DLR Amadeus clip, 1984

[Big Troubles]

I have to ask you, were you a big fan of Betamax?

Ha! I remember it like yesterday for some strange reason.... My dad brought a "VHS VCR" home. It was 1984 I believe... Cant remember the brand. But I do remember that it cost him $600 plus tax and the remote had a 30 ft wire attached to it! lol

Fuck...We taped everything, just so we would have a reason to use it. We would press pause through commercials just so we could watch the same program back without commercials. Kind of an embarrassing story now that I re-tell it.

Funny; for some reason he could afford a new high tech recording device (at the time) but I wore hand me down checkered fuckin pants? people wonder why I'm bitchy?

[Big Troubles]

I used to watch cartoons my father recorded on a Beta VCR & I remember it becoming obsolete, but I have no idea how one is superior to another. Guess I was too young to pay attention to specifications & shit.

Why was Beta better than VHS?

Cheers! :bottle:

ah yes, the day VHS owners rejoiced!

wiki: "Like the rival videotape format VHS (introduced in October 1977[1] by JVC), Betamax had no guard band and used azimuth recording to reduce crosstalk. According to Sony's own history webpages, the name came from a double meaning: beta being the Japanese word used to describe the way signals were recorded onto the tape, and from the fact that when the tape ran through the transport, it looked like the Greek letter beta (β). The suffix -max came from "maximum", to suggest greatness"

The VHS format's defeat of the Betamax format became a classic marketing case study. Sony's attempt to dictate an industry standard backfired when JVC made the tactical decision to forgo Sony's offer of Betamax in favor of developing their own technology. They felt that it would end up like the U-Matic deal, with Sony dominating.

While most casual observers describe Betamax as an obsolete format, there is still a small but fervent group of enthusiastic supporters of the format who continue to use, maintain, and trade the machines and media. Many of these people maintain (on technical merits, not related to run time or availability of prerecorded titles, but more akin to professional video concerns) that Betamax is superior to VHS in many ways, including picture quality, tape wear, and system design and convenience of use. For many of these people, VHS never rendered Betamax obsolete, and DVD may not either; the discrepancy between their view and the mainstream arises from a difference in the criteria (i.e., the interests) on which they judge.

[Big Troubles]

Now I dont know what to do with 2000 vhs tapes of pro wrestling from the 70's and up or the hundreds of taped movies... what a fkn wasteful place we live in. But thats technology for ya!

[FORD]

Sony used to make good stuff, but their marketing sucked. Betamax failed. DAT failed. MiniDisc failed. SACD failed (all SONY inventions). Not because they were bad products - just marketed poorly compared to the competition that buried them.

Still love my little 13" Sony Trinitron TV though. Great picture, stereo sound (a rarity in small TV's of the time) and made a great monitor for the Commodore 64 and Atari 2600. Still have it too, even though I haven't plugged it in for several years. Tuner's worthless now, thanks to digital TV, but I might dig the old Atari out of mothballs one of these days and set up a retro game station.

[Big Troubles]

ya ive never had any troubles with Sony. easy to mod chip their game systems too! lol

[Big Troubles]

I might dig the old Atari out of mothballs one of these days and set up a retro game station.

I think my 80's thread had an affect on ya afterall.

[Blaze]

[Seshmeister]

Sony used to make good stuff, but their marketing sucked. Betamax failed. DAT failed. MiniDisc failed. SACD failed (all SONY inventions). Not because they were bad products - just marketed poorly compared to the competition that buried them.

DAT was used in recording studios for quite a few years but I think it was too expensive for general use.

[GAR]

When we found out about stero VHS doing the same DA conversion, that's how we did it.

The last DAT I bought I paid 14 bucks for 60 mins!

[Dan]

How Dare You,SONY Fucking Rocks.:D

Cheque In Post From Sony.:D

[FORD]

How Dare You,SONY Fucking Rocks.:D

Cheque In Post From Sony.:D

Hey, like I said, SONY made a lot of great shit in the 80's & 90's. I still have an old SONY receiver that works great too. Only stopped using it because it was "old technology" (i.e. basic 4 channel surround sound, as opposed to 5.1 channel, or 7.1 channel, or whatever the latest is. My 5.1 still works great in my rather small living room, so I haven't needed to upgrade again recently)

But it's the marketing guys who fucked themselves. Betamax should have killed VHS. SACD had the backing of the Rolling God Damned Stones & ABKCO records who released their entire 60's catalog on "hybrid" discs that contained both the regular CD bits and another layer of SACD bits on top of it. It's not very often that a greedy son of a bitch like Allen Klein drops a gift in someone's lap like that, but SONY marketing wouldn't take advantage. Really? You don't think "Beggars Banquet", "Let It Bleed", and "Get Your YaYas Out" could have moved some fucking SACD players??

(for that matter, SONY - who distributed the Stones post 1970 catalog from 1985 to 1994 - should have made a deal to ensure THAT catalog was remastered for SACD before they let Virgin buy those albums away from them.)

I'd buy a SONY product again, but probably not first generation, because I wouldn't want to get stuck with obsolete technology.

They finally DID score a victory though...... Blu Ray certainly won the battle over HD-DVD. Of course Blu Ray was a joint project with Phillips, so maybe their marketing team handled it this time?

[Big Troubles]

They finally DID score a victory though...... Blu Ray certainly won the battle over HD-DVD. Of course Blu Ray was a joint project with Phillips, so maybe their marketing team handled it this time?

Ha! They would tell you it was their plan all along.

That's how a good salesman would address that.

[VanHalenFan5150]

I love my VCR. Got plenty of tapes to watch! I recall that it was only recently my family purchased DVD players for use in our house... VHS tapes outnumber the DVDs in our house at least 3 to 1

[GAR]

I got 40 crates of this shit to transfer: 40. Ten high, stacked in storage it's rediculous. And I never have the time.

[twonabomber]

i still have a pro Sony Betamax deck, needs a little work though. gotta look into that. but like someone else said, most of what i recorded has shown up elsewhere so i don't know if it's that important to keep.

there's also a couple bins of VHS lying around. when i built this new machine i transferred the Rock Hall concert from opening weekend. those tapes sat in a box since '95 and the capture turned out great. dumping all that stuff is a wintertime project.

ya ive never had any troubles with Sony. easy to mod chip their game systems too! lol

not the PS3.

When we found out about stero VHS doing the same DA conversion, that's how we did it.

The last DAT I bought I paid 14 bucks for 60 mins!

Sony made that PCM whatever adapter too. didn't use the VCR audio tracks but recorded digital audio on the video track.