what was wrong with it?

The heads. They replaced all of them and tightened the whole deck and performed what they call "General Maintenance".

That means they changed the upper drum. How much they charge for the spare part there?

$108 for everything, including shipping. And this was with the $10 coupon. Not to bad. It's nice though now that I have the thing in pretty much a close-to-refurbished condition. Or would that be saying to much? Either way, nothing is broken and everything works just as if it was new.

Oh, and if anyone was thinking of sending stuff to JOTS, I'd do it now. One of the tech's there that called me said that the guy who worked on my unit, who had been doing this for about 30 years, was going to retire very soon, and said I was lucky mine came at the time it did.

So all in all, I paid a pretty good amount for the VCR initially from eBay and then this repair price on top of that. But it was worth it.

That's very cheap. Just the upper drum will cost near that when bought separately. I've paid between $80 and $250 for pretty basic service including parts over the years for stuff I can't repair myself (in Europe). If it costs more than that, I give serious consideration to dump the unit to a spare part bin.

Seems like now there is a weird audio glitch that happens randomly throughout video. All the sudden the audio will distort for a few seconds. I'll try and post up a sample of what happens soon. In the meanwhile, I also bought an HR-S9600U, so I can test the video out on that deck just to see if it goes away. It'd be rather awkward if this problem didn't go away after testing it on the 2 best decks that exist.

Extra: Forgot this, but this audio problem happens on more than 1 tape.

have you tried the tapes in a Panny deck?

those are very good decks but i would not say they are the best that exist.

No, I do not currently own a Panny deck. I did try it in my JVC BR-s800u and the audio glitch did not happen. However, that deck is absurdly old and terrible at picture, but it does give insight into there being a problem with the JVC 9800 deck, which is odd since it was serviced by JOTS and they checked the whole deck.

What would you say are the best that exists? I gathered my info from this forum, of which arguably the 9600 is the most mentioned as the best deck, with the 9800 and Panny AG1980p in a tie for 2nd.

The 9600 deck should get here next Friday. I'm currently at work, but hopefully I can get a sample up tomorrow and see what you guys think. If the 9600 deck doesn't help matters, I'll give JOTS a call and ask them what they think it could be and if it's something they can fix.

Afterthought: I have considered buying a Panny AG1980p, but am not sure about it. From the big guys here, the JVC's have a superior transportation system and picture quality, and the Panny seems to be a good alt for tapes recorded in SLP, of which I have none.

Edit number the 2nd: The big ass JVC BR-S800U just croaked. I have no desire to save this deck, so I just chucked it for scrap metal. At least it did help at one last time before it met its demise.

the best deck ever made is probably the JVC SR-W320U , SR-W5U & SR-W7U
these are very rare and expensive W-VHS decks
the W5U was like $3000 new and the W7U was closer to $7000

the AG-1980 is a great deck - ive had tapes (even SP) that simply wouldn't track on my JVC's that played perfect in an AG-1980.

There's no problem with the video tracking. It's just that there's an odd audio glitch that comes out of nowhere. Further investigation is required.

i guess just wait and see if the 9600 does it.
if it does than it just may be a tape that wont play well in a JVC deck and you be forced to use a Panny.

I can confirm that the problem is with the VCR. I tried multiple tapes, different cables, and hooking up to a TV. I uploaded a sample of the audio glitch I'm talking about.

The first here is a smaller compressed version I made for those that have limited bandwith/don't want to download 325MB files.

- https://www.dropbox.com/s/jkzlof7ryq...est-encode.mp4
- (mirror) http://cdn4.digitalFAQ.com/juhok/Nig...est-encode.mp4

And here is the original uncompressed capture.

- https://www.dropbox.com/s/34trexl1rg...20original.avi
- (mirror) http://cdn4.digitalFAQ.com/juhok/Nig...t-original.avi

Will wait for the 9600 to come in. If the 9600 produces the same audio anomaly, I'll be calling JOTS about my 9800.

I mirrored your files to our CDN. :congrats:

Your AVI file is actually silent on my laptop.
The MP4 has audio flutter that's generally found on poorer long-play VHS tape recordings. It's usually only in the HiFi, not the linear (mono) tracks.

The avi should be silent, as it was recorded with lagarith and thus doesn't play back for me. (Unless in an editor like Vdub).

That's why the audio flutter is so weird. That recording came from a commercial VHS tape. The audio flutter is not present when I played it on my BR-S800U, same thing for all the other tapes I had. That's why I think it's a problem with the VCR itself.

