Is it true VHS tapes demagnetize sitting in storage?
 

I was having a debate with someone today about the longevity of VHS.

The transfer house debating told me that, "VHS tapes are going to start to become demagnetized in about ten years, and that they should be transferred to digital ASAP."

I was then told people back then bought their blank VHS tapes from Wal Mart like stores and their cheap tapes DO become demagnetized over the years in optimal storage conditions. The mag coating even flakes off the plastic base. Quad broadcast tape gets "fuzzy" over time. Even the networks can’t clear them up.

The shop told me that only SONY Broadcast T-120 BA tapes do not lose their "sharpness" overtime. Is there any truth to anything they have told me or are they being dishonest?

Mostly scary tactics to get your business, While some of it is true, the most worrisome factor is not the magnetic properties of the tape, it is the mechanical properties such as the bonding agent of the magnetic layer (tape shed syndrome is real), tape shrinkage or stretch, tape physical damage, chances of recovering the tape from these type of deteriorations is near zero. Mould damage can be cleaned up but it is hazardous.

Magnetic fade can have an effect on the frequency carrier signal strength but not in a form of sharpness loss or faded colors as some people may think, It will be in a form of noise in luma and chroma, phase shift of chroma, line and frame timing errors. For an ideal storage conditions magnetic prosperities can be preserved for decades.

Is that common to come across VHS with shed syndrome? I imagine that is similar to my reel to reel tapes with (sticky shed syndrome). Any certain brand of VHS tapes that were more prone to this than others I should avoid? I know Sony HI8 are very prone to this.

It is not as common as reel to reel audio tapes but I heard of it, never come across one myself so far, It is a result of bad storage condition, I'm not aware of such failure related to a certain brand, But someone who handled a large amount of tapes like Lordsmurf may have an opinion about it.

That nonsense BS has been stated since the earliest days of VHS-to-DVD (VHS to digital), late 90s to early 2000s. "OMG! YOUR TAPES ARE DYING! AHH AHH! THE SKY IS FALLING! BETTER TRANSFER THOSE NOW! (AND USE OUR SERVICES! <WINK WINK!>)"

The truth is that most all consumer (and many pro) videotapes have a life expectancy of 35-65 years. In the 2000s, it was complete BS. But it was going to eventually be true. In the 2020s, we're now seeing some degradations. Mostly oxide flaking, mostly from certain early/mid 80s tapes. For now.

Walmart didn't exist. :rolleyes: ... Kmart, on the other hand...

Horsepucky. That person knows squat about tapes. "Demagnetized" is technobabble. What tapes suffers is oxide loss. Not the same whatsoever. The entire "demagnetized" thing is a myth that gets parroted around every so often, but doesn't even make much sense.

Correct.

No.

Not dishonest, just incompetent. (Then again... maybe BOTH dishonest and incompetent?)

Correct. Anybody that says "tape fade" in reference to color is somebody that should be ignored (or corrected, as they're spouting nonsense).

I've come across far too many in the past 5 years, including some of our own family tapes. BASF from the early 80s is especially a problem, especially if it contacts overly cold or hot video heads. You have to warm up the deck, and even then oxide can still flake. These are "one and done" tapes. Certain mid 80s Maxell are the same.

Never be a dummy, and FF/REW tapes to "re-pack it" (nonsense 99%+ of the time). If you have a one-and-done tape, you screwed up, and your best play was wasted on a needless FF/REW.

Now that clears it up. I never heard of tape fading before so immediately tuned out anything else they had to say. I informed them I would be making my own transfers, and was told that I would "run out of time" because tapes fade when they lose magnetic strength. I've heard of tape becoming warn from many plays but never this. I pretty much knew this was false but the guy went into so much detail I thought it would be amusing to debate. Maybe I was wrong but nope.

Don't protect these people. Name and shame. Warn others.

That's a touch interesting about BASF tape-stock, in Europe BASF was the supplier of Video2000 video tape stock (I think they may have been the only source, purely conjecture). Video2000 tape is slightly different from Betamax or VHS tape and requires heavily doped tape with higher magnetic coercivity: Chromdioxid.

Video2000 only used 1/2 of the tape width so to squeeze "VHS quality" out of half of the effective area of a VHS tape required higher quality tape-stock. I do wonder if some of this heavily chromed tape found its way into "High Grade" VHS tape (it's fantastic tape) and across the pond where different climates affected the tape as you describe. It's not an issue here (we've transferred hundreds of V2000 tapes without issue in the UK) but what works in one market may not be suited for another.

