VHS better audio

[Amaroc]

Hello everyone. I know this topic still comes up from time to time, but it's so distracting and I'm lost, I just don't know where to start. After two years of ripping VHS material to HDD (75 cassettes) I want to process it. However, due to the nature of VHS, the sound system is not the best, the sound is like a tunnel recording. I know it's because of limited audio bandwidth. However, I do not have a good knowledge of audio processing, how to carry out such a quality improvement process. So maybe one of you knows a good way based on experience and will share it. Currently, under the influence of the manufacturer's advertisement, I bought the editing program "Magix Audio Studio 17" and I don't know if it was a good choice for this purpose, but apparently it has the ability to expand with dedicated plugins that increase functionality. If any of you could advise what order of the sound quality improvement process to follow ??. Can you recommend some free or paid plugins? The seller said that he thought an "exciter" would be needed, was he right? Any suggestions? or descriptions of your own experiences?. Which process is necessary and which can be omitted. For recording I used a Panasonic F200 VCR, KeyWest as TBC and a computer with a Blackmagic Intensity card. The target format for me is to be AC3 stereo. Regards.

[lordsmurf]

Sometimes bad VHS audio is due to the player, not the tape itself. While that Panasonic should have been great to extract, condition matters. Sometimes mode matters.

BM cards are not known for audio quality.

Magix = Sound Forge, something I've used in the mid 90s. Awesome software, you made a good choice.

What matters now are samples.

I've actually discussed audio, and Sound Forge specifically, in years past, in various digitalFAQ posts. Search for those, do some reading. Also post samples.

[pandy]

You may try to use some spectral band replication filter to enrich audio spectrum and imitate wider one or something named exciter.

In quite old ffdshow package there was filter 'Crystality' to do such processing (it was not particularly stable and work ok for sampling rate 44100Hz) so you can start from this. To quickly verify if this OK for you can use something like https://www.videohelp.com/software/GraphStudio or https://www.videohelp.com/software/GraphEditPlus

There are some old threads about problems similar to yours e.g. https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/379480-Spectral-Band-Replication-Filter-in-Adobe-A...acity-or-other

[Amaroc]

Thank you for your reply, of course I should post a sample right away. I will read the recommended threads and make my first attempts. I also thank Lordsmurf for the fact that two years ago he advised me on the selection of the available configuration for recording analog video, it is not perfect, but since then I have been developing my workshop and soon I will change it a bit for a better one and I hope to start archiving my home laserdisc collection. Unfortunately, I'm not a young man anymore, and it's a bit hard to keep up with everything. So thank you again and this time I'm sending you a sound sample. If any of you would rate it, and give your opinion again, I will be grateful and start my own tests. It's time to compress the video and free up some disks because the files are huge. Regards.

[mike20021969]

For VHS audio, that sample is pretty decent. Frequency analysis shows it's has full range (20-20kHz) with no drop-off across the entire range.