My father passed away some time ago but was a huge amateur VHS guy pretty early on, starting with the Quasar VX system (whoops) and eventually getting a VHS player around the mid 80s. He had about 250 taped-off-tv tapes by the mid 00s when he finally moved on to DVDs. In lieu of a TBC I am using a 1990 Sony SLV-575UC with a passthrough through a Panasonic ES15, into a USB Live2 capture to the computer.

Anyways onto my questions:

I'm pretty sure my dad recorded most of the 80s-mid 90s tapes (the ones I'm most interested in) on a Panasonic PV-1430 Hi-Fi VCR, so many of these tapes have stereo audio recorded onto them but I get some unfortunate buzzing on the audio track unless i switch to mono audio which is considerably less pleasant. Is this truly just a tracking audio error or are these problems baked into the tape so to speak? He has a variety of quality tapes, as you can see, but sadly a chunk of them are recorded in EP mode, which I think further creates problems.
Picture-wise things seem good but every once in a while I get tape where the machine cant auto-detect the speed so it will run too fast, then slow down, then repeat creating an unwatchable picture. The tape itself doesn't seem to be damaged.

I dont plan on digitigizing every tape (200+ tapes at 6hrs per tape...do the math), but he's got many with original commercials and special events recorded that are probably worth saving.


The machine I'm currently using:
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/usedphotosna/99443926_934.jpg

The machine these tapes were originally recorded on:
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/6pcAAOSwttRfuG4K/s-l1600.jpg

and just some of the tapes
http://www.videokarma.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=203721&stc=1&d=1639533289

does your playback deck handle official Hollywood released professionally recorded stereo tapes? Try creating your own stereo tape and see how it plays that back. If it can't playback the Hollywood tape it's out of spec for stereo. If it also can't play back a stereo tape it just made then it's out right broken.

Properly working VHS HiFi Stereo audio tracks (not to be confused with VHS linear stereo) had better dynamic range, frequency response, and noise floor than Compact Disc. If it sounds bad either the recording, the deck or both are bad and detective work is in order.

Yuk I hate that word "digitizing" http://www.videokarma.org/images/icons/icon10.gif

I like all my VHS stuff left analogue http://www.videokarma.org/images/icons/icon7.gif (Have to try hard to maintain it)


Good luck buddy!!!!!

Opinions on "digitizing" aside the buzz you're hearing may be an interchange issue with the old Panasonic not really being on "spec" with regard to the head alignments, the other may be head "chatter" caused by worn AFM heads. NTSC VHS HiFi used depth multiplex where the FM video was written over the top by a trailing AFM audio carrier (between the lower luma & down converted chroma) leaving two carriers on one helical track that didn't interfere. I second the suggestion by Electronic M to try a commercially recorded tape to verify the HiFi audio integrity. The other issue is with the EP recording speed and crosstalk, if one of the AFM heads were off slightly it would overlap the adjacent track and chatter during playback as there's no "guardband" at this speed, only the azmuth offsets of the individual heads keeps things in check.
Unfortunately I'm not sure what can be done to salvage the AFM HiFi audio for the purpose of archival, consumer & prosumer decks were more for convenience than integrity leaving most of the quality out for the sake of a few dollars. I do feel your pain here as I had amassed a large collection of early MTV videos during the 80s using a surplusd Sony VO-2811 UMatic and Jerrald CATV box with the composite out, stereo audio was cablecast on the FM band and by the end of highschool I had over 200 tapes all sealed up in Ziploc storage bags, sticky shed syndrome has claimed all but a few of the Fuji tapes.

Sorry for the long delay, ended up jumping right into it. To answer the first question, yes pre-taped movies handle okay, the autotracking locks it in and both hifi and linear play ok.

ARCTech,
From what it seems going through these tapes is that it is a hit-and-miss situation. Mostly because there's no rhyme or reason to the age/recording/# of recordings done per tape. For example the tape itself may have been first recorded in 1984, with a re-recording done in 1988 with a third recording done in 1990, with the latter possibly being a different unit completely. A bulk of these tapes were originally recorded between the early 80s to mid 90s. There are tapes with recordings from TCM and other modern cable channels from the 2000s on that again play well or not depending on if the tape it was oe was a then-15 year old tape with 4 recordings already done on it.
A majority of the tapes are LP speed, which this Sony unit only playback but not record in (may not make a difference in my situation)
Sometimes I have to fall back to linear which often sounds muddy, sometimes I have to defer to L OR R stereo tracks as one channel is buzzed beyond saving.
I have the SM for the vcr and a scope but with pre-taped movies playing fine, there isnt much I can do it seems. The pinch roller IS sadly, on its way out. Not rock hard but shiny, the tape slips and chews badly during rewinds (play/FFD are ok). unfortunately i dont know the way to get a replacement or to measure the spec for a custom one.

