A video cassette recorder (VCR) servosystem was designed using th integral optimal regulator technique of modern control theory. The servosystem is optimized such that quantization noise in digital processing of the VCR signal is small and the accuracy of the frequency generator for the dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) speed sensor is kept at a certain value. The resulting optimized design was used to implement a system controller that incorporates an 8 bit single-chip microprocessor.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>