Topic: S VHS tapes recorded with Sony PCM 701 transfers

[treydaman]

 I am wondering what I need to transfer some S VHS tapes recorded with a PCM adaptor ?  Can you go RCA out from a vcr or Beta machine or do you need the PCM adapter it was recorded with? Really not familiar with this... thanks for any help or advise.

[DSatz]

You need a PCM adapter of the same general type that the tape was recorded with. That would include the Sony PCM-F1, PCM-701, PCM-501, PC-601, or certain other units marketed under the Sansui and Nakamichi brand names. The most useful of these was the PCM-601 since it had a tracking indicator and a variable tracking control that the other models didn't have. There were NTSC (= US/Japan) and PAL/SECAM (= Western and central Europe) versions of those adapters, so the adapter you use must match the video format of the recording and of the video player.

Most VCRs have dropout compensation built in. It's better if there's some way to turn that off (it interferes with the error correction ability of the adapter), although this was provided only on certain Beta VCRs of the time as far as I'm aware.

If these are S-VHS tapes then you can't use a Beta player (the two systems are physically incompatible); you need a VHS player with S-VHS playback capability.

Assuming that these tapes were made in the 1980s when the system was in vogue, they will probably have unrecoverable dropouts now, which will probably cause moments of silence during the music. It may help if these recordings really were made as S-VHS rather than conventional VHS (although the fact that a tape cassette says "S-VHS" doesn't absolutely guarantee that the recording on it is S-VHS).

Let me know if you have other questions about this--I used the format for live concert recording (and even live recording for CD release) for several years.

--best regards

[treydaman]

I Think the tapes were made in summer 1987.
Could I go RCA(audio) out from a S VHS capable VHS player to my UA-5 to a Microtrack 2, or do I still need the PCM adapter ?
I only saw the tapes briefly and they had the S VHS logo on them and looked like a VHS video tape.

[John Willett]

I Think the tapes were made in summer 1987.
Could I go RCA(audio) out from a S VHS capable VHS player to my UA-5 to a Microtrack 2, or do I still need the PCM adapter ?
I only saw the tapes briefly and they had the S VHS logo on them and looked like a VHS video tape.

You need to actually read what DSatz wrote above as he answered all this in his post.

There is no audio at all on the audio tracks - all the audio signal is on the video tracks.

PLEASE - read what DSatz wrote.

You MUST use a PCM adaptor as DSatz said this converts the digital signal that is stored as a video signal back into analogue (some machines were modified to have an S/PDIF digital output, but it was not standard).

I had specially modified Sony C9 Beta recorders for my PCM-F1, which I bought in 1983.

Be prepared to make several copies and to stitch them back together in a DAW.  When I last tried this a year or two ago it took six passes to get a decent copy out.

[H₂O]

Ideally you should get a PCM-601esd as this unit has a spdif out  - this way you can do a digital clone.  Note that PCM NTSC is recorded in 44.056khz and not 44.1k (PCM pal is in 44.1khz)

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If these are S-VHS tapes then you can't use a Beta player (the two systems are physically incompatible); you need a VHS player with S-VHS playback capability.

Assuming that these tapes were made in the 1980s when the system was in vogue, they will probably have unrecoverable dropouts now, which will probably cause moments of silence during the music. It may help if these recordings really were made as S-VHS rather than conventional VHS (although the fact that a tape cassette says "S-VHS" doesn't absolutely guarantee that the recording on it is S-VHS).

agreed. It would be better if they were in fact encoded with SVHS, but using an SVHS tape should help anyway. I always found (at my first job where I dealt with it a lot) that the SVHS tapes held up better, even if we used them in standard VHS decks.

I only saw the tapes briefly and they had the S VHS logo on them and looked like a VHS video tape.

Yeah, they are physically the same shell and tape width, you won't know until you put one in and try to play it. Odds are that they are SVHS though; few would have spent the cash to buy the tapes unless you needed the additional lines of resolution they provided or had a similar reason.

A caveat about playback, some VHS decks will read SVHS tapes, but only at VHS resolutions. If part of the PCM process stuck information in the full SVHS allocation, then you may encounter problems. Keep this in mind, it may just be better to track down a proper SVHS deck.

[runonce]

For those watching at home...

