[HN Gopher] The Lofi Magic of VHS Audio [video]
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The Lofi Magic of VHS Audio [video]
Author : rhema
Score : 104 points
Date : 2023-05-04 21:28 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| evan_ wrote:
| Techmoan did a video on a format that used VHS tapes to store
| _digital_ audio:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDCxTtn4OQ
| c0nsumer wrote:
| Some smaller bands used this to record audio in 90s home
| studios because it was really cost effective. I believe Fektion
| Fekler [1] used this for their album From Here To Heaven.
|
| [1] https://www.discogs.com/artist/53935-Fektion-Fekler
| Aloha wrote:
| There is a whole (almost) lost history about PCM Adaptors for
| VTR's.
|
| Sony made some for U-Matic (3/4 in), there were some for VHS,
| and some that were meant to use other broadcast grade formats.
|
| Also, ADAT, which used a SVHS tape and mechanism to store
| multi-channel audio
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| And there were solutions that used VHS tapes to store _digital
| data_ :
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUS0Zv2APjU
| [deleted]
| themodelplumber wrote:
| It's amazing what you can encode in various formats.
|
| _To_ encode _a_ character in _this_ scheme, we first convert
| _its_ ASCII code to binary. The binary representation of "u"
| is 01110101. We can see that _the_ positions of the 1 's
| _are_ 0, 2, 3, and 6. Therefore, _to_ encode _the_ secret
| word, we italicize _the_ first, third, fourth, and seventh
| words.
| redconfetti wrote:
| Wow. The predecessor to ADAT
| _kblcuk_ wrote:
| Chase Bliss did a whole guitar effects pedal based on that
| concept (Generation Loss):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pq7g_fZWw8
|
| Funnily enough the same channel that made OP video also made a
| review on that pedal 6 weeks ago:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaX6WwV_d_s
| unixhero wrote:
| Strangely the guy used a VHS playbacj device which gave output in
| mono.
| thomasreggi wrote:
| Ugh this is so in the zeitgeist I made this a couple weeks back:
| https://lofi.supply/
| thinkingkong wrote:
| If anyone was into the band Boards of Canada, this is how they
| created a lot of their sounds.
| eurekin wrote:
| Like Dayvan Cowboy too?
| amatecha wrote:
| Yeah they still do it even as of their most recent album,
| Tomorrow's Harvest:
|
| "[the strings in Semena Mertvykh were] performed into a
| dissected VHS deck with the motor running super slowly, so you
| can hear all the pockmarks, the dropouts on the tape. It's
| mono, too, which gives it something special. More people should
| record in mono these days." original article[0] and archive[1]
|
| [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/12/arts/music/tomorrows-
| harv...
|
| [1] https://archive.is/H3ny1
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| They're what got me hooked on getting into playing with
| cassette sounds. Every time I listen to them I'm transported
| and get stuck in an uncomfortable wooden chair in elementary
| school watching National Film Board documentaries and I love
| it. It pushed me to this sound
| https://pl-10.x.burns.fm/?t=15fb486da703a7ae565d2dcd0113908e
|
| There's a duplication company in Canada (they're easy to
| find...) that sells NOS, custom housed tapes, and all kinds of
| related production materials. There aren't many new options out
| there for working with cassette tapes, but if you can find a
| used deck in good shape (or there are new Tascam/TEAC machines)
| then you can have some real fun still. They also deal in some
| VHS.
| dweekly wrote:
| The classic old-school take on analog noise is Alvin Lucier's
| "I Am Sitting In A Room" loop.
|
| Wikipedia:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Sitting_in_a_Room
|
| Audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ho16dPi_WKU
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| Nice! Thanks for sharing. The digital experiments mentioned
| also sound interesting, but there is something about the
| imminence of physical media that captivates me.
| sogen wrote:
| The Leslie Nielsen sample!
|
| Music has the right to children!
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| If you went to primary school in Scotland in the late 1970s,
| early 1980s then you watched a lot of National Film Board of
| Canada movies.
|
| We had a guy, can't remember his name, might have been Mr
| Morrison? went round all the schools in his car with a 16mm
| projector, a screen, and a big box of shiny steel cans of film.
|
| Draw all the curtains, pull all the desks back and line up the
| seats, sit and watch the movie. I can smell the film and the
| heat of the bulb on the sewing machine oiled projector parts,
| clicking escapement pulling film through, and the wibbly-wobbly
| wow and flutter soundtrack with crazy 70s synth soundtracks.
|
| It's why I listen to such bloody awful music now, I guess.
