Is this true?

I have listened to both formats and my R2R tape deck was significantly better. VHS I believe could have gained some ground on R2R once the players themselves improved and if the tape speeds could have matched 7.5 and 15 IPS.

I have an old Sony SLV-575uc VCR (2nd to TOTL) that my oldest brother purchased brand new many many moons ago. It has adjustable recording level and VU meters as well, like a regular cassette deck or RTR.

Anyway, I have some tapes that I made years ago on Maxell and TDK tapes at "Standard Speed" which is 1-1/4" per second. With a 2-ch hifi rotary audio head, 20Hz - 20kHz frequency response, 90dB+ dynamic range and 0.005 wow & flutter, the LP's and CD's that I recorded on those tapes sounded every bit as good as the sources. Not to mention there were very little if any tape hiss, mostly thanks to that rotary head.

I should pull that unit out along with those tapes and see how they stand on my current system. If they're anything like all of those old cassettes that I have, they should still sound just as good as the original vinyl and CD's, if the tapes aren't messed up or the VCR is in need of a little TLC, which it probably is. Last time I used it was probably 10 years ago.

I got rid of my cassettes and player over 20 years ago. When I began getting into higher end gear they just didn't sound nearly as good as my CDP or Rega TT at the time. Most of them were albums recorded from LP. If they were recorded from the Rega and tape heads properly aligned things may have been different.

If I could find that old VHS tape it would be interesting to see how it sounds today. I can't remember which turntable I used for recording though. I still have a stereo Panasonic VHS player but not the Hi Fi Hatachi used for recording.

I remember back in the '80's or maybe early '90s that people were recommending recording high quality audio on the recently introduced SVHS system, using SVHS blank tapes. The specs showed that the quality of the sound should have been equal or better than audio tape (R2R at 7.5ips). Also, since the recording time for one tape was much longer than R2R tape and the cost of the SVHS tape was much lower. I tried a few experiments and I found that the rapidly spinning heads of the SVHS machines had a negative effect on the recorded sound quality. I kept the SVHS recorder for copying laser discs that I rented, but not for music audio recording. As DVDs took over and then bluray as well as digital recording for both audio and video, both Laser Discs and VHS, SVHS, Beta, etc. faded out.

Larry

VHS HiFi (and Beta HiFi) is far more complicated than it might seem. To begin with, the audio signal is recorded along with the video on the rotating head, which means a tape speed of just over 6 meters (about 19.5 feet) per second. To complicate things, though, the HiFi audio needs to be extracted from the video signal by a proprietary multiplexing system; as you might imagine, this can (and does) cause a number of problems if one is concerned with ultimate sound quality, and is a good example of how traditional measurements are not reflective of eventual sound quality. In actual use most listeners preferred the sound from a high quality cassette deck to the sound from Beta or VHS HiFi, but for audio/video content the development of Beta and VHS HiFi was very helpful.