Extended AUDIO recording on a VCR

Cafe Society
1

There’s a midnight Saturday to 5AM Sunday blues program I enjoy but I can’t stay up all night to listen to it, especially the the later hours that feature the prewar music I prefer. Years ago I tried taping it on a VCR so I’d get all five hours plus on a 120 tape but that VCR wanted a video signal too or it wouldn’t record the audio. That was too annoying so I didn’t do it. My newer deck is less picky so I tried it last weekend and it worked beautifully. Pretty much the best analog recording I’ve ever made, within the limits of the input (an FM radio broadcast of music that is mostly older than I).

Next I will try it with a really cheap mono deck I have sitting around–mono (or suboptimal quality, for that matter) isn’t a liability when most of the music was originally recorded on 78 RPM shellac–so I can have a dedicated, programmable, long-format recorder for deferred listening instead of creating a pile of cassettes or filling up much of a hard drive with a single WAV file.

2

A buddy of mine did the same thing, recorded a lot of audio on a good stereo VCR. He looked up the specs, the precision needed to replay video was way tighter than most home audio recording equipment and the quality of the recorded audio was pretty high. He had an old junker stereo VCR in his shop and would play the recordings back in there.

3

I would say in my latest experiment that the recording is indistinguishable from the source, and I’m pretty picky for a guy who’s half deaf–or pretty picky BECAUSE I’m half deaf.