Today we’ll solve a dispute: “There’s a question between a friend of mine concerning hi-fi tracks on VHS recorders. He says it’s a digital track, and I say it’s analog. As far as I remember I it’s a frequency modulated track, with analog sound.”
Well I hope you bet your friend a lot of money because you are right. Hi-fi VCR tracks are FM (Frequency Modulation) analog tracks. FM provides a means to take relatively good care of the audio, which is why they sound better than the standard linear audio tracks on consumer video tapes, but they are analog. Your friend may be thinking of the old Sony F1 system, which used an encoder to digitize audio and recorded it as a video signal on the tape. It wasn’t much to watch, but they sounded pretty good. This was before DAT existed. F1 systems are pretty hard to find these days, but I know of people out there still using them.