In Part Two, I had fun learning new ways to record noise. It was entirely “studio” based, though. My interest in audio continued during the late 1980s, but life was sort of getting in the way. Eventually, things settled, and I met Best Beloved. Happily, he shared so many of my interests it was really easy to rekindle the audio side of my world. In addition, we could add video to it as well. 

The early 1990s was a period of change in many ways. Technology was moving on apace, particularly with the rise of the home computer. While the decade began with analogue home video editing – literally playing back recordings in real time onto a second or third recording deck, editing using the pause controls, with all the loss of quality such things entailed (see also audio recording!) – moves were beginning to be made in using software to edit home video. Such things as Sony’s Video8 format, derived from their larger Betamax system and released in the mid-1980s, and various flavours of VHS, were incrementally improved to provide the best quality original recording as possible. Getting those recordings on to a PC meant further edits would be digital, suffer no loss of quality, and the final edit would be recorded on to another video cassette system. Hi8 and S-VHS were the pinnacle of analogue home video, until the development of digital recording. Even so, a digital video tape still needed to be played back in real time, either to another deck for manual editing, or into a computer for digital editing. The possibility of recording video to a file on a disk or some solid-state memory was still a way off.