Which does limit how much money can be put into products like this. I just like to figure out how you could make it good if you were building it.

Though indeed, a lot of it is not on CD. I taped about 30 of my albums onto VHS-HI-FI in the 80s. VHS HI-FI is actually pretty good quality (much better than cassette but not reel to reel) but the problem is getting a different VHS unit to track properly and not gum up the audio.

Also interesting is the ability to, with the combo of wow and flutter elimination, click and pop removal, a high sample rate and FLAC compression to make a recording that sounds better than what you can get from a turntable, if you had an audiophile cartridge and A2D. There are those who disdain CD with 44K 16 bit samples and certainly disdain lossy compressed music, but they should not disdain 96K sampled 24bit or floating point sampling with lossless or much less lossy compression. With disk space costing 25 cents/gigabyte today, the economics that governed the choices of CD are no longer present.

The technique I describe for removing wow and flutter could even be done without resampling, if you could have the clock on the A2D adjust in real time based on signals coming from the optical stripes on the platter. It might be able to make an audiophile digital copy with inexpensive equipment. Though of course, you never make cheap audiophile equipment!

With my VHS to DVD transfers, there was a lot to be said for the “one touch” mode of the box (which really was far more than one touch.) Though I did decide, in the case of various old movies and TV shows I had on VHS, that I would just buy such things using amazon or peerflix if I really wanted to see them again, because the quality would be so much better as well. So I actually restricted my transfers to personal stuff, stuff you can’t get on DVD, and stuff I only cared modestly about. There was a temptation which I should have given into to use the overnight one-button xfer to DVD+RW as a means to simply find out what was on a VHS more conveniently. I had a ton of old VHS tapes, 6 or 8 hours long, full of random shows, unmarked. For some of these I may do this technique. Since doing 6-8 hours means going to 352x240 resolution, it would mean if I actually really wanted something I would have to seek to it and re-do it. I suppose that might be a clever mode for the recorder — you seek to a spot on the DVD and say, “I want this piece of the VHS for 30 minutes” even without index marks, and it could do it.