That commercial tape, a wishbone episode, is only about an hour long. I even played it back on a cheap crappy deck before I got any of the VCR's I had just to watch it and it still played fine.

go into the menu and turn off the Hi-Fi - use normal audio and see what is does.

i have a commercial copy of a Harry Potter movie and crackles and pops in any JVC deck if the Hi-Fi is on.
it plays fine in normal audio.

some decks just plain dont like some tapes.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a winner. The 9600 plays all the tapes back just fine with no audio flutter. Score 1 for me. But now, I'll need to send the 9800 back to JOTS to find out why it doesn't want to play nice.

Your 9800 issue could only be one of two things:

1. Tape capability, aka how finicky it is with that specific tape. It's not uncommon for decks to perform slightly different from one another. There's also no guarantee that the 9600 is in top condition simply because it played the tape. Indeed, there may be an imperfection inside of it that happens to match the imperfection of the tape! This is why you NEVER calibrate hardware against random tapes, but instead against testing criteria.

2. An alignment issue, or more specifically, a mild imperfection in the alignment. And it would be a tracking problem, just not one that presents visible errors. Such problems would be most pronounced on the SLP (EP) mode recordings.

Though you first mentioned the audio glitch in post#46 above, you've not yet specified more about the source. For example, is it a like group of homemade tapes? (i.e., All made on the same VCR, around the same time?). Or are these SP mode commercial tapes?

Let's try to determine the error first, before jumping the gun. :)

It would be rather impossible for it to be an alignment issue, as I have already sent the 9800 to JOTS and they fixed that issue and replaced heads. (Or, at the least, if it really was an issue with the alignment still, then that would mean JOTS didn't do a good job in fixing the VCR the first time)

The source is varied. I have a commercial VHS tape to test against, and I also have many homemade VHS tapes to transfer. None of the tapes were recorded in SLP mode. The VHS tapes were captured with a very (now) ancient JVC VHS camcorder, of which it no longer exists. (Meaning, it got thrown away decades ago)

The fact that I sent the VCR to JOTS and they did a full diagnostics and didn't catch this issue is odd. I of course have no idea how they test their VCR's there or what VHS tapes they use. Maybe the tape they used worked fine, and for some reason mine don't.

I don't exactly think I'm jumping the gun here though. I've already tested the unit as far as I can with what I have. The only thing I have not tried is turning off the Hi-Fi audio and using Normal mode.

EDIT: Hey, well whadda know. Turning the audio to Norm fixed the audio issue. But, does anyone have an explanation as to why that worked?

And just for the sake of generating some interesting conversation (hopefully), I captured the same scene on both the 9800 and the 9600 just to compare the video quality since I can actually do this now.

I captured both of the files lossless with lagarith. Then, I put both videos into Vdub and then used Vdub's feature of "Copy source frame to clipboard" and then pasted into paint and saved as a PNG. I took 3 different shots for comparison.

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/158311

A very handy site for comparing images.

What is immediately noticeable is that the 9800 has to much red in it. The 9800 also appears sharper than the 9600, but that also appears to bring out artifacts because of this. The first picture is a good indicator of this.

The 9600 is much softer, but gives a more natural picture. Also to keep in mind that the settings on each of the VCR's is the same. (i.e., Digital R3 is on, tbc/dnr button is on, etc.) It would be nice if the 9800 could tone the red down a bit so that it looks like the 9600, but I don't think that kind of option is available in the VCR menu.

Could you use the same frame in your comparison? I like these sorts of comparisons; could you make a short clip of each, in a lossless codec?
I can equalize the sharpness and the colors... my theory is that I can make them look exactly the same (minus random noise).

I did make a lossless clip, I said so in the beginning of the post. However, getting the same frame is rather difficult. As close as they are, they represent the jist of what I'm trying to get across. It'll take awhile for me to upload samples, have to go in to work.

I could probably make them look the same too with 3rd party filters and such. What I'd like/prefer is that they look the same on the VCR in playback and capture.

Here, I'm afraid I went the wrong way though :(
http://www.screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/158336
#1: 9600 vs 9800
#2: 9600 vs 9800->9600
#3: 9800->9600, 9800

What this means, is my filtering to make the 9800 look like the 9600, in other words the sharp one is made to look like the soft one. This was done with a sophisticated convolution technique. The brightness difference is an artefact, I\'ll have to look into it.