After six months of hell, I can confirm this former home cinema heavyweight does not deserve a 'vinyl revival'

As a person who has firmly entered middle age, there are many things I look back on with rose-tinted glasses.

Nu Metal.

Five-string bass guitars tuned in drop-A.

The entire original series of Power Rangers.

Ninja Turtles (or any other 80s / early 90s cartoon with a decent selection of action figures).

The list goes on. And, until last week, it would have included the faithful old movie format of choice from my childhood: VHS.

Younger readers may be confused at this point – my niece and nephew still haven’t quite got their heads around the concept of DVDs and Blu-rays, let alone cassettes. But if, like me, you were born in the 80s, VHS was the go-to format for movie watching.

Whether you were lucky enough to have a collection, rented them from your local store or were from a household rich enough to own a VCR and use them to record shows and films off live TV, VHS tapes ruled the roost during my teenage years.

Highlight memories for me include taking advantage of my older brother’s extra height to raid the top shelf of my Dad’s collection and watch completely age-inappropriate classics, including Terminator and It, before I had even hit double figures.

Or when my dad accidentally scarred me for life when he inadvertently taught me about death, buying us a copy of the original Transformers movie. (Whichever executive decided to brutally kill all the original Autobots in the opening scenes just to sell more toys deserves a special place in marketing infamy.)

Later, the fun hustle I would run, standing outside HMV trying to bribe older kids to buy me the 15- and 18-rated Manga VHS movies I wanted, after getting a taste for the genre watching the Sci-Fi (now rebranded Syfy) channel’s weekly midnight showings.

Yes, I am aware that these stories don’t show me as being a terribly well-behaved child.

The final example, coupled with some time in Hong Kong, is a key reason I still have a pretty sizeable anime collection, including some VHS copies of titles you can’t easily get anymore.

It’s also why, when I finally cleared all the stuff out of my room at my parents' house and rediscovered the tapes, I felt the need to dust them off and revisit some of the forgotten classics contained within.

But, if I knew then what I know now, I wouldn’t have bothered. For what then unfolded was a calamity of errors.

Starting off, I had to contend with the fact that I didn’t have a player. No problem. eBay exists for a reason, right? Yes, but once I got the tapes and player together, it all started to go wrong.

The player I had bought hadn’t been properly maintained, so there was dust and gunk in its motor. This meant I had to pop the hood and conduct a careful spruce with compressed air and more cotton buds than I care to count. I then had to invest in a head-cleaning tape – another eBay expense.

Once the full service was finally completed to my satisfaction, I only then realised that my LG C2 OLED doesn’t have a coaxial input. Another fresh order online, then, for the converter required.

Then, after days of waiting to watch Amon Saga, Perfect Blue and the rest of the pile of treasures I had unearthed, when I finally popped my first tape into the repaired VCR, the muddy funster spat it back out.

The tapes also needed cleaning – they had been stored in sub-optimal conditions for more than a decade after all – which meant another costly investment, this time in a tape-mould cleaner.

I won’t bore you with the specifics, but if you have ever tried to clean a tape with one of these, then you know it is not as easy as it looks. The fear I felt using it has probably taken years off my life.

Old tapes are very delicate, after all, and these machines are not terribly forgiving.

But then – finally! – I was ready to play my first restored tape, the original Vampire Hunter D.

And, wouldn't you know it, to add insult to injury, after all that, Hidive and Shudder released a remaster which laid bare the shortcomings of VHS at a technical level.

Everything was pixelated, full of noise (especially after the years of neglect), with washed-out colours and terrible, squashed sound. The experience was far from the immersive one I remember. And streaming the modern remaster at the same time made that all the more clear.

As I have mentioned before, the remastered version shows what a difference minor quality of life improvements can make.

Colours were rich and more detailed, and the added sharpness made details I had previously missed on the low-quality VHS copy – which was all I had previously seen – visible.

Blacks were better, and the improved audio mix meant I could actually hear the dialogue, even during heated action scenes.

Moving on to the second tape, history repeated itself. And it brought me to a sad, but important conclusion: VHS’s technical shortcomings are too big to overlook. Despite my fondness for the format, it should be left in the past.

Trust me, the end experience is not worth the effort, especially if the movie has since been released on disc or streaming.

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