VHS tape path alignment without using a scope

I get requests on a regular basis for ideas for videos and I got one here today that make perfect sense how do you do an alignment of a VHS VCR without an oscilloscope yes you can do it and it's not hard to do you can do it with a TV preferably an analog CRT TV it makes the process much easier and I'm going to show you how to do it here right now so [Music] in this episode I'm going to try to show you how to adjust the tape path on a VHS machine with others oscilloscope just using a TV now and I should point out that in order to do this it's much easier to do it on a CRT television than it is on a digital on a digital TV you're gonna have a much harder time to try and adjust this we'll try it on the digital TV first and see whether I'm able to do it but it is much easier on an analog television so what I'm going to do is I'm going to try adjusting the p2 and the p3 guides which are these ones right here p2 and p3 and see if I can get the picture to track up and I'm looking at the digital monitor now so I'll just in the p3 guide now go over to the p2 guide and I'll start moving it slowly up and down okay I'm getting close back to the p3 guide back to the p2 going counterclockwise here okay I'm getting some distortion we're going to go back out and then back to the p3 guide I'm close back to the p2 there I think I have it will rewind this video I'm going to mess with the guides again and then redo the same thing on the analog monitor to show you how much easier this now as you can see pictures gonna be pretty much perfect on here now because and I did this using the digital monitor so I'm gonna go and I'm just gonna screw things up big time just start twisting guides around just really mess it up as bad as I can possibly make it like you'll never ever come across one that's like this but we'll screw the guides down all the way both sides okay so that's about this messed up if you're ever gonna get a picture I took both sets of guides and I screwed them down all the way when you're dealing with an analog television you have to remember that your your picture starts here the top of the screen is on this side and this is the bottom of the screen so we can look at the screen we can think of this like our our envelope on our waveform monitor we want to make the waveform on a waveform on here our scope we want to make it flat when we adjust one side we're adjusting the left side here and we're adjusting the right side there think of it like turning this sideways if I turn the set on its side this would become the left side this would become the right side if I turn the set on the side so here's our left side guide here's our right side guide we can start by just adjusting and we start very careful very slowly turning the guide and we watch the picture okay I've now got the picture much better on the top let's go over to the right died how easy was that on the digital monitor it was a lot harder because the digital circuits we're trying to lock in to the sink which was distorted and that was causing the picture to flip and jump all over the place where it's on an analog TV you're you've got instant feedback you don't have that delay of digitizing the signal and with all the distortions that I can mess this up again this time I'll go the other way this time oh well screw the guides up and down now the reason I've got a blue screen here maybe that's what's happened is I've actually raised the tape up enough so that it's no longer on the control track and it's muting right if I push the tape down a bit so you can see right but I've raised the tape up enough that the control track is not being read so we'll just lower this slightly just enough so that the control track has a signal and then we can we can mess with this guide over here okay so now really bad really bad I want to try and get this close so I can start on either side I can start on either the top or the bottom this time I'll start on the bottom side so I'm gonna try and improve the picture here get the least number of lines as I go down now I watch as I'm doing this I can watch the tape if it starts to curl on the bottom of this guy here I know I'm too low so I'm gonna bring the tape up just a bit by turning the guide up until I see the tape is no longer curling okay tapes no longer curling that is probably fairly close we'll go to the other side and I'm going to start adjusting the guide here and watch the watch the lines in the picture just watch these lines they're gonna get closer to the arc get further yeah further apart as I get closer to being correct okay it's not bad not perfect now it's getting there now we'll go back to the p3 side and we'll just adjust that slightly remember we're trying to get the the best best pitcher on the bottom half of the screen here go back to the p1 our P - sorry P ones over here we don't adjust that so now we're back on the p2 bed which is the one on the left side of the screen lower this down a bit so you guys can see it a bit better go back to this one here Picchu we're gonna adjust the p2 guide okay that part's looking good back to the p3 perfect to prove it just take this tape out put in my toga party okay this is my alignment tape we're just going to tweak that in to get it the best we can let's put the scope on and see how close I am without touching this anymore okay I'm just gonna hook up one channel of the scope to test point I think it's test point nine point two so tax point - okay I'm not perfect as you can see I'm not perfect but I am pretty close I'm not just looking at it on the screen here and if I want to get it perfect while I can just tweak the guide slightly here looking at the signal on the scope and flatten it right out but I was close I was close enough to view a tape without using a scope you don't need the scope to do it to do it to get it perfect you do but you don't need a scope just get a watchable picture all you need this TV analog monitor very easy to do can be done on a digital monitor as well an LCD or a plasma but it's not as easy because of the sink instability problems that you'll have on a digital display now I don't like this play very simple to do and of course they confirm it with the scope that's how you set up your VCR same thing applies to 8 millimeter high 8 same thing that's it thanks for watching be sure to hit that subscribe button and click the bell at the bottom of the screen to be notified of all my new videos we'll catching the next one

Channel: 12voltvids

Views: 79,804

Keywords: vhs, tape, alignment, tv, crt, scope

Id: iyUY7cFP9zw

Length: 10min 47sec (647 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 07 2019