On Fri, 28 Jan 2005 10:27:08 GMT, "Mark & Mary Ann Weiss"
wrote:

I dug out an old Betamax tape I made in 1986 of a 5-piece jazz ensemble
performing at a night club, just to refresh my memory of what I had in my
collection of old tapes. I found the experience downright disturbing. Why?
Because it sounds so darned GOOD. It has no right to sound good. It was made
with electret condenser mics made around 1982, feeding a Radio Shack mixer,
driving a Radio Shack model 22 Beta Hi-Fi VCR. I used a Quasar professional
series Newvicon video camera for the visual portion of the recording, which
looks simply awful by today's standards. But the sound... I could not
believe it. snip

Consumer Beta Hi-Fi, an FM system without the constraints of broadcast
FM, was technically superior to JVC's depth recorded VHS Hi-Fi. For a
time after the introduction of the Sony SL-5200 in 1984, it rivalled
DAT with many users.

I have some state-of-the-art digital recordings I bought on CD that were
made in 2003 and they don't sound that much better. snip

Further proof that digital recording sucks, eh?

In fact, a lot of my
newer recordings have a blanket of hiss in the background. snip

A common fault of noisy codecs. It's not that much better, just
"different" than analog tape hiss.

This old
recording only suffered from VCR-related problems: tape dropouts and a 30hz
purring sound caused by the vertical scan rate of the helical recording
heads. snip

There was a switching adjustment on older Beta Hi-Fi decks that
eliminated that, as I remember.

The think that irks me, is that, with today's digital technology, why are we
still getting CDs with very audible hiss on them snip

Because digital recording sucks. People STILL can't figure out how to
properly sync that crap!

when a pair of electrets
driving an old RS mixer can produce a recording that is much quieter to the
point where any hiss is masked by the ambient noise? What kind of signal
routing and planning can cause state of the art recording facilities to turn
out such a noisy recording? snip

Don't discount the fact that you MIGHT be listening to CD on a noisy
player with a noisy DAC...very common. Computer CD-ROMs are genuinely
awful...Sound Platers' crap ranks down at the bottom, in my
experience. I use a Sound Plaster CD-ROM as a doorstop.

Now that I have much better recording equipment today, fully digital, I am
dying to engage another ensemble recording and see how much better I can do
than I did in 1986 with the Betamax VCR.
But I still can't believe how enjoyable and natural the sound of that old
recording is! snip

I started making audio reference masters with Beta Hi-Fi in 1985. I
was blowing away people with them back then...80 dB s/n with no noise
reduction schemes, flat as a board freq response, negligible
distortion...it was a really contender to DAT in all areas. VHS Hi-Fi
isn't quite as good, but is still better than a lot of the cheap
digital crap out there today.

dB