Audio popping on home vhs tapes but not retail vhs tapes

[Egon]

This is driving me a bit mad.

I have a JVC SR-V101US that plays wonderfully but we had a power outage and now I'm getting audio pops on ONLY vhs tapes that are home movies. Any retail movie is fine. The audio comes from the vrc into a hauppauge wintv 885. I've switched all the cables out, tried different settings, tried a different outlet, tried opening it up to clean the heads, and I just cannot get rid of them.

I'm included a sample of the pops.

[Eric-Jan]

To me this sounds like static you hear on a Medium Wave radio, maybe some capacitors got fried by the mains spike ?
Your own tapes have this also with the anti record tap removed ?
Do tapes with only analog sound (lineair track) have this too ?

[dpalomaki]

Commercial tapes often include stereo Hi-Fi audio, and many players default to playing the stereo sound. Many home VHS recordings only had linear sound. Can you select linear or stereo/Hi-Fi audio output on the player? If so see if it is present on the linear track of the commercial tapes.

[Eric-Jan]

On the other hand..... it also sounds like a loose wire or metalic part... does it get any worse when you move or knock on the vcr, or any parts connected ?

btw. I see this vcr has a Three-prong power cord ...(this is just a wild guess.....) the earth wire is used before and after the "failure" ? (earth loop comes also in mind) does your house mains have a earth leakage circuit breaker ?
it could be EMI caused by the outage,
https://www.controleng.com/articles/...noise-and-emi/
I guess even plastics rubbing against each other could generate EMI
Does other HiFi sound equipment have the same "noise" ? (earth loop)
Can you try another audio input on the vcr ? this interference is not visible in the video ?
Any Plasma tv screen nearby ?