| Aloha wrote:
| Mono only VHS decks were not uncommon (and I wouldnt be surprised
| to hear that the last VHS decks made were only mono) because mono
| only pre-produced content - even with NTSC MTS TV Audio, mono
| only broadcast originated programming was not unusual.
|
| I'd love to see him doing this with the VHS HiFi signals, which
| were.. IIRC, significantly better than MTS Stereo/FM Stereo
| (particularly in L/R channel separation) - so basically near CD
| Audio.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yeah VHS HiFi was pretty good. Standard VHS audio wasn't even
| as good as cassette tape as I recall.
|
| People also built data backup devices using VHS tape machines.
| At the time anyway, the data density of VHS tape was pretty
| good.
| Aloha wrote:
| Cassette Tape (even Type I) has no issue with audio up to
| around 12-13 kHz
| mortenjorck wrote:
| The video makes a good comparison in the frequency domain between
| the original and processed audio, but the high and low frequency
| attenuation is only half the story.
|
| The other key part of the VHS sound is the pitch modulation
| caused by slight inconsistencies in the speed of the tape going
| past the heads. In a synthesizer, this can be mimicked (and often
| is, in "lo-fi" presets) with a sine wave modulating the
| oscillator frequencies.
|
| Still, if you want to get that full, dreamy VHS shimmer, you
| don't necessarily have to dub your audio onto an actual machine.
| There are software emulations out there, my favorite of which is
| a user-created Reaktor effect called VHS Audio Degradation Suite:
| https://www.native-instruments.com/en/reaktor-community/reak...
| It gives you full control over an exhaustive set of VHS
| attributes, from flutter and wow to distortion and noise.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| There are many shades of plugins for the effect (and related
| media), but you lose that edge of chaos--most of the sounds
| that are so popular are the result of happy accidents because
| of that chaos and randomness. If you play around with these
| plugins enough you'll find them pretty deterministic. That
| said, they're pretty great, and highly portable. And I'm going
| right out to get the one you linked!
|
| And for posterity there's also XLN's Retro Color and Abberant
| DSP's Sketch Cassette (which is pretty genius), also Waves'
| Abbey Road Vinyl is pretty good.
|
| https://www.xlnaudio.com/products/addictive_fx/effect/rc-20_...
|
| https://aberrantdsp.com/plugins/sketchcassette/
|
| https://www.waves.com/plugins/abbey-road-vinyl
| NickC25 wrote:
| Retro Color is straight-up amazing. Not only can it simulate
| the VHS sound, it can also do vinyl, a whole host of
| different types of speakers, and overall it's really user-
| friendly. I use it on everything. Synths, drums, drones, FX,
| even vocals on occasion. Highly recommend it.
|
| Haven't tried Sketch Cassette but have seen videos of it in
| action, sounds pretty awesome.
| eljimmy wrote:
| This was great, thanks for sharing. I really do love the "warmth"
| provided by VHS, but I often wonder if that is just nostalgia
| from using a technology we grew up with?
|
| I've been getting into old technology the past few years and a
| Panasonic AG-170 VHS Reporter camera was one item I had picked
| up. I've recorded a few social gatherings and trips with friends
| so far and plan to edit them into a 80s/90s styled montage.
| However, my camera recently stopped recording any video or audio
| with the viewfinder showing a black/blank image, which is a real
| bummer. I imagine there is an electronic component inside that
| may have failed.
|
| Does anyone know of any forums where VHS enthusiasts gather? I'd
| love to dig around to see if I can find any resources for
| diagnosing and repairing this camera on my own. Unfortunately VHS
| repair shops are quite rare, if not nearly extinct in 2023.
| [deleted]
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| If these guys can't help, maybe they can point you in a
| direction: https://www.proaudio-revival.com/
| prpl wrote:
| I remember hearing people (DIY) were mastering to HiFi VHS or
| SVHS in the 90s because the quality was pretty good and tape was
| cheap. That's not the same thing we are talking about here
| rhema wrote:
| FYI, I posted this mainly for its description and illustration of
| the VHS format. The author of the video has very high quality
| explanations of technical and cultural details of instruments.
| WirelessGigabit wrote:
| This was the first reason I got hooked on Stranger Things.
|
| The music. It reminds me of a time and space I've actually never
| lived in. And it probably never existed like that. Yet growing up
| it is very much how I believed North America looked like.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| You should check out Alex Ball's deep dives into analog synths
| of the 70s and 80s. Particularly the full documentary on ARP.
| morsch wrote:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l31RXiVSI9s this?
