VHS Hi-Fi audio crackles with 2018 technology?
 

I never imagined that VHS hi-fi (which once sounded kind of pretty okay) could blow up so badly with the irregular crackling after 20+ years. If you know of anybody who has written this problem up I could use a pointer to that.

But speculating - it sounds to me like there is both a frequency aspect and a dynamic component.

By that I mean that the artifacts present in fairly specific frequency space and that they may be triggered by or trail certain kinds of audio events. They are either masked or suppressed in most produced musical content which is likely dynamically compressed.

Question 1. Do you agree with the characterization above or can you help me flesh it out?

Question 2. Do you think that the artifacts are regular enough to be lessened by some combination of algorithmic processing?

I am thinking about tools for mapping out an audio file and then more aggressively processing likely problem areas.

Sample? :question:

I don't agree, no. It's far more likely that you have an audio issue.

But you've not said what you were doing, what hardware was involved, etc. That matters most.

thanks, and I probably should have placed this in the restoration thread but I have been head down in capture.

I encountered this while setting up an old D865GBF (mine circa 2003 for audio work with an E-Mu 1212M) and a 9600XT that I found last year.

I thought that I had a clocking error so I dropped my work tape in another VHS hi-fi. The artifact is in the source of this tape, a commercially duplicated 22 minute instructional for an appliance.

I will load up your Sound Forge filters and take a look at those. I looked at the my first test pass in Izotope RX (not the advanced version) and that led to my original guesses. Izotope RX has a spectral editor.

Yes, embedded issues are quite common.

And if anything, newer hardware is better than old, and that makes errors more obvious, both audio and video.