dw@rocksvax.UUCP (Don Wegeng) (03/23/84)
XXXX Well, my Sanyo 7200 Beta Hifi unit has is selectable between what they call "stereo" and "Beta Hifi". This leads me to believe (perhaps incorrectly) that this unit has two audio heads, one for each channel (plus Beta Hifi on the video track, of course). If this is indeed correct, then perhaps the copy of Blade Runner which you tried to watch was indeed in stereo as labeled, but not Beta Hifi. Does anyone else know more about this? As for the logic of selling a mono-only version of a movie, I can see where if a company thought that they could make more money by selling a seperate Beta Hifi version of the movie at a higher price than the mono version then they might so it. ==dw
boyajian@akov68.DEC (03/26/84)
watcgl!dmmartindale: > Sounds like you got an ordinary Beta tape rather than a Beta HiFi tape. They > definitely exist - I watched Blade Runner on a friends Beta HiFi VCR and the > tape was definitely not HiFi. Since it wasn't labelled as such by the rental > place, ther was nothing to complain about. (Beta HiFi tapes have the ordinary > audio tracks recorded, too, for compatibility.) Waitaminute -- if the BHF tapes have the regular mono soundtrack in addition to the stereo track to make them compatible with non-HiFi decks (and I know this to be true), why would anyone find it necessary to issue two separate "editions" of a movie, one with just a mono track, and one with both mono and stereo tracks? It's one thing if the movie had already been released in mono and was then re- released in stereo (like APOCALYPSE NOW, STAR WARS, and DRAGONSLAYER), but BLADE RUNNER was one of the first stereo Beta tapes issued, and was marked as a stereo tape when it first appeared. Of course, you've pointed me in a possible direction for a solution. That I can recall, the copies of BLADE RUNNER that I've seen are all marked "Stereo", but not "Hi-Fi". But no, now that I think about it for a minute, this isn't a rea- sonable answer. The rental copy at my dealer's also says only "Stereo", but it behaved in my BHF unit the same as the other two tapes that *are* marked Hi-Fi (including having the "Beta Hi-Fi" light come on). It's possible that when the boxes for the tape were printed up, it wasn't clear that "Beta Hi-Fi" was going to be the neologism rather than "Beta Stereo" or somesuch. At any rate, my pur- chased copy wasn't even in stereo, let alone high fidelity. On the other hand, if your friend's rented copy wasn't in stereo, that could point toward the first alternative that I postulated: that when dupes were being made, one (or maybe more?) of the machines might not have been set up for stereo input, resulting in some lot of the tapes being non-stereo. I don't know the likelihood of this as an explanation (for one, I'm not sure of the probabilities of one tape from this lot finding its way to the Boston area, while another is sent to the Waterloo area (I assume from your net address that you're in that area)). This explanation does fit the available facts, though. --- jayembee (Jerry Boyajian, DEC Maynard) UUCP: (decvax!decwrl!rhea!akov68!boyajian) ARPA: (decwrl!rhea!akov68!boyajian@Shasta)