An analog question for those who record

Like Noble100, back in the 80's I used to record to a hi-fi VHS machine specifically for the long play time, and also found the sound to be more to my liking than playing the CD direct. I seem to recall though, that my VHS deck was somewhat unique in that it would record audio without a video signal present. I believe that a video signal had to be present for hi-fi VHS and it would internally produce some sort of signal for the audio to ride on. It's been a while though! I'm not sure about Beta, but believe it was an entirely different audio process.

If sound quality is your top priority, a 1/2 track reel to reel which plays 15 ips is your best option. Aside from sound quality, its a very impractical way to archive as you'll need to store these huge and somehwat costly tapes, hunting for a track is time consuming, and you'll need to align and de-mag the heads on a regular basis.

Unfortunately, you'll lose some of the vinyl magic if you convert to digital no matter how good your chain. Trust me I've tried for years with my very high end recording studio (Manley, Weiss, Cranesong etc, etc,).

My solution is to buy back up copies of my favorite vinyl and leave it at that.

Thanks for the responses

Back in the day I tried recording onto a VHS HiFi deck and though the fidelity was very nice it was not a user friendly format in trying to search for songs if the need arose or time it took to fill out a long VHS tape in recording.

Honestly if you want to preserve your vinyl collection onto another analogue format get yourself a good cassette deck. 3 heads often give you the best choice especially if you go with models older than say 1990 when the manufactures put a lot of time and money into good decks. But also there are some sleeper two head decks from makers such as Nakamichi (though their three headers were generally among the best) and Harmon Kardon among others good made in Japan two head decks.

Finding good new tape stock is hard today but lots of NOS on eBay etc.

Properly recorded vinyl onto a good cassette deck can be quite impressive, give you a lot of that analogue sound vinyl gives and it very user friendly.

I have a good 1/2 track reel, a cassette deck, good VCR that I used for that purpose once upon a time; now I use the PC. I hope that tells you something.