newbie question, vhs tracks

[alcez]

i'm capturing a video from a standard vhs cassette for my brother. it all goes well, but my brother is pretty sure the audio was different on the recording. its a homemade video he made with his friends a long time ago.

for all i can see there is no other audio on the tape, he thinks it may be "hidden" in one of the audiochannels. is that even possible? for all i can see with my simple vhs recorder i get the same signal from each stereo channel.
is it possible that there could be 2 different audiotracks for one videotrack?

not sure i make any sense but i hope you understand

[MOVIEGEEK]

Not possible with VHS.

[redwudz]

Not likely. VHS is probably just a single channel of AFM stereo. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHS

Of course you can modify the characteristics of the audio and maybe make it sound a bit better, if there is a problem with it. Audacity is one freeware audio editor to try.

[greymalkin]

many times we remember things to be much better than they actually were...like the dark crystal

[alcez]

hehe yea, that's probably it. its not the quality or anything, its just missing dialogue and music.

cheers för the replies!

[jman98]

Back in the mid 1980s my parents bought a VCR that was made by Goldstar. That's the company that eventually became LG. To be honest with you it was cheap junk and it only worked for maybe a couple of years before it broke. I remember that it had some weird feature where it somehow allowed a secondary audio track and I remember copying a non-protected DVD and recording my own soundtrack to a silent movie using the output from a CD player. The Goldstar unit could play my soundtrack fine, but if I put the tape on another VCR, it only played the original soundtrack from the silent movie. Note that although the film was silent, it did have an orchestral soundtrack. I never understood how that worked and that VCR is long long gone. Maybe something similar is at work here. I suppose it's possible that what I really did was something akin to how VCD works with separate mono languages possible in the left and right soundtrack. I've always been puzzled at how that old Goldstar VCR did the audio.

[jagabo]

VHS can have two audio tracks. The stereo HiFi track is recorded by the flying video heads along with the video. There is also a LoFi mono track recorded linearly along the edge of the tape. It's possible for these two tracks to contain different audio. Of course, it's also possible for the stereo HiFi track to record a different source on each channel. You usually have an option to select the HiFi or LoFi audio track during playback. Recording from different audio sources is unlikely for a consumer camcorder though.

[jman98]

Thanks jagabo! That makes perfect sense how that old Goldstar VCR was able to have 2 separate audio tracks on a VHS tape.

[classfour]

The old JVC 3911 that I have sees two audio tracks. Last time it switched away, I recall it was set on SAP mode.