Apparently not all VHS tapes labeled as stereo are actually stereo.

[brassplyer]

Got a commercial tape of a show from 1983, the cover clearly states "stereo" but there's no stereo field and after capturing a DV file of it, the two channels are obviously identical. If I play a couple of other commercial tapes known to be stereo on the same VCR the stereo field is obvious. I actually got two pristine copies of this same show and neither is in stereo.

Apparently the fact that it has a L & R channel qualifies it as "stereo"?

[manono]

Yeah, dual mono is often called stereo. Sounds better, doesn't it? Heck, I have probably a hundred DVDs proclaiming themselves as having DD5.1 audio. The movies only had mono audio and to make the DD5.1 the original mono audio was copied across all the channels. Each channel is identical to the others.