I remember reading about those digital Sony interfaces in the
eighties.  If I recall, they used 32,000 samples per second so they
weren't directly compatible with CD systems, but they probably sounded
quite good anyway.

        Older VCR's need to see at least a vertical sync at the
correct rate in order to record at a uniform speed.

        I even read that some public television station in Boston used
to broadcast an experimental digital feed of classical music
performances through one of those Sony devices and the audience was
instructed to tune their VCR to that channel and then feed the video
out to the correct input on their digital converter and the result was
digital radio.

        I think if you just want to use an older VCR to record audio,
all you need is a source of a good sync signal.  I do this all the
time and just tune in a channel to provide a signal to make the sync
circuitry happy and then feed audio in to the auxiliary input jack.
It makes for some very strange video tapes, I am sure, but the sound
is steady.  With one of the digital systems, you could have two stereo
channels plus the linear edge track for yet another audio channel.

        Thanks for mentioning the name of the Sony F1.  I have
always wanted to find one of those, but had forgotten what it was
called.


Martin McCormick

andy howard writes:
>Many of the earliest digital audio recordings were done on video
>recorders, using a Sony F1 PCM adaptor. In those days "real" digital
>recorders cost a small fortune so the Sony/video recorder system gained
>a lot of friends by being some two orders of magnitude cheaper(!)