This machine pays it's own tapes fine. Tapes recorded on another machine play in black and white and recordings made on this machine play in black and white on other machines.
I was a Sony certified tech, worked for Sony for awhile, left because they wanted to transfer me to national lab to work as a QA engineer. Not a snowballs chance in hell I was going to winterpeg. Left sony and ended up at a large indie shop running the service dept.Stayed there almost 19 years and couldn't handle the owner. Was a real piece of work. Went to the phone company where I still am. The youtube channel started because I was bored.
@@12voltvids nothing wrong with that. You have definitely shown us great knowledge and given us hope that great techs like yourself take pride in their work. Salute to you.
Unrelated, but one time I recorded a concert from PBS. VHS tape. Went to play it back, nothing but garbage. The tape was defective. It was a new tape never used before. I wanted to save a certain song that I loved. I had a 2 head VCR. I, just on a hunch borrowed my mom's 4 head VCR. It showed a watchable picture. So I copied the song from her VCR to another known good tape. I'm glad I did. Because to my knowledge, they didn't show that concert again. Sessions at West 54th Street was the show. Interesting that a tape would only play on the device it was recorded on, as in your case.
As soon as I heard "the heads were replaced", I yelled at the screen "they put the upper drum in backwards!". And yes I did learn about this from you. :)
It was probably the shop owner as he did the repairs after I left and he couldn't get anyone to work for him. (Hmmm I wonder why, it was a toxic place to work)
Its actually more common with the newer style that has a rotary transformer as part of the head drum. They are wired differently on the lower drum. So someone grabs a head off one brand of machine and pops it on another and wonders where the color went.
09:42 - PAL actually reverses the phase rotation of the chroma every line back and forth. It's not just offsetting the phase 180 degs. So, just illustratively, because PAL encoding wasnt actually RGB but YPbPr (YUV), but you can imagine that in one line it went RGBRGBRGBRGB, and in the other it went BGRBGRBGRBGR, and then back to the first one etc. For receivers the phase of the color burst was +45 degs for odd lines, -45 degs for even lines, that was telling receivers if the chroma is in forward or backward phase rotation. It is called 'swinging burst'. Maybe I'm stating the obvious again for you here; also everyone is welcome to correct me. 10:46 - I think the tracks overlap in SP speed too, or the slant azimuth would make no sense. 21:51 - Well I did wonder what the paint on one half meant; now I'd call the guy who did the mistake, a bonehead too.
If I remember ntsc steps the phase forward 90' evert field. It takes 2 full frames to get back where you started. Beta and 8mm do it that way if I remember and vhs flipped 180. Its been so long since I worked with this crap i have forgotten most of it.
@@stevemurnane1892 You would be surprised how many comments I get telling me I am pronouncing it wrong. I go out of my way to emphasize the "L" just to send them over the deep end.
It would have been the owner. After I left nobody would work for him so he went back to repairing stuff himself for s few years then shut the service dept and put a sound room in the space. 4 years later the shop closed
Figured as much as I believe all VHS were the same. Don't know about the Beta 711 chassis however because that head drum was keyed. There was a magnet on the head disc that poked through a hole in the base (that was the PG trigger) so the head only went on one way.
@@12voltvids This was a brilliant solution. On the same matter, what is the chassis model for the older betamax like my SL-C7 (or SL-T9)? If I recall (will look it up as soon as I'll get home from work), on my SL-c7 the magnet also pokes from the bottom of the disc.
@@12voltvids Hi Dave, after checking I have confirmed that the head disc for the SL-C is the same withe the magnet on the bottom, so this one also can go only one way. I had a question about the mechanism in my deck, and what I meant was: like there is the 711 chassis and it's variants, what was the name for the older chassis. Best Regards, Moshe.
I have a Sony VCR that has no problem with color, but tapes recorded with the VCR have distorted hi-fi audio when played back on any other machine. I believe it's been like this from the time I purchased the VCR brand new in the 90s. I realized the problem a couple of years later, when a friend asked me to record a show for him. Not that I feel any need to fix it, but I still wonder what could be the cause. Tapes recorded on other machines play fine.
Great video. Is it possible to perform the same error on Sony Betamax vcrs? Now I have a question for you. I have a Marantz Model 1060 and on the front it has two 6.35 mm input jacks labeled mic/aux2. Also labeled left and right channel. Now the right channel fell apart. The plastic housing that holds the connector simply brittled from age and broke apart from the pressure of the jack inside the connector. Where do I find this internal part? I did find a listing for this complete component on a site but it had been sold already. Yeah I'm a nut for old audio and Sony betamax, sue me. Thank you for your time and keep on fixing.
