Issue with captured VHS Audio

[alleycat]

A while ago, before I was active on fanres, I paid for a company to digitise a couple of VHS tapes. I only got around to looking at one of them recently and the audio is pretty much unusable. Whenever it gets loud, especially during speech, it distorts. This is how it looks in audacity: 



I just wanted to check, before I go back to them and complain, could there be an issue with the actual VHS that caused this? To me it's as if they didn't plug one of the audio cables in fully when capturing? The audio sounds fine when watching the VHS. 

Thanks

[Feallan]

If the audio sounds fine on the actual tape, then they definitely botched something. Do make a complaint

[alleycat]

Thanks - dropped them a line and they are going to recapture it.

[Evit]

How much did they charge?

[alleycat]

It was £12.99 per tape

[BusterD]

Unless you only have one or two tapes you want to digitize, it would probably be more economical to capture them yourself.

For VHS video, I personally use a Panasonic SVHS VCR outputting to a Sony Blu-ray recorder from Japan which records at up to 15MB/s AVC (and has a great comb filter, but for VHS I just use the S-video output from the SVHS VCR), and use an M-audio 2496 for the audio, which as the name implies will capture analog audio at up to 24bit/96kHz. But unfortunately the M-audio (or my PC) captures audio at a slightly different speed than the Blu-ray player, so I need to remove a couple milliseconds of silence every 5-10 minutes to get the audio to sync up: https://fanrestore.com/thread-2268.html

But whatever works out best for you and is most convenient for your needs is of course best.

[alleycat]

I only had a couple to do and the only the VHS player I have is only good enough for watching so I figured it wasn't really worth the cost of buying the equipment - but sure I think if I had it already I could do a better job than this firm have