Here is my VHS Hifi experience (can’t remember is it was S-VHS). Back around the late 1980’s I used to do some amateur audiophile recordings of artists in the NYC East Village Anti-folk scene (perhaps before it was called that, and certainly before it spawned some well known artists.)
Not having the great recording gear I bought later (including a Neumann U67 and a pair of AKG C414s) I did weekend rentals of a Nagra open reel deck (normally used for film production) and a pair of Schoeps figure 8 mics and recorded in Blumlein stereo.
Since I didn’t own an open reel deck I took the Nagra’s live output and fed it into a high quality VHS HIFI deck (I got into S-VHS as well, but I don’t know if had the decks at that time.)
While the VHS stereo Hifi tracks were a nice option to listen to the masters in a better format than audio cassette, I remember the recordings were grainy sounding in the highs. Not sure if it’s a switching issue in helical scanning, but that was my finding.
Later on I got to borrow a Tascam 4 track cassette based portastudio and at double speed with the best metal cassettes I could find after doing shootouts (the cassettes had a ceramic body!) I made some really nice recordings with that U67.
Someday I’ll have those open reel master tapes digitized as DSD, but reading this thread has made me want to find those VHS Hifi masters and hook a VHS deck up to my system!
Not having the great recording gear I bought later (including a Neumann U67 and a pair of AKG C414s) I did weekend rentals of a Nagra open reel deck (normally used for film production) and a pair of Schoeps figure 8 mics and recorded in Blumlein stereo.
Since I didn’t own an open reel deck I took the Nagra’s live output and fed it into a high quality VHS HIFI deck (I got into S-VHS as well, but I don’t know if had the decks at that time.)
While the VHS stereo Hifi tracks were a nice option to listen to the masters in a better format than audio cassette, I remember the recordings were grainy sounding in the highs. Not sure if it’s a switching issue in helical scanning, but that was my finding.
Later on I got to borrow a Tascam 4 track cassette based portastudio and at double speed with the best metal cassettes I could find after doing shootouts (the cassettes had a ceramic body!) I made some really nice recordings with that U67.
Someday I’ll have those open reel master tapes digitized as DSD, but reading this thread has made me want to find those VHS Hifi masters and hook a VHS deck up to my system!