Question on this Dave. If you hadn’t had the customer’s VCR but thought of this scenario, would you have been able to reverse the heads on one of your VCRs and achieve color playback? I’m guessing that would be the case but want to confirm. As always, great video!
12volts question for you while you're converting how do you deal with the sound as I got over 3000 VHS tapes and when played on different machine's the sound is low when playing some tapes
If the video heads were installed backwards, such that the A head was reading the B head's tracks and vice versa, would the different azimuth of the tracks cause an issue? Each head would be trying to read a video track recorded with the azimuth 12° off.
12volts this VHS player you turned the head around if you turn it on , I know some players use the channel up and down to use for tracking and if both buttons pressed at the same time runs auto track I also have a VHS recorder iit plays but there no picture and I'm thinking that the heads have gone
You do have a oscilloscope, so put the composite- or Y/C signal on the input channels to check the color burst signal. Other questions is this a multi system video player ?
Something similar to this happened to me while transferring some PAL N videotapes not long ago, that’s the TV standard we used to have in my country, an absolute nightmare of a system I tell you, just incompatible crap. By the way, that’s the Panasonic G mechanism I think, I got a Panasonic NV L25 with that one, what’s your opinion? Was is that bad? The machine I have is from 1990 and in all these years only basic maintenance was done to it, works great.
I have a Panasonic NV-L20 from 1989. I had to replace one cap in the power supply, resolder the connector for the capstan motor, lubricate the half-loading arm, and re-time all the gears. It works fine now. By the way I have one single PAL-M tape that won't play in color on any of my machines. Oddball system that's for sure...
That Tv system was even worse because it was only used in Brazil, so to play your tape you should get a Brazilian VCR or a multi system VCR able to play PAL M. PAL N, worked differently but at least it was used in three countries, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. It is not compatible with any of the other PAL standards, I really don’t know why at the time color Tv came to my country, PAL N was adopted, a system which they had to modify to a unique standard for such a small region of the world, it’s just stupid. NTSC would have been a much better option. Now I’m stuck with the Panasonic L25 I have, which is PAL N and that’s it, totally incompatible with NTSC.
@@danielpitterly6466 So you have a PAL-N variant of the L25? What is the full model number? Mine is an NV-L20ER which is able to play NTSC tapes in NTSC 4.43.
@@crashbandicoot4everrThe one I have is a Panasonic NV L25AR, I guess the AR might stand for Argentina and yes, it’s a PAL N version of the VCR which I’ve never found anything online about, it’s just like it’d never existed. Mine, can also playback NTSC videotapes but I’m not sure what strange conversion it does to them, it might output NTSC 4.43 but it doesn’t matter because most TV sets here won’t display it properly. I have a Sony Trintron set which has three systems, plain old American NTSC, PAL M and PAL N, when I play a NTSC tape in the Panasonic, with both NTSC or PAL M selected, the video has no color and if I select PAL N, it has color but no vertical sync, jumps up and down like crazy and you can’t adjust that on my set . So, to sum it up, the ‘play NTSC on PAL TV’ advertising the VCR shows on it’s front panel, it’s just useless to me.
@@danielpitterly6466 I believe PAL-N is 625 lines/50 fields just like European PAL but with a color carrier of 3.57MHz instead of the normal 4.43MHz. NTSC uses 3.58MHz. No idea why they chose a slightly different carrier frequency for the Argentinian system. The VHS down-converted chroma is still 627KHz so a tape recorded in Argentina should play fine on a European VCR, and vice-versa. It's PAL-M's that is a bitch to deal with.
Interesting Dave! Thank you for your posting as always. So, if there is no physical key and there are no reference factory marks on the video head rotor and video head drum, then how mad is that. I mean, that translates to 50:50 chance of getting is right. How mad is that?!
