Err well ........................
Today i have mostly been listening to cassette tapes. Recorded a long time ago on chrome tapes at good levels. BBC new year concert on FM from Cardiff, didnt write the year down. Saint Saen piano concerto 2 by Bella Davidovich with concertgebouw orch. Neeme Jarvi. A tape to tape copy of Grieg/Schummann piano concertos by Stephen Bishop Kovacevich and BBC Symphony Orch. Sir Colin Davis. All recorded with a marantz twin deck machine. Amp is arcam movie solo 5.1. Played loud and no hiss from where i was sitting. I was expecting to be critical after listening yesterday evening to dvd A. Thoroughly enjoyed every minute. I am tempted to say that FM was better then but don't want to start anything.
FIGHT FIGHT !
Looked up your bits and pieces online and looks as though you have a neat and tidy system at not a great outlay and of course you can take some of it with you.
I have many BBC radio plays that I recorded onto good TDK 180 VHS tapes (audio only, NICAM) back in the 1990s. I copied them to DVD on a Panasonic VHS/DVD/HDD recorder a few years ago, then used Mpeg Streamclip software to 'demux' the audio files to AIFF and imported them to iTunes in Lossless.
They still sound excellent.
However, more recently, I have used FM via Arcam, Naim (and now Marantz) tuners - always with a good rooftop FM aerial and strong signal - to listen to many BBC dramas and drama series and the quality is just as good as it ever was.
I don't record them anymore. I buy the series on CD whenever they are available and rip to iTunes or listen on iPlayer or the repeats on Radio 4 Extra.
The reasons I originally used VHS (rather than audio cassette) were (a) so that I would not get breaks in plays that were often well over 2 hours in length (b) video recorders had excellent timer facilities for recording when I was out.
I gave my last cassette deck (Yamaha KX-580) to my brother a few years ago after ditching all my tapes. (iPlayer is far more 'robust' assuming system backups are taken.)
Marantz M-CR603 + AirPlay • Rega R3 loudspeakers • iPhone 5 32GB • iMac • Apple Airport Extreme 802.11n • Apple iPad Mini • Panasonic TX-L32D25B • Sony BDP-S390 • Ruark Audio R1 Deluxe • Humax HDR-Fox T2