The Lofi Magic of VHS Audio [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHoTzs3mtM8

by rhema • 3 years ago

152 61 3 years ago

rhema• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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.

short_sells_poo• 3 years ago

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.

kevin_thibedeau• 3 years ago

You should check out Alex Ball's deep dives into analog synths of the 70s and 80s. Particularly the full documentary on ARP.

morsch• 3 years ago

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l31RXiVSI9s this?

f5ve• 3 years ago

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

zackmorris• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

"it's the stuff dreams are made of"! also, flight of the navigator is an amazing movie https://archive.org/details/FlightOfTheNavigator1986

redconfetti2• 3 years ago

I really loved the first part of The Explorers. The ending was just so camp though.

cancerhacker• 3 years ago

You might enjoy the archives of Over The Edge[1] which I always felt like it captured the zeitgeist of 80s culture. (Edit: better link to internet archive [2])

[1] https://kpfa.org/program/over-the-edge/ [2] https://archive.org/details/ote?

wrp• 3 years ago

I'm surprised at how often I see adults rewatching Flight of the Navigator, even though it's very much a kid's movie. Harry and the Hendersons is particularly fun to watch now if you are a Poirot fan.

Nostalgia tripping on the 1980s seems to rarely if ever include Max Headroom. To me, he was the essence of my high school zeitgeist. Maybe younger people today think he was too weird to have actually been a big deal. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6epzmRZk6UU)

ShadowBanThis016• 3 years ago

Yeah, 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• 3 years ago

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.

amatecha2• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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.

dannyw• 3 years ago

VWestlife, Technology Connections, and Modern Vintage Gamer too.

_kblcuk_• 3 years ago

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

evan_• 3 years ago

Techmoan did a video on a format that used VHS tapes to store digital audio:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDCxTtn4OQ

Aloha3• 3 years ago

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

dspig• 3 years ago

The 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• 3 years ago

And there were solutions that used VHS tapes to store digital data:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUS0Zv2APjU

themodelplumber• 3 years ago

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.

c0nsumer• 3 years ago

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

redconfetti2• 3 years ago

Wow. The predecessor to ADAT

thinkingkong• 3 years ago

If anyone was into the band Boards of Canada, this is how they created a lot of their sounds.

eurekin• 3 years ago

Like Dayvan Cowboy too?

sogen• 3 years ago

The Leslie Nielsen sample!

Music has the right to children!

amatecha2• 3 years ago

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-624• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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

Gordonjcp• 3 years ago

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.

Aloha3• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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.

Aloha3• 3 years ago

Cassette Tape (even Type I) has no issue with audio up to around 12-13 kHz

chiph• 3 years ago

VHS 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.

mortenjorck2• 3 years ago

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-624• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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.

mortenjorck2• 3 years ago

Arturia makes a tape plugin modeled after the Mellotron tape system. It's my go-to for less gnarly tape sounds:

https://www.arturia.com/products/software-effects/tape-mello...

ChowDSP has an open-source tape plugin. I haven't used it too much (I use the iOS version), but it has a lot of parameters:

https://chowdsp.com/products.html#tape

eljimmy• 3 years ago

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.

52-6F-624• 3 years ago

If these guys can't help, maybe they can point you in a direction: https://www.proaudio-revival.com/

thomasreggi• 3 years ago

Ugh this is so in the zeitgeist I made this a couple weeks back: https://lofi.supply/

ofalkaed4• 3 years ago

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.

ShadowBanThis016• 3 years ago

Wow, 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.

ofalkaed4• 3 years ago

They were most likely hi-fi (weren't all the non-hifi ones coax?) but it would not have mattered if I had used a 2" Studer, bouncing down is not a good way to maintain quality, especially how I was doing it. Most of my gear was from the 60s and 70s and probably not in the best repair, even if perfect such gear would generally have noticeable noise and I generally used this gear during the bouncing down as well to apply filtering and the like. So 2 track and 2 track to 4 mixed tracks, then 4 mixed tracks and 2 tracks to 6 tracks, then those 6 and another two recording over the 4 track mix, repeat for as many tracks as were recorded. All that noise is getting copied over and over and adding to the total noise floor and those tapes being reused over and over meant wear on the tape since the vast majority of VCRs like the majority of consumer tape based gear had shit transports.

jdalgetty• 3 years ago

Got any links to your music?

ofalkaed4• 3 years ago

Don't currently have anything (that I know of) on the web but my current project will get posted here when it is ready, it has aspects which should be of interest to enough people here to make it worth posting. The VCR recordings are most likely lost to time.

unixhero• 3 years ago

Strangely the guy used a VHS playbacj device which gave output in mono.

prpl• 3 years ago

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

zoklet-enjoyer2• 3 years ago

It'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/

waihtis• 3 years ago

Somewhat 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

Ambix• 3 years ago

And 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...

The Lofi Magic of VHS Audio [video]

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