Was Beta as good as or better than reel to reel?

Lol. Isnt googling something you do after brushing your teeth? I had a nasty dose of VHS once...

vhs hi fi was better than consumer level reel to reel; beta had better video, but I can't recall if the sound specs were as good. The reason was, that head was spinning very fast, effectively yielding a very high tape speed. I used Canon. It was difficult to keep those machines working right, esp portable ones; very complex. wouldn't recommend them for that reason.

I had an Akai hifi VHS unit I bought in an audio shop (yes audio only) that was the bomb that I fixed several times to keep running. It was the bomb for vhs hifi recording.

I still have the Sony hifi vhs that replaced it. Not bad, but I lost interest in recording to vhs hifi when recordable cd-r for music came out.

Of course you can still buy hifi vhs recorders I think. I suspect a good Sony or equivalent to sound pretty good!

Still keep the old Yamaha cassette recorder hooked up to my system but never record there anymore, mostly used to play cassettes I recorded years ago. Other than higher background noise levels than digital, the sound is pretty good.

Beta was considered superior to VHS. But Sony patented the Beta so competitors produced the VHS, and made VHS the consumer choice because there were simply more of them.