Capturing LP cassettes with misaligned video?

[araset]

Hi my video tapes are recordered with misaligned VCR. I know how to misalign vcr in the video but sometimes in the recording there is only mono sound, sometimes stereo and sometimes one channel is louder then other. This is due due misaligned audio? What should I do? Reduce to mono in Hybrid? Thanks.

[aramkolt]

Mono sound usually means the HiFi is not coming through or flickering in and out which is annoying, so the deck probably still isn't "misaligned" correctly to match the tape. Certain VCRs will also allow you to just output the linear audio track only in their menus or will just output it separately such as is the case with the AG1980 which has a completely separate output for linear audio. It's kind of cool that you can technically capture the hifi and linear audio simultaneously in those cases and then decide later which audio is better for specific scenes without having to recapture.

[timtape]

Sometimes manually adjusting the "tracking" control in playback just a little to one side of the VCR's auto tracked position can be enough to prevent the HiFi sound from dropping out, and without affecting the picture. On many VCR's this is done using the two "channel" buttons on the remote while playing the tape. Or there may be dedicated "tracking" buttons on your remote. Some Sony VCR's had this for example.

A good HiFi track on an LP tape sounds better than LP linear (mono) so we only use the linear if we have to. Unfortunately sometimes (more often than we'd like) the HiFi track cannot be tweaked to play reliably so we're forced to use the LP linear. An LP linear track can be optimised to sound its best but achieving this is usually specialist work and beyond most users.

[radiokom]

As timtape wrote. Manual tracking adjustment is a must in many cases. Digital tracking not always work correctly on particular tapes. This is why I like those S-VHS recorders with manual tracking adjustment with potentiometer (not +- knobs) and Hi-Fi tracking indicator. Like in many professional VCR and some consumer. I always check tracking with manual adjustment before digitization.