What works in rainy and cold Western Europe might have a distinctly different outcome in Texas - just a consideration as to why this may be the case? The Chromdioxid audio cassettes I think fared badly in humid or warm climates whereas they're still in service in UK & Europe without any of the same issues.

I might be a case of lack of proper regionialisation? Who knows.

I believe both Beta and VHS used Chrome or tapes with Chrome like performance. I have a TDK booklet here which lists its range of VHS and Beta tapes. They are all Super Avilyn, a High Bias tape.

Such tapes are by no means immune to accidental erasure but more resistant to it.

Ah you're right - SA was a common formula, but actual 'pure chrome' I think was only used by BASF, it's tricky stuff to manufacture and possibly BASF may have held a patent on it during the early 80s, if they didn't Du Pont certainly did who were very closely aligned with Philips during this period, subsequently Philips absorbing the media division of Du Pont.

It's only a hypothesis, but the problems LS suggests add to up to Chromdioxid formula tape
Smell test might be useful (I'll try it later) as heavily chromed tape (not SA or the ilk) has a very distinct smell.

High quality tape are certainly used here in the US for S-VHS and D-VHS formats, I'm pretty sure those are as good as V2000 or better, Though they were very expensive.

I'm pretty sure S-VHS tapes are Metal formulation as are Video 8, Hi 8, Digital 8 and others. The higher performance is good and theyre even harder to demagnetise but the tapes don't survive flooding nearly as well as older oxide types.

No, S-VHS is not metal and so does D-VHS because it's based on S-VHS formulation, I recorded D-VHS HD MPEG-2 @ 25MB/s on a S-VHS tape by just adding the extra hole required for D-VHS recognition, not a single glitch. Hi8 and D8 are metal because they record an equivalent S-VHS signal or better on half the size tape, high density formulation was needed.

Thanks for the correction re S-VHS tape.

Wiki is unclear on this. It says: "In order to take advantage of the enhanced capabilities of the S-VHS system, i.e., for the best recordings and playback, an S-VHS VCR requires S-VHS video tape cassettes." It cites a reference but the link is dead. Hence my slight uncertainty.

In my TDK booklet, two tape formulations are listed as S-VHS tapes, XP and XP Pro. XP Pro was also marketed as for S-VHS C. TDK claimed they were the highest grade of Super Avilyn tape they had produced but they werent Metal.

"Metal" tape is a different sort of tape-stock altogether and needs a different recording strategy to Ferric/Chrome tape. Metal tape is probably the most misunderstood, metal tape is inherently very noisy stuff and needs comparatively extreme recording levels to get the tape to record a signal. The (crude explanation) benefit of metal formulation tape is that because it can absorb such high recording levels it's easy to rise above the noise floor and the fidelity achievable is high.

There was a good/better/best paradigm with audio cassettes with ferric/chrome/metal but it's a lot more complicated than that, metal tapes really were designed for a different purpose than many people assume and pure-chrome cassettes usually provided the best in play-back fidelity but were the trickiest to record and pure-chrome formulations are very, very easy to over-saturate, hence they were relatively uncommon and cobalt-doped compromise tapes (which the machine understood as 'Class II') were more common as they provided most of the benefits of pure chrome but could take far higher input levels.

Leave your heavy rock on metal, record your classical stuff on pure chrome as it's almost hiss free. There's great ferric tapes too but I'm getting out of the subject here.

Applying this to video tape, for VHS which wasn't planned to use metal tapes I can't see they would be used, it would require electronics making the playback incompatible with normal decks I'd wager.

Anyway, back to topic, I have a BASF VHS tape in my hand (UK market) and it has all the hallmarks of a heavily chromed cassette, it's a very deep black and highly reflective stock with the characteristic waxy smell of chrome-laden tape. I wonder if this is all remaindered V2000 tape that was moved on as VHS tape, as by all accounts it's very high-grade tape.

This may be why some climates are having them break down with age, BASF audio cassettes using a similar heavy-chrome formulation are known for breaking down in warm and humid environments.

VHS doesn't use chrome tape that I know of. I have a few Dupont PD Magnetics tapes (both VHS and Betamax) and they are NOT chrome.

Dupont was the patent holder for the CrO2 formulation used for Compact Cassette with Sony being the exclusive license holder in Japan. This is why pure chrome cassettes are rare from Japanese tape brands and the industry quickly developed cobalt doped ferric Type II cassettes (TDK, Maxell, etc). I think the cobalt doped ferric tape did find its way to video tape in the form of TDK's "Super Avilyn".

In Europe, almost all the pure chrome tape came from BASF and AGFA. While low noise, it's not well regarded for long term stability. I know the cassettes have degraded a bit over time.

