I think the appeal exists for exactly the same reason: the affectations of the medium.

Both vinyl and VHS are obviously inferior as a medium for high-fidelity playback compared to modern digital formats. Both impart their own artefacts and types of imperfection which may be aesthetically desirable for what they evoke. Consider the recent "Alien: Isolation" game- the developers made extensive use (and abuse) of analog video playback equipment to recreate the battered, lo-fi feel of technology in the other Alien films.

A big assumption here is that the throwback to these old mediums is quality or artefacts but, with vinyl at least, I think that's largely wrong. Most of the arguments I see for it is the packaging. The package a vinyl record comes in has multiple large pieces of artwork, liner notes, lyrics etc. The medium also encourages listening to music as a main activity when we're all now so used to it being background noise.

With VHS you get crappy quality, you need more physical storage space (but, unlike vinyl, you don't get better packaging in return), and seeking is much more difficult (with vinyl seeking is almost as easy as CD/digital). Nostalgia is probably the biggest driver when it comes to VHS (in the same way audio cassettes are gaining in popularity).

> multiple large pieces of artwork

I've spent a few bucks on used records just to have the large format album art.

For whatever reason I don't have any nostalgia for the ritual of listening to a record, even though I tend to listen to full albums anyway.

I'd suggest LaserDisc is closer to the vinyl of video - maybe CED - but LaserDisc qualitywise was almost broadcast, and pushed the best the medium (NTSC) could do.

I grew up watching the Wizard of Oz every year on standard def broadcast TV. Then I moved to LA and got a chance to see it in a theatre from a restored print on actual film (this was 20 years ago). The detail was incredible, but it also took some of the magic away because it was now painfully obvious that it was shot on a sound stage. Production flaws that had been hidden by the low definition were now painfully visible. I haven't watched it since, despite the fact that I have it on DVD.

It's probably an urban legend, but I remember hearing that porn DVD's didn't sell well initially because VHS did a better job at covering.... "imperfections"

Even TV anchorpersons were concerned in the early days of HD, that their small wrinkles, blemishes, or imperfect makeup would be noticeable.

I don't know if they just do a more careful job with makeup now, or if they slightly defocus the camera, or how that was resolved.

Better makeup:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/05/fashion/foundation-makeup-...

I suspect it's a little bit of that, and also a little bit of... well you know what that song says the Internet is for.

I can understand not wanting a high quality signal of something not meant to be high quality. But DVDs can hold a low-quality video just fine. I've got some SD DVDs.

And VCRs are generally substantially lower quality than the "original" since VCR tapes are much lower resolution than NTSC, so that doesn't really work well.

Really, none of the vinyl arguments apply here.

(Full disclosure, I don't really buy the vinyl arguments either. My personal suspicion is that vinyl has historically been thought to be better not because of vinyl advantages but because vinyl mixes weren't participating in the loudness war. I'll buy that a non-war'ed vinyl might sound better than a war'ed CD, but I'd rather have a non-war'ed CD.)

> Full disclosure, I don't really buy the vinyl arguments either. My personal suspicion is that vinyl has historically been thought to be better not because of vinyl advantages but because vinyl mixes weren't participating in the loudness war. I'll buy that a non-war'ed vinyl might sound better than a war'ed CD, but I'd rather have a non-war'ed CD.

Heh. Everybody forgets that the Loudness War goes all the way back to even the Beatles. It's not new.

However, most people who "prefer" vinyl do so because it sounds "warm". They like the sonic imprint that the needle, preamp, amplifier (which has to be tube, dontcha know), and speakers put on the sound.

In reality, it's personal preference with a dose of whatever you were raised on in adolescence. It's like guitar preference--you may like the sound a Fender Stratocaster makes when we all know that a Rickenbacker 360 is objectively superior while staying in tune better. (Yes, I'm being sarcastic :) )

But, yes, calling vinyl "better" is quite silly. Especially since it degrades with every playing.

>> "Heh. Everybody forgets that the Loudness War goes all the way back to even the Beatles. It's not new."

Loudness was something to strive for then sure but it wasn't crushing the dynamics out of music the way we've been doing since the 90's. Digital made that possible so older vinyl records will have much greater dynamic range.

Personally my preference for vinyl is packaging. I like large art, liner notes, and lyrics. I also like that it encourages me to make listening my main activity instead of using music as background noise. In these areas vinyl is superior but I don't think any medium is overall better than another. They're useful for different things. I subscribe to two streaming services and have headphones on most of the day. Without digital streaming I'd spend half the day flipping records and going crazy.

IIRC, the "no vinyl loudness war" argument is based on the fact that vinyl loudness is limited since it causes a higher probability of needle skipping. This is also the reason for why vinyls are recorded with the bass de-emphasised, needing a corresponding vinyl RIAA preamp.

> But, yes, calling vinyl "better" is quite silly. Especially since it degrades with every playing.

