The tapes all come from 2000 so I would imagine they use the newer version of surround, one works fine in surround, but the other two on only come out the centre.
One other thing, I noticed at certain scenes in each of those two films, it sounds like it is working properly coming out of the fronts, but then it will suddenly go back to only coming through the centre.
I have tried with the tracking control and it will briefly for a second or so come out the fronts, but then it will lose it again unless I adjust it again and the picture quality does degrade quite a bit.
My dad has some cassette tapes from 1974 and they actually play practically fine if you put NR on them. It is sort of ironic though that the low tech stuff like LP's always seem to last the longest. Its strange when you think about it as paper documents thousands of years old have been found intact, yet a DVD or video will have degraded within a century generally. Makes me wonder what we are going to leave behind for the people in the future to find as it will have all degraded.
EDIT: I played some tapes over my mono vcr built into my tv and they don't flick or anything, yet when I play them on the new player, they flicker so much every few seconds that its impossible to watch them. They also keep going back to the mono non hifi track as the ound only comes out the centre and it has a lot less bass. Could the actual player be the problem?
Looks like I am going to have to get a lot of new DVDs.
Yes, the VHS HiFi player could be a problem, or it could be that the tapes were not recorded properly, or have been stretched and/or otherwise degraded. With the mono VHS player, it ignores the HiFi tracks, so it does not matter if they are aligned with the video well or not. With a HiFi VHS machine, they generally default to the HiFi tracks, but if they drop out, then it uses the linear audio. So, you can have it coming and going, as it keeps trying to lock onto the HiFi tracks. To help it out, you use the tracking control, but it is possible that the tapes were poorly made so that the machine cannot get both the picture and HiFi sound, or they could have been slightly damaged over time (e.g., stretched or warped in some way), which can give the same result. Or it could be that your player is overly picky and/or defective, and so it cannot deal with things that are slightly less than perfect. It is difficult to know remotely what is happening. And it is unfortunate that you do not know anyone else with a HiFi VHS player.
I think that most HiFi VHS machines allow for manually selecting the linear audio, so it won't jump back and forth that way, but with the vast majority of machines, it will be mono that way, and with all of them, the frequency response, wow & flutter, and signal to noise ratio will be relatively bad.
One thing to remember is that the HiFi sound is not original to the VHS format, but was something "tacked on" later, so it is more picky. The same idea applies to FM stereo, so that FM stereo is more picky than FM mono. When things are added later on, they often are less than perfect. This general idea does not apply to all cases, as it depends upon the way things are tacked on later, but it has often been this way.
You may want to try cleaning the heads of the player again. It may be that the heads are very dirty, and that could cause your problem. The best way to clean it involves opening it up, not using some tape cleaner thing; you can probably find a detailed explanation for how to do this if you search online, though I do not know where such a thing is off the top of my head. Or there could be a problem with alignment, which would need to be dealt with by a professional, which would probably not be cost effective. Or it could be worn out heads, or some other problem that would require a professional, which, again, is not likely to be cost effective.
If you really wanted to play the tapes, you could try a new VHS machine. The last time I researched VHS, Panasonic was the brand to get for reliable performance at a reasonable price, but it has been a few years since I looked into this matter. If it is just a couple of tapes that you can get on DVD (or, better, Blu-ray), I would recommend that instead, as it will look and sound better.