These units were consumer component sized - and, when paired with a VHS or beta machine - basically created a giant DAT deck.

You do need the converter to derive audio (digital or analog) from the tape.

I remember being lusty for these things back in the day...they seemed like the best solution for archiving cassette recordings.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCM_adaptor

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sony_PCM-501ES_%26_Sony_SL-HF360.jpg

[ArchivalAudio]

The big question to ask
are any of the recordings that you want to transfer, already in the public domain?  Are they stuff that is out there somewhere?
if so don't waste the time and energy.
If not find someone with a PCM unit to transfer them.

Are there any potential treasures in these recordings? 

If there is non circulating material then go forward.  If not press pause.

--Ian

[ArchivalAudio]

PS
here are some pics of Analog414's PCM F1
and PCM set up he has used to transfer his masters.

[Ozpeter]

Ah, the F1/SLF1 system!  The first digital recorder I used, 1984, hired from HHB.    Edited at HHB using a betamax based system which took up a whole small studio.  The result is still available - http://www.arkivmusic.com/classical/album.jsp?album_id=146676

Probably most pocket recorders these days would exceed the capabilities of that system, and editing at home on a PC has done away with the need to pay a facility $100 an hour to hire!  Wow, we've come a long way.

[morst]

I notice that my digital DAT clones recorded PCM601esd> S/Pdif> Panasonic SV3500 > DAT have the Emphasis light showing when I play them back on a 3800 or Sony A6.

Anyone care to weigh in on this? DSatz, I would appreciate your take on how to handle that.

Ideally you should get a PCM-601esd as this unit has a spdif out  - this way you can do a digital clone.  Note that PCM NTSC is recorded in 44.056khz and not 44.1k (PCM pal is in 44.1khz)

[DSatz]

morst, yes, all models of this type of PCM adapter applied pre-emphasis (a fixed, pre-defined treble boost) in record, and a corresponding de-emphasis is required in playback. If you transferred your recordings digitally, then the resulting copy would be similarly pre-emphasized unless some kind of digital signal processing was applied during the transfer. Fortunately the CD and DAT standards include the identical pre-emphasis as an option, so all DAT and CD players should play the recordings back with correct frequency response.

I've read (but have not verified) that some later CD players violated the standard and either left out the de-emphasis feature entirely or implemented it so poorly that such recordings might sound quite different on different players. So it would be understandable to want to remove the emphasis by means of some appropriate DSP.

A couple of years ago I found a freeware or shareware command-line utility called "SoX" that could do it (http://sox.sourceforge.net/sox.html); I used it a few times and it seemed to work, but I never tested it carefully to see whether the processing was precisely correct or not. The command line syntax seems to be: "sox infile.wav outfile.wav deemph". This is for a Windows computer; I don't know what exists on the Mac side of the world.

--best regards

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This is for a Windows computer; I don't know what exists on the Mac side of the world.

Sox works on an OSX mac as long as the user is willing to use the command line.

A while back Sox had a bug in de-emphasis routine, but that was resolved a number of years ago.

[John Willett]

I notice that my digital DAT clones recorded PCM601esd> S/Pdif> Panasonic SV3500 > DAT have the Emphasis light showing when I play them back on a 3800 or Sony A6.

Anyone care to weigh in on this? DSatz, I would appreciate your take on how to handle that.

Ideally you should get a PCM-601esd as this unit has a spdif out  - this way you can do a digital clone.  Note that PCM NTSC is recorded in 44.056khz and not 44.1k (PCM pal is in 44.1khz)

The answer is simple - the Sony PCM-F1 system used emphasis in the recording and de-emphasis on replay.

This improved the signal to noise ratio and, IMHO, sounded better than DAT which came later.

So if you do a digital dub then the file will have emphasis and the emphasis light on the DAT will come on.

A customer of mine ran into trouble over this.  I had recorded a demo recording for a clarinet quartet with my PCM-F1 rig.  The record company found the recording so good that they decided to release it as it was - just they wanted a few more tracks to fill the album.

My client insisted I recorded the extra tracks with DAT rather than PCM-F1.  I warned him that this would be a bad idea, but he insisted.  He then had to edit together tracks with emphasis with other tracks without emphasis (the DAT ones).  He had to call someone in to help.  It would not have been a problem if everything had been done F1............