HiFi audio clicks: options?

[Brad]

I'm a total newb to HiFi audio on VHS, and it seems every tape that I transfer on every VCR has clicking somewhere, including with my JVC Professional deck. Granted, I've only tried 3 VCRs so far.

Surely this isn't the expected scenario seen on the demo floor. Any tips?

[yoda313]

You can try some kind of physical audio equalizer between the vcr and the capture equipment. Alternately if it isn't too severe you can try post production tweaking with audio software. Audacity is freeware you can experiment with.

I'm no engineer but there might be some kind of grounding issue in your capture setup. You could search for "audio ground" or something like that to find out if that might be part of it. Only guessing there.

And have you tried different audio cables not just different players? Maybe some are frayed or just poor?

[Quasipal]

What condition are the recordings? If slightly damaged parts of the tape are played then clicks will not be easily avoided unless you us the linear audio. Also if the recordings are made on a deck with worn heads then the HiFi sound will not be recorded correctly.

[turk690]

On a VTR, there are discrete video heads: one for each field. During half a revolution, a head scans a track (writing one field on the TV screen), is blanked out at the end of this diagonal track, just as the other head meets tape and scans the next track for the next field. This segmented diagonal track arrangement actually works well for video: there are finite breaks at the beginning and end of fields and frames that naturally coincide with which video head hits tape at that point or goes off and is muted til next track to scan. When one head is dirty or damaged and produces no output on playback, most VTRs mute the video instead of akwardly just showing one field. That's why when fast-forward is done during play back where one video head is clogged (depending on VTR), only one head is needed to read the tape and if it coincides with the good head then we see a picture on the TV screen.
If discrete heads are a natural for video, the same is not true for audio. Linear audio has no natural breaks and would ideally require a linear stationary head to read and write. This still occurs for the hissy lo-fi linear audio part of a VHS deck.
Enter hi-fi audio, where two other heads scan at the same speed as the video heads. This arrangement actually produces 60 sequential segments of audio per second; expert circuitry precisely mute each head at the points where it starts physical contact with the tape then off, which is also where one segment ends and the next should (ideally) seamlessly start. Motorboating and/or clicking hi-fi audio therefore happens when
-muting circuitry is defective and we hear the hi-fi audio segment joints (60 grating clicks a second)
-a dirty or defective audio head didn't record its share of audio segments so we are hearing blank segments in between good ones (a sort of grubby drumming sound at a rate of 30 times a second)
-a dirty or defective audio head cannot play back its own share of segments, same results as above
-a tape played back on a VTR that wasn't used to record the same, with the two VTRs' hi-fi audio heads grossly mismatched in alignment
-a severely damaged and/or dirty tape confuses the automatic selection of hi-fi/normal tracks and jumps between the two many times a second
VHS hi-fi is a precarious delicate arrangement that is a wonder at all that it works the vast majority of the time. Separate audio heads from video had to be used as compromise so that the much lower frequency audio (longer wavelengths) occupies a deeper level of the magnetic layer on the tape, with the higher frequency video recorded and played back on top of it. This was because the way the bandwidth for VHS recording on tape was initially planned, there was no empty slot with which to insert carriers for audio.
This is different from the approach of Beta hi-fi (NTSC) and 8/Hi8, where audio and video are recorded by the same heads.