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Yes
| f5ve wrote:
| Factoid tidbit: The popular, groovy, timeless, excellent
| _Inspector Norse_ by Todd Terje was made *entirely* with the
| sources from the ARP 2600. Drums and all.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebjXsc0UjdQ
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| This is so on the money. I feel they managed to capture exactly
| how the America of the 80s looked like in people's imagination.
|
| I also feel it is a genuine adventure movie that is told from
| the perspective of kids, but again exactly how adults will
| remember their childhood adventure dreams.
|
| There's scary stuff, they don't shy away from showing quite
| disturbing imagery, but it's never about the shock value.
| zackmorris wrote:
| It pretty much was just like that (I was there). One of my
| favorite "biographical" movies that nobody's ever heard of is
| Explorers:
|
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089114/
|
| The "More like this" section at the bottom has some other
| goodies, although a bit campy: Flight of the Navigator,
| *batteries not included, Short Circuit, Harry and the
| Hendersons, etc. Mainstream movies like The Goonies and The
| Breakfast Club are uncannily accurate. My friends and I
| basically rode BMXs and played Nintendo and drank Mtn Dew by
| the pool while REM played on the radio. We had analogs for
| everything today except the internet and cell phones, and much
| of it was actually more functional (didn't require
| instructions). And politics was a joke back then, like it was
| common knowledge that Reaganomics would dismantle Social
| Security and leave no money for Gen X (which hadn't been named
| yet) but we were rapidly heading for the 2015 Back to the
| Future Part II where we'd have our own fusion reactors so it
| wouldn't matter anyway.
|
| Oh and my friend had a VCR that could pause without jittering,
| because in most models the magnetic head had to move slightly
| to pick up a signal from the tape. My other friend had access
| to a Video Toaster (can't remember if it was at the A/V club or
| a local TV station) that could add words and FX. But really the
| best work had the smeary transitions where we pressed record.
| And mixtapes often had part of the radio station's jingle or
| missed the first few seconds of the song. Everything was a bit
| dreamier because we were doing original things ourselves, not
| watching other people do it on YouTube. That's probably what I
| miss most.
| lagniappe wrote:
| "it's the stuff dreams are made of"! also, flight of the
| navigator is an amazing movie
| https://archive.org/details/FlightOfTheNavigator1986
| redconfetti wrote:
| I really loved the first part of The Explorers. The ending
| was just so camp though.
| cschneid wrote:
| Fun video. I enjoy this angle of hacker news - where it really is
| somebody going unnecessarily deep into some tech. Not for
| practical use, but just because it's there.
| amatecha wrote:
| Word. Well, it started out as an experiment but he ended up
| loving it, so he and his buddy ended up making sample packages
| available for sale based on this technique :)
| doublepg23 wrote:
| There's a pretty big sphere of retro-tech and unpractical-tech
| enthusiasts like Techmoan, LGR, 8-Bit Guy, Cathode Ray Dude,
| This Does Not Compute, even Linus Tech Tips makes videos on the
| subject often enough.
| ofalkaed wrote:
| Back in the previous century I used three VCRs as a multitrack
| audio recorder, I kept spending more money on synths instead
| getting a proper multitrack and mixer. It started out as a 6
| track setup but mixdown was troublesome to say the least so I
| switched to a 4 track setup with bounce down. Two VCRs were
| recorded on and their outputs ran to a tuner which had two record
| ins that could be used at the same time and each even had a
| volume and balance control. So I would start my cheap electronic
| metronome, hit record on the first, hit record on the second on
| 16, start playing on 32. Then stick one of those tapes in the
| third VCR for play along and two blanks in the others, hit play
| and record 4 more tracks, repeat. Eventually bounce/mix them down
| in what could be a very long process since after the first go I
| could only add two tracks to the mix but the whole setup gave me
| a fair amount of room to play and infinite tracks as long as you
| did not mind the cumulative noise of all those tracks, which I
| did not.
|
| The other thing which I always failed to buy was a sequencer or
| midi to CV interface, synths and effects were just so much more
| fun than recording gear. Since I could not effectively play 4
| tracks worth of synth and twiddle the knobs by myself I would
| make control tracks on the computer, ~15khz sine wave whose level
| I would control for the desired pitch/effect, stick a rudimentary
| envelope follower on the computers output and I now had
| sequencing for my synths. I would make 4 of these tracks, two
| would be dumped onto a cassette tape which gave me 4 tracks of
| sequencing and essentially 4 extra hands. The envelope followers
| each had an LED since I could not hear the click track on them
| and needed a way to sync them still.
|
| It was not great sound, snr was poor with all the bouncing down,
| nothing was ever quite in sync (but at least I did not have to
| deal with midi jitter and lag with thru's!), the tapes all wore
| differently and it was labor intensive but it was fun and the end
| result certainly had a rather characteristic sound.
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(page generated 2023-05-05 23:00 UTC)