I've been milling on this issue for a while now... A few years back, I found this guy online who had some rare audience video masters that were mostly done on 8 mm format in the early '90s.
Actually, it was my friend who originally found this guy - and at the time he did not have the capability to transfer his shows to DVD, so the way he preferred to distribute his shows was on copies to VHS (the 8 mm master dubbed to VHS).
Well, the idea of the extra analog gen bugged me, so I finally contacted the guy directly and basically begged him to let me borrow his masters so that I could transfer them to digital myself. I offered to send him some rare material from a different band in return, and he eventually he agreed and supposedly sent me his original 8 mm tapes of several shows.
However, the first thing that I noticed was that these tapes had virtually no bass whatsoever. The picture was very clear, but the audio was incredibly thin. On the other hand, my friend's first-gen VHS copies (which my friend put to DVD) had a much fuller bass sound. Additionally, some of these shows have had been circulated in years past on multi-gen VHS tapes, and they also had way more bass than these "masters" I was holding.
At first I thought it was my equipment, but I easily ruled that out. I tried using three different high-end Sony decks and they all produced the same result, regardless if I was doing an analog capture or using the DV output that some of the decks provided. My friend didn't do any editing to the audio from his VHS copies, and we are both using similar high-end capture cards - so these are not the issue either (I've never had an issue with any other tapes except for this guy's).
Anyway, something just doesn't add up here. The reason I'm asking now is because I was thinking about trying to obtain a few more tapes from this guy, but I'm starting to wonder if he's lying to me about sending the actual masters, and really just making some kind of hazy 8 mm > 8 mm copies with a deck that has some kind of audio issue that reduces the bass. Either that, or when he makes VHS dubs he must be's using some kind of "bass enhancement" that gives the VHS copies a fuller sound. However, this guy is pretty technically challanged and I think it's very difficult to make natural sounding bass from something that doesn't exist in the first place....
I've also ruled out the possibility that the tapes had somehow degraded by the time they reached me, as my friend obtained the VHS copies only a few months before (and the picture quality was still great.)
For the record, I don't think this guy really has any vested interest in me getting the best results out of all this, and I've always found him to be a bit shady - but then again I don't understand why he would lie to me about all this.
Besides that, I really have very little experience with the 8 mm format... Does anyone have any idea what's going on here? I'm sure if I obtained a new first-gen VHS copy of one of the masters I already transferred the bass would magically reappear somehow!
Ok, thanks for reading my somehwat strange and possibily confusing post. Any insight would be appreciated!