For what is worth, this is what I heard a vinyl fan say about this: "Since the needle changes the disk, every time you play a vinyl you are effectively listening to it for the first time. DVDs can't do that"

My favorite part is people buying vinyl nowadays that come from digital masters (same as the CD/MP3 versions)—with none of the warmth of analog.

The 'warmth' of vinyl isn't just due to the mastering (though this certainly plays a part), it's also meant to be because of the physical limitations of the vinyl itself. IIRC the grooves made for low frequencies are easier to create than the grooves for high frequencies.

Intersting so it's essentially EQ'd differently post pressing? Did they not take this into account when creating the master by cutting low frequencies or boosting highs?

Yes, they did. An inherent tradeoff between mids and bass has to be made to prevent the needle skipping, too. A great example is if you go listen to roots or dub reggae, like Barrington Levy - mids are sucked in to accommodate the huge bass, and the treble is pushed up to compensate for the resultant lack of clarity/character.

Needle skipping is also the original reason for mid/side (or in old terms, lateral/vertical) style processing - in a stereo record groove, anything mono is equal on both sides, hence in the 'mid(dle)' of the mix. Anything panned is more prominent on one side than another. Compressing the mid and side differently allows you to maximise the stereo-ness of the record without as much effect on the overall mix, and without throwing the needle off to the side. When multi-channel recordings first came out, they originally mixed different instruments to different channels instead of trying to create a cohesive single image. It was basically between headphones and the quest for loudness that engineers found that you can get 'more' out of the record with a (now-traditional) centre-focused mix.

Yes, then it's undone by your record player https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization

Reading up a little further it appears vinyl had issues with both high and low frequencies, but the bass frequencies tended to be boosted by the amp. The weaknesses on the high and low frequencies seems to tie in with the RIAA equalisation information.

>How can someone think [VHS Video is] superior to modern alternatives?

There are two camps of people in the legacy-media market, collectors/nostalgists, archivist. There are many nostaligists who enjoy vinyl for the warm feeling it psycologically imparts and similarly so for VHS video.

Where the legacy-media market splits is when it comes to archivist. There are many archivist who prefer the vinyl medium over digital because of media-rot issues. The robustness of vinyl is exceptional compared to other medium [1] If you want to play back a CD you are reliant on a CD player and all of it's integrated circuits working properly to extract the information. With vinyl all you really need is something that rotates and a thin nail. This is attractive to archivists.

The closest equivalent of vinyl in the video domain is film: super low tech play back (heck you can even look at it) it's longevity is worse than vinyl though.

[1]probably due to it's low information density and how the data is sequenced. I.e. one aberrant perturbation of the medium or read head doesn't cause large chunks of the data to be lost or unreadable.

"With vinyl all you really need is something that rotates and a thin nail."

All you need something that rotates and a thin nail?

It is really hard to make something that rotates well enough to play vinyl discs. I know because I made my own DIY vinyl player as a young engineering student. In the end it was way simpler and it did sound better to make a contactless(optical) head with air blowing to remove the dust. Even then it did not sound as well as the real thing.

It takes a couple millions of dollars to replicate an old vynil player with similar quality. Those plates are balanced and big. The head needs micromachined components.

Companies spent an enormous amount of capital in order to do it right, and every unit is expensive to make.

It is way simpler to read a CD today than to read a Vinyl. Normal players also destroy the discs over time. How many optical Vinyl players you see? How much them cost?

Reading CDs is super simple. They are pots or no pots, zeros or ones. We could do it with simple step motors today and cheap lasers.

One aberrant [and multiple] perturbation on the medium in digital is easily fixed with CRC checking. Also with digital there are millions of disc with the exact same information. For archivists this makes incredible simple to restore all the information.

It is in analog where you lose data. First, every disc, or film or tape is different from the others, you can only guess what is original and what is noise, degradation and so on.

In Vinyl, if the head jumps too fast your sound saturates and you lose everything in between. Dust , scratches, a hair, everything could harm you.

Vinyl's robustness comes from being purely mechanical and analog. That's film's advantage too. To play back a CD, you need the physical electronics to read the data (even moreso for magnetic media formats) but you also need the algorithms needed to turn the physical data into information. With vinyl the wiggles in the medium are directly related to wiggles in the sound waves the medium is encoding; all you have to do is amplify them. Even if you had no idea what a record is, you could stumble across the playback mechanism by accident.

You are right, the video analogue to vinyl is film. I can see the appeal of 35mm film, I can see people imagining it as more natural (being analogue) and having certain human/warm qualities --but I can't see that in VHS. VHS is very utilitarian, I can only guess it's the "vernacular" aspect of it. It was the every man or woman's medium, it was not classy, not professional, so maybe that, the vernacular, the pedestrian appeal. Like the Bic pen or the cheap Dutch bikes, acetate eyeglasses frames, polyester, etc.

When I'm at my grandparents I get a kick out of watching VHS movies on their old CRT TV. Plus I get to watch the unadulterated version of 'A New Hope'.