Entirely correct - this is a subject close to my heart.

I do have a heavily chromed VHS cassette sitting on my desk though made by BASF, as I remarked earlier this was required by V2000 as part of the specification, I would guess in the early 80s there was a few thousand kilometres of chrome videotape kicking around and the Netherlands wasn't an especially big market by this point...

Looks like BASF Chrome VHS cassettes did exist and were marketed in the US as shown here. That's NTSC market is as it's a 'T' rather than an 'E' PAL cassette length and 2-hour cassettes were quickly binned in Europe as they looked pretty rubbish against the 8-hour V2000 tapes sold alongside them I guess? Either way E/T 120 is quite rare here.

To bring this all back together, yes it's likely that BASF tapes are chrome from the 1980s, and yes they're known to degrade heavily in some climates. They're generally reasonably stable over here though.

Let's not get in to FeCr! :P

I'm in the US and I've picked up those BASF tapes shown in your link (curb side find), They are home recordings from local broadcast stations. No issues with them, though the storage conditions prior to my possession of them was unknown.

The US is bloody huge so I wouldn't speculate as to climate variability in your area, and of course not every single tape will degrade, it's just trends, not laws. The UK is only about the same size as Oregon so across the tapes I generally they probably - in general - see less climatic variance than the US as a monolith. It's just always slightly above freezing and lightly raining here for 300 days a year, then slightly warmer, cooler or drier for the remainder of the year. Light snow occasionally, sometimes it reaches 20 Celsius (68 F) and we all moan about how it's too hot, sometimes we have 2 inches of snow and the UK grinds to a hault.

A bit tongue in cheek, but the climate is just cool and damp here mostly. Something these tapes don't seem to have a large issue with :hmm:

BASF is a German company, and most of their products have always been for European markets. I just looked at an 80s tape, circa 1983, and it was made in Korea.

I don't think UK has anything to with BASF tapes acting better/worse than anywhere else. Europe as a whole is just as variable as the U.S., in terms of climate and weather. Arizona to Maine to Florida to Minnesota. Or Spain to UK to Greece to Finland.

I don't know about chrome, but you are correct about BASF odors. Those are unique. But so are some other brands.

Where was your BASF made?

While true, US not UK, US big and UK small, in the past 40+ years, both locations have seen all sorts of weather, hot and cold, wet and dry. So over a longer term, I'm not sure exact locale really matters. I think the overall climate was fairly even. It's not like the Sahara and Antarctica.

While I liked TDK in the 90s, those 80s "Super Avilyn" were never impressive. For me, it was about recording-time quality, more than longevity. At this late date, longevity is a footnote, or a last column on a spreadsheet, in terms of "best VHS tapes" (overall quality).

About that quote: blah, blah, blah. The difference between VHS and S-VHS (and D-VHS) was a hole on the tape. Not necessarily the tape formula. Lots of better VHS tapes were perfectly adequate for S-VHS. TDK HiFi/DSP (blue package) was one of them. JVC EHG (gold package) was another. To a lesser extent, Maxell HiFi (purple package) was passable.

I don't know about that. How "metal" is metal? Maxell S-VHS, for example, use black magnetite. (The tape, however, was crap. Mostly due to construction, the clamshells were flawed, often led to feathered tapes. The tape itself was merely so-so. It was no TDK Pro, or Fujifilm, or even Sony.)

This sorts of conversations are mostly interesting trivia. :)

Black tape doesn't necessarily mean metal, Metal is a very special formulation and the playback/recording machine has to have a special tape equalization in terms of recording and playback currents, erasure current, bias frequency... etc. You can't use the same VCR to playback normal tapes and metal tapes without having to switch from metal to normal and vise versa just like in an audio tape recorder. Besides metal formulation wouldn't work for Hi-Fi depth recording and linear audio anyway. Wondered why ED Beta VCR's have a switch for Super Beta and ED beta? It's for that purpose.

Even metal formulations are not created equal, tape stock is not interchangeable across a lot of consumer and pro formats. I learned that by experimenting with these types of tape formulations and put them in different cassettes. For instance I tried VXA data tapes in a D8 camcorder and I couldn't get a useful recording, Even in a Hi8 camcorder I got chroma rainbows and a lot of luma noise. I put a digital Betacam tape into D-VHS and S-VHS cassette shells and I couldn't get a digital recording, in S-VHS mode the recording was very messy, The same tape produced noisy recordings in ED Beta mode. So tape equalization is very important.

