Eh?
There's a lot of misinformation here: Not just with your post, but everywhere.
Let's start with audio.
Initially, all VHS tapes had a monaural sound track that is recorded linearly at very low speed, in a manner not at all dissimilar to a Compact Cassette (but worse). It sucks, but it's all that such a tape has: If you have such a tape, you'll have to make the best of it.
Some VHS tapes (mostly original studio releases) also have a linear stereo soundtrack. This also sucks (again, because the tape speed is too low for excellent audio), but it's all the tape has. This stereo linear soundtrack is often recorded with Dolby B, but not always (and if it is, you better have a proper Dolby B decoder on the output, or you're doing it wrong). Consumer VCRs that could deal with linear stereo were and are rare.
Many tapes, whether studio releases or otherwise, that were recorded on equipment newer than the mid-late 80s also have a Hi-Fi soundtrack, which can be either stereo or monaural. This is both recorded and played back using the helical-scanning video head, and is (indeed) rather Hi-Fi: It has excellent channel separation, and excellent signal-to-noise, and excellent frequency response.
Lots of home-made Hi-Fi tapes have mono sound, because that was all the recorder could handle, even though the Hi-Fi standard specified two channels. This was for marketing purposes: You could sell a mono Hi-Fi VCR or camcorder next to a stereo Hi-Fi VCR, and both would perform similarly...except the former was cheaper, and the latter had stereo IO. (===$Profit!)
Yes, VHS Hi-Fi uses a frequency modulation system to accomplish its awesomeness (and it is still awesome, even in these modern enlightened times). But it was never marketed as such, so looking for a VHS VCR that supports "FM" is a non-starter.
Which of these is best for playback and archival depends on entirely the tape in question, and what audio formats it has recorded on it, and how those formats were handled through the original signal chain, the level of deterioration of the tape itself, the calibration of the playback machine to the recorded tape, [...].
Meanwhile, video. Video is simpler to discuss, because VHS only has one video format: Composite NTSC.
A lot of people keep saying "Oh, and make sure it has something with an S-Video output, because that's better."
And I'm here to tell you: Dude, it doesn't matter. You might theoretically buy a VHS player with a Faroudja-scaled 1080p output over SDI, and it STILL doesn't matter: Regular VHS tapes always and only just have composite video on the tape itself, with the luminance and chroma signals multiplexed together. Accordingly, the very best unprocessed video that a regular VHS tape can present is composite NTSC, because that's all that is on the tape.
The only inherent difference, again with regular VHS media, between a player with an S-Video output, and a player with a composite output, is which device is responsible for comb filtering the composite video: The tape machine, or the playback machine/capture device.
So, one has a choice: Do you trust this role of Y/C separation to a possibly decades-old analog machine on blind faith that "S-Video is better," or do you trust it to modern video hardware wherein the capacitors have not yet aged, the solder joints are still good, and much of it probably happens in well-developed DSP-land?
I'll pick the latter, myself, unless I had a remarkably good and recently tuned S-VHS deck which is known to have an excellent comb filter....and even if I had such a beast (which is going to cost a nontrivial amount of money), I'd still compare the two methods with a very skeptical eye. Digital scalers, de-interlacers, and digital comb filters have progressed by leaps and bounds over the past decade and a half or so, to the point that a cheap TV from Wal-Mart can a better job of handling these things than the very best (and very expensive) hardware from a decade ago.
And just because S-Video has more wires does not make it better in an end-to-end perspective, especially since VHS tapes (again...) only have composite video.
All that said, the only time that an S-Video output should be an important consideration is when dealing with S-VHS tapes. S-VHS is quite a different beast than regular VHS, in that the luminance and chrominance signals are recorded separately on the tape.
S-VHS is the singular reason that we even had S-Video as an interface standard, and for S-VHS media one should certainly be using an S-Video connection. But regular VHS tapes do not and cannot inherently benefit from this connection scheme.
And S-VHS never really did catch on, so that's mostly irrelevant to the question.
(Oh, and while I'm at it: Laserdiscs? Same game: The source media only contains composite video. Sure, there are plenty of old Laserdisc players with an S-Video out, but again that simply moves the comb filter to the playback machine instead of the TV/encoder where it has resided since the dawn of color NTSC. Conventional C-Band satellite? Composite. Etc, etc, etc. Why? Because TVs displayed amplitude-modulated composite video, and these standards were developed simply to be seen on those existing televisions.)