In 1996 they came out with the 8 vhs tape set of the Beatles Anthology for rent at the movie rental places. I couldn't afford to buy the set so I dubbed off the set not realizing they were copy-guarded and when I came across the tapes 24 years later, the playback quality was terrible! Ebay has the complete sets from various sellers cheap. I bought a set of 8 tapes in very good condition for less than 9 dollars which included shipping!

It also came our on LaserDisc which is impossible to have MacroVision.
Not to mention most VHS/Beta from those days would have sticky shed syndrome and probably wdnt play. Also especially anymore - you could have Torrented the whole thing for free..

Everybody I know in those days was getting the LDs from the rental shops and taking `em to the school media library/duplication center where they had both 2-inch and 1-inch broadcast mastering decks as well as thousands of VHS Beta and U-Matic decks.

The original reasons were to bring in educational videos on a master and then
1 make enough so every floor in every school can have their own
2 make copies to play on instructional Television Fixed Service (the half a dozen PBS-ish stations you could only get in schools via microwave).

Once microwave pay TV companies came in and bought up all the unused nighttime system hours for the likes of HBO and Showtime when their broadcast day was only 4-12 or 4-2AM on weekends there was no more need for the in house duplication facilities.

Enter swapmeet guys who take the laserdiscs during the video shop's off hours, and later on the syndication movie masters sent in by the pay TV operators as backup in case the downlink goes out - bring them to the media center, make 1 inch or 2 inch master videos and the run off thousands of copies to sell at the swapmeet by ``number'' (no title) from which the guy's title book was consulted at his booth.

Since the REAL duplication houses had the exact same overruns and seconds and such - the scant copyright police that existed in the 70s 80s and 90s left everybody alone bec it wd cost more to prosecute than they would get back.

And then Napster came out and all bets was off.

You've made some good points but my post was for the die hard fans that want anything Beatles related! And these tapes I bought still play just fine, thank you!

I mostly have only heard the Beatles on AM radio. I never bought a Beatles LP but know all the tunes, can repeat them in my head anytime. So I'd say any anthology set would be a good buy, regardless of the quality.
Sounds like a good score, the Fab Four.

My point is - The Beatles sound great even when the audio quality is bad, example "I want you, She's so .... Heavy.."

I haven't experienced any VHS tapes with sticky shed syndrome, and I have tapes going back to the early '80s. Most of the tapes I have and come across still play perfectly or close to it.

The Abbey Road album has been remastered, as have Sgt. Pepper and the White Album. The work was done by Giles Martin, George Martin's son. It's pretty impressive. You can sample these for free on Spotify, but of course they're 128kbs MP3. Still, you would get a pretty good idea of the improvements. Amazon Music and Qobuz both stream these albums in hi-res at 24/96 lossless.