Item — HN Reader

On a slightly related note, I used to use a hi-fi stereo equipped VHS (used for recording NICAM digital stereo transmissions) to listen to music, e.g. transferring my vinyl albums to VHS tape. Advantages (beyond protecting the original vinyl) included:

- Quality - the audio format used for recording NICAM audio was vastly superior to that of audio cassettes.

- Capacity - you could easily fit a double concept album on one tape so no interruptions flipping the record over, or even in many cases have an artist's entire back-catalogue on a single tape.

- Indexing - on my video recorder you could even record index points on the tape, so when you had several albums on one tape you could forward/rewind to the start of the album relatively easily.

2 comments

Interesting; I'd not heard of NICAM, but there were several other audio formats that used video tape as a storage mechanism.

The Sony PCM-F1 recorder was probably the most common, and could be attached to either a VHS or a Betamax recorder.

My personal favorite, and one that I still own, was the dbx 700 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dbx_Model_700_Digital_Audio_Pr...) which used delta-sigma rather than PCM encoding, and produced an NTSC output suitable for tape. (For reasons I don't really understand, 3/4" U-Matic was the dominant recording format, at least that I saw. But it works fine onto a good VHS deck.) The digital format was ahead of its time, although it was a bit of a dead-end technologically unless you count SACD (arguably also a dead-end).

Compared to the F1 it was a joy to use, because you didn't have to leave the headroom of a PCM recorder (it doesn't "brickwall" if you run a hot signal into it). In the days when most audio engineers were used to analog tape and recording very hot, this led to much better-sounding recordings.

You could also take the video signal and send it around a video distribution system (closed-circuit TV, cable, satellite, etc.) and have a very high quality audio feed on a point-to-point link.

Occasionally the boxes turn up on the used market... I still have one, and largely just keep it in the signal loop because of all the neat 1980s blinkenlights and digital VU meters.

That's super neat. What kind of VCRs support NICAM audio?

Like most fancy VCR features NICAM decoders started out as an expensive high end thing in the late 80s and gradually trickled down to lower price points. Note that there were no VCRs that recorded audio in the NICAM format, only decoded it.

The actual recording mechanism was VHS Hi-Fi, which uses helical scanning to record a relatively high quality analog stereo track onto the tape vs the normal not-very-good VHS mono audio track that uses a stationary read/write head.

In the late 90s D-VHS came out which recorded digital MPEG video and audio onto VHS tapes (and supported high definition 720p/1080i!) but it was an extremely expensive niche thing that never took off in any meaningful way.