Let me posit this: This sony vcr is a 4 head hifi unit. I also have a mid00s Panasonic 4 head hi-fi unit (with supple pinch roller still). Aside from special features, is there any reason why i shouldnt use the Panasonic one instead?

No. The Panasonic is just as good but it might not do any better with the old tapes. The issue is the original machine was probably out of interchange and this is why the tapes won't play on another one. Home decks used alot of plastics and they warp, even the aluminum base will squirm slightly as the plastic its screwed to shifts over the years. LP compounded the problem as it cuts the margin for errors to a third of SP mode allowing a slight overlap of the recorded video tracks, they rely on an azimuth offset between the A & B to guard against crosstalk but there's always a small degree of bleed thru that adds to the noise. Automatic tracking only looks at the video RF envelope from the head amps and shifts the phasing to maximize this regardless of the HiFi output, a manual tracking deck would be an advantage
Honestly I'm not sure how I'd go about capturing these tapes despite my experience with video restoration. A "sacrificial" deck that I could adjust and manipulate the tape guides while observing the head waveform on a scope would be one way but its the dynamics of the old tapes that would be difficult to chase in real time. Telephone audio was better than LP linear and given the tolerance for mass production the linear head might be off slightly, tweaking the azimuth screw might help but it will also affect the tracking, don't get carried away here.
If the tapes were recorded with the bad pinch roller all hope is out the window as this introduced an unknown number of variables such as wow & flutter speed variations, slight up or down sliding and possible contamination by shedding the hard rubber and embedding it into the tape itself. Give the Panasonic a try as you have nothing to lose here, good quality VHS decks are all but impossible to find anymore, I'm talking the first generation of HiFi decks from the likes of Hitachi and Matsushita (Panasonic) G-chassis. The Hitachi VT109 was an oddball 5-head HiFi deck that was better in the LP modes with the AFM, I had one years ago and was impressed with the stereo recording quality.

The more a tape was used over and over again (re-recorded over) the more damage it does to the filament and causes some bleed over of audio or video which can cause some of the playback issues you are facing. It also doesn't help that these tapes were re-recorded over on a long period of time so it may have set up for awhile before use again. I've had some tapes that were originally used in 1985, then partially recorded over in 2003 and the damage is much worse than if it was a 1985 to 1985 or 1985 to 1987 or something.

Also, as others have said, using the original recording deck would be best to make the conversion, even though VHS is a incredibly resilient compatible format where you can play a tape recorded in say 1979 on a machine made nearly 30 years later, it doesn't mean it will actually playback well. I wish I had the original VCR my dad made all his recordings on, half his tapes play back badly on a variety of VCRs I've tried over the years.

Back when I was regularly making recordings 2012 and earlier what I found is that if I recorded a tape at one speed it was preferable to record over it at a different speed. Sometimes if I want to record over an SP tape at SP a few days before I'd let it record random junk on EP. If I had a tape with multiple speed recordings I would blank it for reuse by recording junk at the speed I wanted then another pass of recording junk at the other speed before the actual recording....That method did a marvelous job of eliminating bleedover from old recordings.

Also, as others have said, using the original recording deck would be best to make the conversion, even though VHS is a incredibly resilient compatible format where you can play a tape recorded in say 1979 on a machine made nearly 30 years later, it doesn't mean it will actually playback well. I wish I had the original VCR my dad made all his recordings on, half his tapes play back badly on a variety of VCRs I've tried over the years.

Surprising I was able to find an identical PV-1430 VCR on ebay, right now. The seller says it will not turn on, this this could be anything from a blow fuse to just some electrical PS repair, both of which I am capable of doing. The issue is that on the original unit we owned, eventually the transport mechanism failed on me. As in the gears eventually would pop loose and misalign..and when i chanced across a same era-basic unit the SAME transport was failed. So I could easily get this unit and fix it up, only to find the transport is going/has gone bad (see image for the original unit we had and the basic unit above both which suffered said problems)
203841

In response to you ARC Tech, I can name multiple players we had in the family since the first one. My dad generally stuck with panasonic, but after the original 84 HIFI unit, they got less advanced as the years went on, to the point he was using a basic mono onnivision from 1995-1997 ish. From 1997 to 2005/end of vhs era he was using a hifi sony unit which ended up failing due to some hardware glitch.
I guess the point being that visual inspection of some of these tapes shows kind of a sawtooth/wiggly bottom edge due to, likely, a misaligned tape path on any one of the machines. He generally bought higher end tapes, ALOT of TDK HS, EHG etc as well as Scotch EG+ and etc. Just like you said once the tape has been recorded x times over again, it just permanently wears it out,

