without jittering, because in most models the magnetic head had to move slightly to pick up a signal from the tape. My other friend had access to a Video Toaster (can't remember if it was at the A/V club or a local TV station) that could add words and FX. But really the best work had the smeary transitions where we pressed record. And mixtapes often had part of the radio station's jingle or missed the first few seconds of the song. Everything was a bit dreamier because we were doing original things ourselves, not watching other people do it on YouTube. That's probably what I miss most.
Nostalgia tripping on the 1980s seems to rarely if ever include Max Headroom. To me, he was the essence of my high school zeitgeist. Maybe younger people today think he was too weird to have actually been a big deal. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6epzmRZk6UU)
[1] https://kpfa.org/program/over-the-edge/ [2] https://archive.org/details/ote?
I also feel it is a genuine adventure movie that is told from the perspective of kids, but again exactly how adults will remember their childhood adventure dreams.
There's scary stuff, they don't shy away from showing quite disturbing imagery, but it's never about the shock value.
I was on my bike every. single. day. I actually bolted an antenna onto my handlebars for my FM Walkman.
And YES I have had sex. With partners.
"[the strings in Semena Mertvykh were] performed into a dissected VHS deck with the motor running super slowly, so you can hear all the pockmarks, the dropouts on the tape. It’s mono, too, which gives it something special. More people should record in mono these days." original article[0] and archive[1]
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/12/arts/music/tomorrows-harv...
We had a guy, can't remember his name, might have been Mr Morrison? went round all the schools in his car with a 16mm projector, a screen, and a big box of shiny steel cans of film.
Draw all the curtains, pull all the desks back and line up the seats, sit and watch the movie. I can smell the film and the heat of the bulb on the sewing machine oiled projector parts, clicking escapement pulling film through, and the wibbly-wobbly wow and flutter soundtrack with crazy 70s synth soundtracks.
It's why I listen to such bloody awful music now, I guess.
There's a duplication company in Canada (they're easy to find...) that sells NOS, custom housed tapes, and all kinds of related production materials. There aren't many new options out there for working with cassette tapes, but if you can find a used deck in good shape (or there are new Tascam/TEAC machines) then you can have some real fun still. They also deal in some VHS.
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Sitting_in_a_Room
Music has the right to children!
It’s by Captain Disillusion, probably the YouTube creator with the highest continual quality.
I was overdubbing with my setup and discovered that the shitty Tascam four-track had speed variations all through the song, on every take. I had to memorize where they occurred and ride the pitch control while copying to the VHS. It took days, and by the time I had an acceptable mix the original tape was wearing out. I kept a VHS first-gen copy I think.
When computer audio became a thing I of course digitized all the original tracks and gleefully made a perfect mix. Maybe someday I'll do a surround one.
Kids today will never know what it's like to try to edit on consumer audio equipment! I remember memorizing how long it took the pause control to release on my tape decks, to make seamless edits.
So they broke the format when HiFi came out, tapes recorded on a HiFi VCR could not be played on a pre-HiFi one? Something like that may have happened but if it did it happened back during the early days of the format. From what I remember HiFi just meant it had RCA outs which bypassed the internal RF modulator that was used to modulate the signal to channel 3 or 4 standards so you could watch it on your old fashioned TV. In the early days if you recorded something off of broadcast TV it would be demodulated by the VCR, recorded and later when you watched it it was remodulated back out to the TV which would than demodulate it again, this was not a perfect process, as cable TV grew in popularity demand came about for getting rid of the now useless RF modulation which only served to degrade the signal. I could be misremembering and I was not exactly following this stuff closely back than, I was a bit on the young side but I can not ever recall their being two standards for VHS.
And no, they did not break the tape formats. Beta Hi-Fi came out in the early '80s and VHS Hi-Fi followed a couple years later. From Wikipedia:
"Around 1984, JVC added Hi-Fi audio to VHS (model HR-D725U, in response to Betamax's introduction of Beta Hi-Fi.) Both VHS Hi-Fi and Betamax Hi-Fi delivered flat full-range frequency response (20 Hz to 20 kHz), excellent 70 dB signal-to-noise ratio (in consumer space, second only to the compact disc), dynamic range of 90 dB, and professional audio-grade channel separation (more than 70 dB). VHS Hi-Fi audio is achieved by using audio frequency modulation (AFM), modulating the two stereo channels (L, R) on two different frequency-modulated carriers and embedding the combined modulated audio signal pair into the video signal. To avoid crosstalk and interference from the primary video carrier, VHS's implementation of AFM relied on a form of magnetic recording called depth multiplexing. The modulated audio carrier pair was placed in the hitherto-unused frequency range between the luminance and the color carrier (below 1.6 MHz), and recorded first. Subsequently, the video head erases and re-records the video signal (combined luminance and color signal) over the same tape surface, but the video signal's higher center frequency results in a shallower magnetization of the tape, allowing both the video and residual AFM audio signal to coexist on tape."
I sold a decent number of HR-D725s where I worked in high school. You see very few products with its build quality today. I still have the original JVC promo tape that showcased the release of VHS Hi-Fi, featuring a voiceover by Don Adams (Get Smart).