I was involved in the indie music scene in the late 1980s and 1990s and recall similar systems to this - digital audio recorded on analog videocassettes.<p>IIRC, WBRS, the radio station at Brandeis University, used one such system to record live performances at the studio in two channels of digital audio starting in the late 1980s. I also worked with a studio in Taiwan in 1997 that used analog video cassettes to record 16 channels of digital audio, which were then mixed down to 2 channels and burned to a CD-ROM.<p>One of the limitations that we were very aware of at the time was being able to extract the audio from the tapes at a later date. No home users had gear that could play back the tapes, and it seemed that very few studios even had access to these specialized pieces of machinery.<p>In the early 1990s, I also worked in a 24-track London recording studio, which still used very thick analog tape for multitracking, but would output demos or test mixes to the then-emerging DAT standard (<a href="https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Digital_Audio_Tape" rel="nofollow">https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Digital_Audio_Tap...</a>).
Digital audio storage on video predates this, and even VHS, by quite a long way. The whole reason we have the weird sample rate of CD audio is because it was one that could conveniently be stored and retrieved as a video signal in either PAL or NTSC.
Who remembers D-VHS? Digital video on VHS.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-VHS" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-VHS</a>
I only started watching this channel about six months ago, but have really been enjoying it. (I started supporting Techmoan on Patreon shortly thereafter.)<p>If you're interested in hi-fi, photography, new/classic/weird/historical technology, I'd recommend checking out the rest of Techmoan's catalog.
Seeing this brings back a vague recollection of touring a radio station -- I'm going to guess in the early 90s -- and seeing a bank of VHS machines they used to record everything they broadcast. I think I (or someone) asked about them, as it was weird to see video cassettes in a radio station, and so I'm fairly sure it was actually VHS and not DAT or something proprietary. It definitely didn't look like machine in this video. I don't remember what the radio station was anymore, but it's very possible it was a college station.<p>Was this a common thing, or am I just misremembering this? Maybe just a hack a college station would have done to use commodity hardware/tapes and get 6 hours of recording time per tape?
Reminds me of<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid</a><p>(Data storage on VHS)
VHS is a great analog tape format, too. S-VHS HiFi audio recording rivals reel-to-reel multitrack tape quality (i.e. close to objective CD quality). Only problem is the tape life is terrible.