Its a bummer but these are being saved for my own interest and storage, if they are not 100% no big deal, however some tapes are just barely useable, At least I can make a list of titles so I can someday watch the kinds of movies he was watching.
The REAL issue is our family home movies. My dad would use tapes that already had content on them, stuff he taped off TV, and then would record over them on a shoulder camcorder without a flying erase head....so i am running into a lot of a/v sync problems with those, as every time the recording stops and starts again the sync pulls away a little bit. I cant justify $2500 on a TBC-1 and finding an ideal svhs with built in TBC is tough too. THOSE are the tapes I'd really like to save.

And in case anyone cared, these are the models of VCRs known to have been used at one point (mostly for playback but some recording too)

PV-1430 (1984)
PV-4250 (1992)
PV-4514 (1995)
SLV-776HF (1997)

We had a PV-1640 as a kid, that thing was a tank and got a ton of use. Never broke.

The Panasonic PV chassis was also used for the commercial NV series decks. As a rule of thumb PV is consumer grade, NV is the industrial line for the school and business while the AG series is the "professional" high end of the spectrum. These are the steel and brass tanks that only run at the SP speed, stability and reliability.
Sony bought and rebranded Hitachi VHS decks as their own for a while, don't know if they ever made their own designs as their videotape equipment was geard to the professional betacam world.

The Panasonic PV chassis was also used for the commercial NV series decks. As a rule of thumb PV is consumer grade, NV is the industrial line for the school and business while the AG series is the "professional" high end of the spectrum. These are the steel and brass tanks that only run at the SP speed, stability and reliability.
Sony bought and rebranded Hitachi VHS decks as their own for a while, don't know if they ever made their own designs as their videotape equipment was geard to the professional betacam world.

That brings up a question, do the AG end models not support LP in playback?
I know for sure not for recording, as my Sony only does SP/EP. I was considering getting an AG model deck to consolidate the 3 piece system i have now, but if it cant do LP then im in trouble.. i might be better off getting that PV and fixing it up.
You mention Sony rebranding Hitachi which is interesting, I suppose something that is also interesting (but less so) is that Quasar had rebranded Panasonic models as well. I know Matsushita made both (I'm the same guy who restored that Quasar VX format machine years ago...) but I wonder what the differences in quality wouldve been. Compare this Quasar deck to my PV-1430 and its pretty similar..
http://vintageelectronics.betamaxcollectors.com/quasarvhsvcrmodelvh5346xe.html
http://vintageelectronics.betamaxcollectors.com/images/quasarvhsvcrmodelvh5346xe_1.jpg

Most of the "prosumer" AG series will play back SP/LP/EP speed, but only record in SP while the AG editors are only SP record and play. I have the AG-7500 SVHS editor and confirmed this. Sony bought from Hitachi when they got into the consumer VHS game and I think eventually went to Funai or something similar later on as their videotape was focused on the professional betacam, UMatic, Type-C and D2 formats along with the Hi8 EVO & EVV series decks after the betamax vs. VHS wars of the 1980's
Panasonic/Quasar (Matsushita) was at the top of the VHS heap with JVC, Sanyo/Fisher Studio Standard was near the bottom. Hitachi had some oddball head arrangements for slo-mo stability and had a heavy die cast aluminum base. Another deck I've had good luck with is the Mitsubishi HS-U54 from the late 80's. Most of my videotape equipment was for training and technical support production, I did everything betacam SP and only used VHS for the final unless otherwise requested.

I think it's going to come down to adjusting the deck to "fit" the tape each time you want to capture, cumbersome yes but maybe the only way.

I shouldve done this earlier but alas..
So i have the Sony unit mentioned earlier as my primary capturing unit. I also have a 2001 Panasonic PV-V4611 also a hifi 4 head unit, which until now i only used as a preview/seeking unit, to get times and length of tape etc.
I did a capture of the same tape on both units and to my surprise the Sony unit looked much worse... Any ideas on this one? all this time i didnt use the Pana to capture as I thought it would be inferior and newer but now I dont know. Tape sample frame was a from an LP segment video.

2001 PANASONIC:
203856
1990 SONY:
203857

Difference in noise could easily be because the tracking of one machine just happens to better match the tracking of the source recorder.

In terms of sharpness, VHS basically has crap frequency response, which is coaxed into an acceptable picture by non-linear video peaking. This can differ from brand to brand depending on the preference of the designers, but you can see what's going on when you look at multi-generation VHS bootlegs, where more than one serial attempt to squeeze wine out of a lemon becomes obvious.

The short answer is to just use the one that's best.