Current Events > My favorite way to watch movies and listen to music is VHS and cassette tapes

(+) Yeah! (+)

I just love how tapes sound. I have a good quality tape deck and old big speakers. They sound good as hell. The quality definitely dips if I listen to a tape on an old Walkman. It's night and day between my two tape players. And if you listen to an entire album, it basically means no rewinding required by the time you get to the end of side B.

I love watching VHS tapes with my VCR's audio connected to my tape decks receiver. Turn out the lights and with the volume up, it's like being in an old movie theater. It's an amazing experience. A lot of older film to me just seem more appealing with the grain of a tape. I feel like because digital didn't exist yet, this is how the director intended for the movie to be seen. Especially a lot of B movies, they just feel more natural on a VHS. A myth I will debunk is people saying that rewinding takes forever. I recently watched Scream and with previews at the start of the tape, it was around 2 hours worth of tape. Took maybe 20 seconds to rewind.
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Bump it
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The only problem with vhs is when you have to do that thing I forget what it's called
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iosifsvoboda posted...

The only problem with vhs is when you have to do that thing I forget what it's called

Adjust tracking?
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Yeah I think that's it
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My player has automatic tracking adjust.
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Hiiiiiipsteeeerrrrrrrrr.
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RTruthLILJimmy posted...

Hiiiiiipsteeeerrrrrrrrr.

I can't even grow a beard
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I still have a whole bunch of VHS tapes... I have a VHS player with an HDMI port so it still looks good on a 50 inch tv even though obviously it's not a crisp image.

What I like about VHS is that whenever you stop it the tape just stays in the same place. With a DVD sometimes it automatically brings you back to the same place but not always, and there's these fucking ads that you are forced to watch every time
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VHS is amazing
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Be kind, please rewind.
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I always rewind. I don't get being fined back in the day for not doing that.
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Yeah those formats have higher fidelity in theory than digital ones but I always do doubt when people say they can tell a difference. Most digital audio is sampled at 44.1kHz, which according to Nyquist Theorem is plenty for most people and just enough for those with the most sensitive ears. I believe 16 bit resolution is what most formats use per sample, which puts maximum quantization error at about 1/131000, or essentially nothing.

Though what I find more believable is that what people do hear the difference of is actually nothing to do with fidelity but with the constraints of having physical moving parts in the recording and/or playback process. I would guess that this would round out the waveform, complete with overshoots, undershoots and all that good stuff.

But it's worth noting that any advantage given to analog formats is short-lived as all information decays. Even digitally-stored information decays, but the way it's stored makes it easy to restore at play time, where it's essentially impossible--or at least very difficult--to restore analog data.
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VHS will always be the best.
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gatorsPENSbucs posted...

VHS will always be the best.

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When VHS would eat your movies and you'd had to either open it to remove the tape or pull the tape gently to avoid damaging it because you'd have to pay full price of the movie at Blockbuster.
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