Very few Betas were equipped with linear stereo (recorded by two stationary heads located in the ACE head assembly). This added flexibility but it was limited to the professional Betas such as the GCS-50, SLO-383, SLO-420 and SLO-1800. But there was one company that ventured into linear stereo for the consumer market. Before Sony changed audio forever with Betahi-fi Marantz introduced a high end stereo video recorder with Dolby® noise reduction and lots of features. Made by Sanyo it incorporated state of the art tape handling and advanced circuitry. Unfortunately not too long after it hit the market Sony began promoting Betahi-fi stereo. This new technology blew the socks off linear stereo and Marantz never produced another Beta unit. |