**Nods sagely**

Tape stock is a subject close to my heart, it's a very complicated topic and you're dead right here. Good point on ED Beta, this totally changes the bias and level of the recording - this is why it's not always a "good, better, best" paradigm between different tape formulations, they each have a special role and different requirements. cf. Betacam and BetacamSP.

I've not thought about depth-multiplexing though, that's an interesting consideration, that doesn't work in PAL territories as Betamax HiFi is depth-multiplexed in PAL regions akin to VHS, Betamax PAL and Betamax NTSC are quite different beasts whereas VHS is a much more uniform system.

The Korea thing wanders in to SKC (or a Saehan shell), but this isn't a forensic examination of tapes or climates, but I'm reasonably confident in my remarks on this, but ultimately it's just conjecture.

What I can say with near certainty is that BASF tape from the early 1980s is likely to be heavily chromed, the UK market example before me has all the hallmarks of a heavily chromed tape stock, chrome tape is known to degrade badly in certain climates and would delaminate or shed after time.

Another thing I might experiment with in downtime is audio, my hypothesis being that chrome formulation VHS cassettes have noticeably less noisy linear audio compared to usual doped ferric forumations?

Looking at Ray's Betamax site, BASF appears to have made chrome Betamax blanks: http://www.betainfoguide.net/basf.jpg

Just to follow up, I currently have a stack of BASF EU market VHS tapes here.

They all absolutely 'stink' of wax crayons, so much so that you notice it as soon as you open the box.

The tape stock looks identical and smells exactly the same as V2000 tape stock.

Magnetic retentivity: The ability to retain the generated magnetization in a magnetic material when the magnetizing force is removed is called the magnetic retentivity of that material. ... It is the capacity of a substance to retain magnetism after a magnetizing force is removed.

There is no such thing as perfect retentivity. ALL materials will eventually lose their magnetic charge.

Short answer to your question: Yes, magnetic video recordings will eventually fade away in storage. The question as to how long before it is unusable is almost entirely dependent on the materials used in the manufacture of the tape. I say "almost" as the subsequent storage of the tape will have some impact, but I find that since most tapes aren't stored in a hot attic, and are instead kept in a climate controlled home or business, that is rarely an issue.

I have some high quality VHS tapes that I recorded back in the late 80's that still look almost as good as new and I have some lower quality tapes (purchased videos) from just over 20 years ago that have suffered significant loss. Fortunately I had the foresight to use nothing but high quality tapes for my own personal home video recordings back in the 80's and early 90's. Having remastered and archived them again (for the 3rd time now) within the last year or so (using a JVC D-VHS deck, DVDO processor, and Colossus II Capture Card) I noticed that they still hold up, but I wouldn't wait too long to convert yours to digital. Every tick of the clock brings them closer to death.

I've always wondered if VHS tape works for audio recording in a 1/2 R2R machine at 15 ips, I don't have 1/2 R2R deck to test with, I suppose I could try it on my Sony R2R deck that can only go up to 7.5 ips if I find a way to slice the tape in half to make 1/4 inch tape. I know for a fact that people tried it for compact audio cassettes and the results were mediocre, 15 ips might work.

A T-120 VHS tape has about 246 m (roughly 800 feet of tape) or about 1600 feet split.
At 15 ips that is about 21 minutes of recording.

I suspect recording bias setting for video tape used as audio would have to be changed, as might equalization curves. And you could enjoy all the blessings of analog audio tape recording.

Below is a listing for a film splitter. Wonder if they would make a version that can split 1/2" video tape (12.7mm) to 1/2"? (I have not used it so I have no idea as to whether or not it would work.)
https://www.etsy.com/listing/266829907/film-slitter-to-cut-any-roll-film

While precise width is not very critical for film it can be for audio tape due to the narrow track widths once you go below full track heads on 1/4" tape. Width variations can cause variation is track alignment on the heads.

Videotape does make especially poor audio recording tape, I've never researched the precise reason but some especially low quality (the derided Type 0) tapes often used slit video tape. Whether metal or chomed videotape stock works I don't know, it would be an interesting experiment. We have a 1/2" multitrack machine somewhere in the storeroom (I think) so I might have a fiddle one day.

Definitely, the bias and curves as dpalomaki points out would need recalibrating.

We'd need to specify the ways in which the audio quality would be inferior using VCR tape on say a 7.5/15ips open reel analog audio recorder.

A fundamental difference between the two is the thickness of the tape. A typical VHS tape has a thinner plastic base tape and perhaps a thinner magnetic coating, for overall a much thinner tape than Standard open reel tape. The former increases print through (pre and post echoes especially over time) and the physical robustness of the tape such as resistance to stretching and creasing. The thickness of the magnetic layer affects the low frequency response because the lows penetrate deeper into the layer than the highs.

