Quote:
Originally Posted by WCV82
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.
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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)
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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)