An analog question for those who record

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.

Years ago (early 90's) I did a bit of hi-fi audio recording on a VHS Hi-Fi vcr. Tapes sounded great. Did not do much of it as I was more likely to record onto cassette for my car audio system. Fast forward to modern times. I from 2008 onwards added some cassette decks to my gear to archive many of my LP's to get a good analogue copy of my LP's and to have fun with such. I added a reel to reel about a year ago and it was a fun medium but very costly to buy good tape stock for. Fidelity was great though.

Most recently I reacquired a VHS HiFi vcr and began to make some tape dubs off my vinyl and IMO the audio fidelity is near impeccable to the original source. One would have to under the highest scrutiny listen to hear much a difference between a Hi-fi vcr tape and the source. Of course VHS is a more cumbersome format for search and for doing any heavy editing, but for archiving LP's or CD's one can get at the fast speed on a T-120 tape 2 hours of audio and at EP speed 6 hours with no loss in fidelity. IMPRESSIVE!

BUT! On must search out older vcrs say from the late 80's to the early 90's as these had better design and most often included manual record level settings. Late 90's to more current 2000's deck were/are just built rather cheap.