These differences were known once the different length open reel audio tapes such as Standard Play, Long Play, Double Play, Triple Play etc came onto the market some time in the 50's or 60's.

Yes the major concern is the magnetic layer thickness, Thin layer gets saturated quickly by the magnetic head but if the transport speed increased it may prevent the tape from being exposed for too long to the magnetic field, That with some equalization tweaking it should probably give decent results. I know for a fact Betacam SP analog tracks are recorded on a similar tape but with higher speed 4 ips, In most cases Betacam employs a Dolby C NR system but I listened to some tapes without NR and they sounded pretty darn good, So with 7.5 or 15 ips I believe Dolby NR is no longer needed.

Film thickness and coercivity are quite different topics, you're broadly right; but with the broadest of brushstrokes.

Betacam SP sound is very good (even on the relatively slower PAL speed) and was more than good enough for broadcast television even in markets like the UK where we switched to digital* stereo for television broadcasts in late 80s with most but the cheapest sets decoding it by the mid-90s. Betacam SP was more than good enough for this and our system (various others were used across Europe and Japan I believe) were near CD quality so would show up defects. However if you closely monitor Betacam SP it still does 'hiss' and whilst through obvious format improvements and companding it does eliminate most tape noise, it's not absent. It's far better than linear VHS/Betamax/V2000 though and is arguably more pleasant sounding than PCM or MPEG audio streams from the 1990s.

One of my businesses did an awful lot of experimentation with audio on various videotape formats so I can probably dig out some old reports if you want to see the numbers that we found. Betacam SP was a high-quality system though, I'm not denigrating it, but the hiss is still intrusive with focused listening.





*NICAM or 'Near Instantaneous Companded Audio Multiplex' - it's a slippery topic.

The main problem I heard with Betacam Dolby C audio was Dolby mistracking artifacts, often audible on news footage possibly due to misalignments between the camera deck and the studio playback deck, then perhaps compounded by the tracking errors being baked into copies. Companding NR came at a price: higher standards of maintenance (including cleanliness) and alignment. Of course Betacam SP hissed but compared to the mistracking problems it was minor.

I found the reference to S-VHS tape being a Metal formulation. It is in the IASA TC 06 C Standards paper. Its reference is Beeching 2001 p.56.

It's barely mentioned but it does mention the Metal formulation in passing:

"Older S-VHS machines will switch into normal VHS recording mode when detecting
an oxide rather than metal tape. However, JVC later produced the SVHS-ET system
(Beeching: 2001, p. 56), which allowed certain machines to make S-VHS recordings on
standard tapes, further complicating playback for archivists."

I'm trying to locate the Beeching paper.

Hmmm. Conventional wisdom was that the machines detected the hole in the cassette that denoted S-VHS. If based on detecting the tape formulation then making the hole in the cassette would NOT have worked. And detection would likely have required a record/play cycle to verify tape type every time it was inserted.

S-VHS can be recognized on playback by the frequency of the luma carrier recorded on tape.

In the late 1980s or early 1990s one of the consumer/prosumer oriented audio/video magazines did a fairly technical review of video tape comparing around 5 or 6 characteristics for several popular brands. But sadly I do not recall which mag it was.

The hole in the S-VHS tape and the sensor for it in S-VHS decks are more than "conventional wisdom". They are facts. In front of me is a Sony S-VHS cassette with the extra hole. Next to me is a Panasonic S-VHS recorder with the pin to sense such a hole, indicating a cassette containing a tape optimised for S-VHS recording.

A similar tape identification system was used extensively on later compact audio cassettes. The record lock out tab feature was extended to extra holes in the case for detection of Cr02 or Metal cassette tapes, automatically adjusting the deck's record bias, record EQ and playback EQ, but only on decks equipped with the sensors. Of course it was an indirect system and relied on the hole matching the tape, which it would from the factory unless somebody later opened the case and swapped tapes!

Yes the frequency would denote that it was recorded in a S-VHS recorder in S-VHS recording mode. It wouldnt necessarily indicate the tape type. The higher frequency luma carrier could have been recorded onto a VHS tape and produced a picture, just as it is possible to record traditional audio onto a Type I cassette with bias and EQ settings not matched to the tape. We get a result but it's not ideal. Just because a result is possible on a tape doesnt mean it is the best result possible for that tape.

The Beeching text referred to is:

"Video and Camcorder servicing and technology, Steve Beeching, Newnes, 2001"

I see there is a copy in our state reference library.