Was Beta as good as or better than reel to reel?

I had an Akai hifi VHS unit I bought in an audio shop (yes audio only) that was the bomb that I fixed several times to keep running. It was the bomb for vhs hifi recording.

I still have the Sony hifi vhs that replaced it. Not bad, but I lost interest in recording to vhs hifi when recordable cd-r for music came out.

Of course you can still buy hifi vhs recorders I think. I suspect a good Sony or equivalent to sound pretty good!

Still keep the old Yamaha cassette recorder hooked up to my system but never record there anymore, mostly used to play cassettes I recorded years ago. Other than higher background noise levels than digital, the sound is pretty good.

Beta was considered superior to VHS. But Sony patented the Beta so competitors produced the VHS, and made VHS the consumer choice because there were simply more of them.

From what I remember,VHS gave a longer record time over beta.The consumers chose the extra time over the better picture quality.

ANSWER No

Yes, record time was the big reason why VHS won out over Beta. Picture quality was said to trend a bit towards Beta but in all reality both were comparable. Beta tried to trump VHS when it introduced Beta Hi-Fi. Sony reasoned that VHS by design would not be able to make VHS into a full frequency Hi-Fi setup because there was no room between the video scans to layer in full band width audio as Beta allowed. The VHS group just created multiplexing burying the Hi-Fi audio deeper into the tape layer and created heads that could detect and construct the audio. Once that happened Beta was going down. SVHS combined with VHS Hi-Fi was stellar in analogue video record and playback. Super Beta came out and was said to again have a slight picture edge but it was all but over by then... JVC had licensed way more makers to sell VHS machines Sony never did establish a big enough licensee base.