After about 10 minutes I forget what I'm watching on anyway.

I'm not going to set that up at home though..

The unadulterated version of the original Star Wars is, kind of, available, as the "Despecialized Edition" widely floating around the universe. It's HD. So, so much better than VHS, particularly if you have a big TV on which to play it.

Just to add: there's also the Silver Screen edition [1], which is sourced from a single cleaned up 35mm film print, instead of from scenes spliced from various sources.

[1] http://thestarwarstrilogy.com/starwars/post/2016/01/15/Team-...

Why not set it up at home? It takes up one little corner and you get the added bonus of being able to play lightgun games, which my kids cant get enough of!

There are lightguns that work with LCDs. They use the same principle as a wiimote (LED bars at the top/bottom of the screen, plus some calibration). Accuracy isn't 100%, but it's no worse than the CRT lightguns I used in the past.

So no need to lug that CRT around just for that.

Maybe they love the fact that every time they play a tape it is slowly being destroyed. Most VHS tape will reduce to noise after repeated playback over time. Especially if the player is lousy, you can see quality loss within a few viewings.

You would have to be visually impared to not see the huge difference between VHS and a hidef digital video. I doubt that most people can tell the difference between vinyl and a CD. Many audiopaths (aka audiophiles) will of course argue that vinyl is vastly superior, bringing up all kinds of pseudo-science which is also used to sell overpriced gear

Vinyl and cd are simple to tell apart. On cd there's no hums, no crackles, better bass and overall fidelity is better. It's like the different between DVD and bluray. On a good system anyone can tell the difference.

Not to mention vinyl has to be specially mastered for, so the content isn't even 1:1.

Technically better doesn't inherently mean more enjoyable, though.

I would say the success of "VHS Camera" apps and the like (and mostly with people scarcely old enough to remember what a VHS looked like) suggests there's quite a bit of taste for the general aesthetic of analog video.

Nobody in this thread has said it, but, like vinyl, there are a lot of weird cassettes out there that you cannot find on DVD or YouTube. If you're looking for surreal/nostalgic/obscure videos, VHS is a phenomenal format, similar to vinyl for particular genres (dance music, country, 20s-40s music...).

They never claimed VHS is “superior to modern alternatives”, they claimed it is “the vinyl of analog video recording”.

That's true but many/most people who are into vinyl are convinced that it sounds objectively better, IME. Not because of the compression/mastering issues everyone knows about, not because of the nostalgia factor- they literally just think it's an inherently better medium for recording and replaying audio. Such is the power of the human imagination. :)

Nobody will tell you that they vinyl is technically better, but that it sounds subjectively better for them.

They will tell you that sounds better(for them). It is not imagination, it is taste.

Lots of artist and people that love old music(like Beatles) prefer vinyl because it was the medium for what it was created. I understand them, they have a point.

If I play Sonic the Hedgehog or original Mario on an emulator and a digital TV I see pixels that were not there on fuzzy old screens.

Oh, you can find someone who believes any given idea, no matter how crazy, especially in the audio world. See #9 here for example:

https://bluechat.io/list/top-ten-reasons-why-vinyl-is-better...

The consequences of the fact that vinyl is ultimately made out of atoms is lost on many. The idea that "analog" means "infinite precision" is surprisingly common.

Sonic is an interesting example.

If you'd played the game in Europe, your TV would have had a SCART connector. That provided much better picture quality, and wasn't as fuzzy.

http://m.neogaf.com/showthread.php?t=630556

Which is still a bizarre claim. If anything is "the vinyl of analog video recording", it's actual film on reels, not videotape. It's more accurate to say that VHS is the compact cassette of analog video recording.

Wouldn't that be closer to the reel-to-reel of analog video recording? (..which is also making a somewhat more understated comeback)

Cassettes are making a comeback too

Yeah, I don't get that either. All the "convenience" of tape and it sounds crappy, too!

It can't just be nostalgia—my first portable playback device was a Sony Walkman and I can't ever imagine wanting to use one again.

TechMoan on YouTube has a great video on cassette tapes - granted he's got thousands and thousands of dollars worth of audio equipment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVoSQP2yUYA

Well, I get that. My issue is I can't see anything redeeming in the technology. It's not "warm to the eyes" or the artifacts don't humanize it, they usually get in the way of the experience. VHS to me, was a useful tool, but inferior, none the less.

I understand if someone wants to keep their old collection, but.... Paying thousands for a "rare" copy of an inferior technology? I don't get it.

Conspicuous consumption, I can spend the thousands and you can't therefore I'm better.

Personally I'm not a big fan of this seedy aspect of humanity, and would file a bug on it, if someone could just point me to the right github account...

Some people are enthusiastic about compact casettes as well. It's just nostalgia, rationalized as some unquantifiable "warm" sound.

The same thing will happen with mp3s. Remember those random clicks and skips of early, buggy encoders?

A Super VHS VCR using Super VHS tapes provides surprisingly good quality for generic analog.