Can Anyone Help With My VCR/Recording/Playback Problem Here? (1 Viewer)

[Mike-M]

Hey guys,

Every day here on ABC Family, the 'Wonder Years' comes on. I always enjoyed the show, but it comes on when I'm in class so I decide to tape it every day. I tape it on my third floor VCR/TV combo and play it back to watch it downstairs on my TV that just has a VCR connected to it.

Here's the odd thing: I'll be watching, say, two episodes in a row, and it works fine. But then the next episode will start, and there's NO sound whatsoever! The picture is perfect, but no sound comes through. And I can hear the speakers crackling as if there SHOULD be sound but there just isn't.

The weird thing is that when I take it back upstairs to my TV/VCR combo and pop in the tape, ALL the episodes play perfectly with sound. But downstairs in my room where it's more comfortable to be, it seems that some on episodes the sound will come through, and some episodes there's just no sound. I can't logically figure this out. I don't think it's the VCR in my room, because I've watched other shows I've recorded on the VCR/TV combo, and the sound works fine. I'm wondering if it could be from the network itself in how they play some of their episodes. I just don't know. It seems silly for that to be the problem, though.

Can anyone help here? Anyone ever see a problem like this and can you help me figure out a way to fix it? Thanks in advance.

 

[Neil White]

Have you tried adjusting the tracking manually? I've had problems recording on one machine and playing back on another - even in the scenario you mentioned where some programming is okay.

N

 

[Mike-M]

Neil,

Can you help me understand how adjusting the tracking helps bring in audio? And there are no tracking buttons on the VCR I playback on, just on the one I use to record.

 

[Patrick Sun]

Sometimes the tracking control is the channel up/down buttons on the remote (just a guess), if the remote doesn't have specific tracking buttons on it.

 

[Scott Kimball]

Mike, if the tracking is off on a Hifi recording, you can lose sound completely while still having the video look okay. On Hifi recordings, the soundtrack is interleaved with the diagonal video track, instead of being linearly recorded along the tape edge.

Tracking can alter during the playback of a tape, since the linear tape speed increases as the take-up hub fills. Playback on a VCR other than that which recorded the tape may need tracking adjusted as this happens.

Usually, auto-tracking is good enough to handle this, but occasionally manual adjustment is needed.

As another person pointed out, try the channel up/dn keys while playing a tape, to adjust tracking. It is extremely rare (at least) to NOT have manual tracking controls on a VCR... but the control isn't always obvious.

-Scott