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The Lofi Magic of VHS Audio [video]
- waihtis 3y agoSomewhat related - if you like the soundscape of "old VHS" you should check out the artist VHS Head, he samples music from old videotape cassettes. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiPGoIicGrAU32LR987iD9g https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiPGoIicGrAU32LR987iD9g
- rhema 3y agoFYI, 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 3y agoThis 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.
- short_sells_poo 3y agoThis 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.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y agoYou should check out Alex Ball's deep dives into analog synths of the 70s and 80s. Particularly the full documentary on ARP.
- morsch 3y agohttps://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l31RXiVSI9s https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l31RXiVSI9s this?
- KerrAvon 3y agoYes
- f5ve 3y agoFactoid 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebjXsc0UjdQ
- zoklet-enjoyer 3y agoBehringer sells a 2600 clone for $500. Price just dropped so I've been trying to justify not buying it. I really don't need it
- zackmorris 3y agoIt 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/ 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 3y ago"it's the stuff dreams are made of"! also, flight of the navigator is an amazing movie https://archive.org/details/FlightOfTheNavigator1986 https://archive.org/details/FlightOfTheNavigator1986
- ShadowBanThis01 3y agoThere's a great breakdown of the special effects that were done on a shoestring for that movie. I recommend doing a search for it.
- bombcar 3y ago
- ShadowBanThis01 3y agoYeah, I grew up in that time and I'd say it's reasonably accurate. I would have loved this show during the time period it's set in. I was on my bike every. single. day. I actually bolted an antenna onto my handlebars for my FM Walkman. And YES I have had sex. With partners.
- cschneid 3y agoFun 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 3y agoWord. 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 3y agoThere’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.
- dannyw 3y agoVWestlife, Technology Connections, and Modern Vintage Gamer too.
- _kblcuk_ 3y agoChase Bliss did a whole guitar effects pedal based on that concept (Generation Loss): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pq7g_fZWw8 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaX6WwV_d_s
- evan_ 3y agoTechmoan did a video on a format that used VHS tapes to store digital audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDCxTtn4OQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDCxTtn4OQ
- Aloha 3y agoThere 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
- dspig 3y agoThe Sony PCM-F1 was one of these - and was the first time I got confused between "is this live or is this the playback?" because until then it had been obvious.
- justsomehnguy 3y agoAnd there were solutions that used VHS tapes to store digital data: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUS0Zv2APjU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUS0Zv2APjU
- themodelplumber 3y agoIt'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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- c0nsumer 3y agoSome 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 https://www.discogs.com/artist/53935-Fektion-Fekler
- thinkingkong 3y agoIf anyone was into the band Boards of Canada, this is how they created a lot of their sounds.
- eurekin 3y agoLike Dayvan Cowboy too?
- sogen 3y agoThe Leslie Nielsen sample! Music has the right to children!
- amatecha 3y agoYeah 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-harvest-by-boards-of-canada.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/12/arts/music/tomorrows-harv... [1] https://archive.is/H3ny1 https://archive.is/H3ny1
- 52-6F-62 3y agoThey'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 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 3y agoThe 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Sitting_in_a_Room Audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ho16dPi_WKU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ho16dPi_WKU
- Aloha 3y agoMono 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 3y agoYeah 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 3y agoCassette Tape (even Type I) has no issue with audio up to around 12-13 kHz
- chiph 3y agoVHS HiFi was very good, but you still had some tape hiss. So I used a dbx 224 compressor to record my 4 hour mix tapes. I couldn't share them since no one else had a dbx box, but it was good for long background music where I didn't have to get up and change CDs. So, like a reel-to-reel but much more compact.
- unixhero 3y agoStrangely the guy used a VHS playbacj device which gave output in mono.
- mortenjorck 3y agoThe 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/reaktor-user-library/entry/show/11003/ 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 3y agoThere 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_retro_color https://www.xlnaudio.com/products/addictive_fx/effect/rc-20_... https://aberrantdsp.com/plugins/sketchcassette/ https://aberrantdsp.com/plugins/sketchcassette/ https://www.waves.com/plugins/abbey-road-vinyl https://www.waves.com/plugins/abbey-road-vinyl
- NickC25 3y agoRetro 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 3y agoThis 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 3y ago[deleted]
- 52-6F-62 3y agoIf these guys can't help, maybe they can point you in a direction: https://www.proaudio-revival.com/ https://www.proaudio-revival.com/
- thomasreggi 3y agoUgh this is so in the zeitgeist I made this a couple weeks back: https://lofi.supply/ https://lofi.supply/
- ofalkaed 3y agoBack 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.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y agoWow, you used non-Hi-Fi VCRs? I used a VHS Hi-Fi unit as an audio recorder, and also to bounce tracks from a POS Tascam four-track. Before DAT, Hi-Fi VCRs were by far the best audio recorder you could buy for home use. The only problem (which I pretty much never heard talked about) was a "purring" noise that would accompany high-frequency sounds. I suspect this was caused by switching between the audio heads on the spinning head drum.
- prpl 3y agoI 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
- zoklet-enjoyer 3y agoIt's still a thing. I want to try this out but I have a 4 track and my vcr doesn't have stereo in https://facebook.com/groups/528835951138452/ https://facebook.com/groups/528835951138452/
- Ambix 3y agoAnd many professional studios still using tape machines and emulations over the final songs to produce that fat, warm sound of analog era. Like this Ampex recreation I love to use with my Apollo and Luna: https://www.uaudio.com/uad-plugins/luna-custom/ampex-atr-102.html https://www.uaudio.com/uad-plugins/luna-custom/ampex-atr-102...