I thoght from title of the video that maybe tape path alignement is wrong, the machice records in wrong alignment and is able to play it's own recordings but no others. Don't know if actually possible
My betamax hi band SL-2100 displays PAL in full colour but when I went to record something using s video it came out in B&W when I tested it slightly wobbly picture audio was perfect records ntsc just fine though
I have a NBC TV recording on VHS from 1994 that is unwatchable. The recording quality looks fine until it has two static lines on the top and bottom and they slowly meet in the middle and they disappear - until it happens again!! I honestly don't know what was the fault of the recording but the tape itself was in really good shape! There was a recording before it that was fine but until it cut to the other one, the rest is history. I uploaded a snippet of it, look for "Screwed-Up TV Recording". It played the same in all my VCRs so I think it's a recording fault. I'm stumped🤔
The control track is missing from your recording, so the drum servo is free running, it can't do tracking. Most modern VCRs would mute the audio and the video if it can't see a control track, it seems yours is different. The missing ctrl track could be caused by two things usually: either the edge of the tape is wrinkled so there's no proper contact with the ctrl head, or the ctrl head was dirty during recording. If you want to save the recording really desperately, you can try to put an opamp in between the ctrl head and the ctrl signal amplifier, with a pot in the negative feedback of the opamp so the gain can be adjusted, say between x2 and x100. You might be able to restore a level which is enough for the servo to lock on. It probably won't be stable because the S/N ratio of the control signal will be horrible, but it might turn out to be watchable.
hi when you started going on about lines it had to be the head 100% when i started to watch the video in the uk there's not alot that will work on vhs there one man in london that has a small shop that repair audio gear he's getting on now this why alot end up on ebay in the uk or at a carboot sale and the re pair guys get hold of them
@@danielpitterly6466 how did you figure it out? Does he show the back sticker or read it? I didn't watch it all the way through i just saw parts of it and saw that thiswas a RCA Panasonic vcr.
@@austinthevhsvideogamelover5265 Generally, there's either a date of mfg sticker on the back of the unit, or some parts inside may have a date stamp of some sort on them.
@@ThatOneTruckGuy i know. I have a RCA VR612HF 1997 Panasonic vcr and It was manufactured 12/15/1997 on the back and on the front of the chassis it says (97 12 03) December 3rd 1997.
It shut down because the owner went through a divorce and he wasn't going to pay our his ex, so he burried the business is what I was told. This was 9 years after I walked.
that would be a headache especially if you used such a machine and heavily made recordings only with it. to transfer everything its probably be best not touch it until every single tape was transferred if that was the solution and if you had a worn head you'd most likely have to install it wrong then correctly install it when every tape was transferred.
Maybe the reason that the service department closed was because of too many stupid mistakes like this and of course, that means annoyed customers that have to come back.
The reason the service department closed is nobody would work for the tyrant that owned the store. I put up with his shit for 19 years. Should have quit after the first month. The guy was a miserable prick, horrible person to work for. I only stayed because he paid me considerably more than other shops offered. Believe me I was looking around but taking a 7.00 to 9.00 cut in pay and having to drive to another area which meant fighting rush hour traffic for a tunnel or bridge for less pay meant I bit my tongue and put up with the shit, till one day I was few up with him. He tried to hire several guys and none would work for him. Hell when I was there there was a revolving door with techs being hired and the quitting within a month because of how he treated them. The year following my departure he had no fewer than 5 techs in there that quit. He had to do the work himself and not only was he badly out of practice he hated doing it. He ended up just closing the service dept and making the space a sales showroom for home theater. I have never said anything really negative about the place only that he was a very difficult man to work for but he paid me well and that js why I stuck with the place all those years. He had s stroke early in 2003 and when he came back he was 100 times worse than before and that was the straw that broke the camels back. I left right in the middle of construction of my house. I was half way complete with a 5vyear old and 3 year old and owing about 200,000 on construction of my house. I was the sole earner so you can imagine what I was going through. I went to work as a contract satellite dish installer and that js where I started to really make good money. Working 7 days a week but the cash was fantastic for a year. Then the NHL went on strike and nobody was putting up dishes. I heard the phone company was gearing up to begin the biggest hiring blitz since when I was in high school. That was my dream job. I wanted to work for the phone company when I was in high school but the quota was filled before I graduated. 25 years later I got my shot.
So long story short some bonehead repaired the machine wrong the machine can play its own recordings in colour because it recorded on the tape wrong. Other tapes don’t match so it shows no colour. Got it.
That's a POS G-Deck Panacronic grab ya mech rebuild kit including new mode switch, as all the gears are usually chewed with a major mode switch failure this one hasn't obviously as yet, but I have also seen the turn off when eject is pressed caused by mode switch too.
@@12voltvids Yes it's a POS but for different reasons soft of not as many gears but still lots of plastic that wanted to say bye bye regularly not to mention the mode switch was a total prick to get apart not that I did back in the day I'd just replace it, had a serious laugh about the dick "tech" with the heads 180 out WTF that's just incompetence.
