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Tommy the movie was the first use of a center channel. I had no idea the Tommy movie soundtrack was QS. Does anyone know if the CD is QS encoded? My CD is from Japan. I guess I need to audition it.

ABC's markings were very subtle. Lots of titles, especially on Impulse.

Yes, Jay, Santana III is a wonder.

Linda

Disclord, you never cease to amaze me. I used to think I was techy.
was

You don't mean Tommy was the first movie to use a center channel, do you? Because that's not the case at all - stereo films had used a center channel since Fantasia's Fantasound. Cinerama had 5 speakers across the front, including center, as did Todd AO, and CinemaScope was Left-Center-Right-Surround, as Dolby Stereo copied. "Earthquake" was the first film to start the stupid practice of placing all dialog in the center channel - before that it was usually panned to follow the actors placement on the screen. Dolby STRONGLY discouraged the panning and movement of dialog in the early days of Dolby Stereo because the Vario-Matrix decoders that were glomed on to Dolby's Left-Center-Right gain-riding system couldn't keep the panned dialog out of the mono surround track - that recommendation stuck, even though the Tate-based Dolby decoders had no problem with dialog that moved - Superman II was one of the few optical Dolby Stereo films that had panned dialog. Then, before too long, the center channel became known as the "dialog channel".

I hate 'mono' dialog because, for example, in a film a person will be standing at the left side of the screen, opening a door, and you'll hear the door open from the left side, but when they talk, even though they're still on the left, their dialog comes from the center speaker! It's just stupid. And sound mixers have gotten lazy and don't want to bother with the additional work it requires - although Pixar is a nice exception - all their films have panned dialog. And studio's often ruin older stereo films by re-directing all panned dialog to the center speaker - they euphemistically call it "re-balancing the soundtrack." The film "My Fair Lady" had a beautiful panned soundtrack, but the restoration destroyed it - all voices now come from the center. Robert Harris, the person in charge of the "My Fair Lady" restoration HATES panned dialog, as does Tom Holman of THX fame - when Robert Harris worked on "Laurence of Arabia" he tried to talk David Lean into letting him remix all the dialog to the center channel - Lean resisted and demanded that the film keep all the directional dialog. The Blu-ray of "2001: A Space Odyssey" has been ruined by the mono-ing of the dialog. It's so sad.

Gee, can you tell that's something I'm really passionate about?
 
Wow, interesting read Disclord. I too hate center channel only dialog. Now I know why in greater detail. Gives the voices in a movie that old Drive-in movie mono "shoe box" speaker sound on the best top of the line sound equipment.
 
In the end credits of "Tommy", the movie, there's a mention of QS "Quintaphonic Sound". If you have the movie on tape or DVD, check it out. I believe the CD of the soundtrack
was made from the same masters as the LP, so it's most likely QS as well. I had heard, and I could be wrong, that Sansui didn't charge a royalty for the use of the QS system
when mixing a recording, but did charge for the use of the logo on the album. This was why ABC, on those albums that featured QS encoding, referred to it as "standard matrix".
The Impulse releases often had this blurb on the back of the cover. As for the center dialog in a movie soundtrack, it's to keep one's attention focused on the screen.
 
So sorry, Doug! It was imperitive that I apologize or you would need to change your name.

And Disclord, what I meant to say was that Tommy claimed to be the first movie using a center channel with Quad, described as quintaphonic.

Linda
Mistress of Mistakes

Oh, I understand what you meant now - and you are right, it was. Although it was kind of a 'cheat' because the center channel was from its own discrete mag track and not derived from the QS encoding at all. The QS was used just for left front/left back and right front/right back. They had so many problems with the head azimuth of the mag prints and keeping sounds and sibilants leaking to the surrounds that that was one of the reasons Dolby decided to go with mono surrounds, time delay and high-frequency surround roll off as they added surround to their stereo optical format. There were lots of problems with Quintasound and that's one of the reasons it was never used again. The logo at the end credits was cool though, although it looks quickly hand-drawn, almost as if it was done at the last minute.

Unfortunately, when they did the DVD and Blu-ray transfers of Tommy, they used a standard QS decoder - in other words, no Vario-Matrix decoder was used. It sounds awful too because the backs are basically just duplicates of the front. I can't believe the original discrete mixing masters don't still exist - they could have been used to give the full Quintaphonic effect without the limitations of QS - which was only used for the theatrical system because they had no way of creating stereo surrounds on 35mm mag prints.

John Mosley didn't give up on multi-channel theater sound though - he helped form Kintek and along with Keith Johnson (HDCD co-inventor) and David Blackmer (dbx inventor) invented the Colortek film sound system - it used super tiny optical tracks and read only their edges via a CCD array - a modified form of dbx, with a 2.8:1 compression ratio was employed to get rid of the massive noise problems of such small optical tracks. It also had a control track so that special effects could be programmed into a films showing or automated functions, like dimming lights, etc... and a special bass reproduction mode they called "Veritone" that produced Sensurround-type bass. In fact, Kintek licensed the rights to Sensurround from MCA and their theater installations were capable of playing Sensurround Mod-II/III prints. Kintek was also responsible for the notorious practice of front/surround only systems, where there is a center speaker behind the screen and a single surround channel and that's all - they also made a processor that made mono films into surround - it analyzed the mono soundtrack and if dialog was detected, fed it to the screen speaker - if anything besides dialog was detected, the surrounds were switched on. It was just awful. They also made a rather elaborate surround decoder that actually decoded Dolby Stereo films, but instead of real crosstalk cancellation logic, it used gain riding logic - actually a bunch of dbx expanders, to steer the channels. And it had 3 surround channels, like Surround EX (one of the reasons Dolby should never have received the EX patent - it was clearly prior-art!) Some installations also did overhead surround.

BTW, other than a test print, Colortek never got used on a single film. They had an agreement with Paramount, but at the last minute Paramount went with Terry Beard's VistaSonic system for "Popeye" and "Dragonslayer". It was to be used on "Raiders Of The Lost Ark" too, but because it also used multiple tiny optical soundtracks, it had problems in the theater and Paramount dropped it and Raiders became a Dolby Stereo film. And as you know, Terry Beard is the inventor of the DTS-6 digital sound system for theaters.
 
I had heard, and I could be wrong, that Sansui didn't charge a royalty for the use of the QS system
when mixing a recording, but did charge for the use of the logo on the album. This was why ABC, on those albums that featured QS encoding, referred to it as "standard matrix".
The Impulse releases often had this blurb on the back of the cover.

Actually, I'd bet you are right - that would explain all the different names and logos for was was essentially the QS system.
 
I wonder if there were maybe different fee levels for QS usage too as some records have QS mentioned quite obviousy on the front of the album (Turnabout, Vox), some only have the QS logo on the back of the cover (Everest Olympic, Ovation), some state the use of QS encoding but no logo (Ovation), some don't mention QS but show Sansui equipment with an encoder/decoder inside the gatefold (ABC Command), and some don't mention anything at all other than quadraphonic (Ode).

I remember from back then too that there was no charge for using the QS system but there was for using the logo or specifically mentioning QS.

Doug
 
I wonder if there were maybe different fee levels for QS usage too as some records have QS mentioned quite obviousy on the front of the album (Turnabout, Vox), some only have the QS logo on the back of the cover (Everest Olympic, Ovation), some state the use of QS encoding but no logo (Ovation), some don't mention QS but show Sansui equipment with an encoder/decoder inside the gatefold (ABC Command), and some don't mention anything at all other than quadraphonic (Ode).

I remember from back then too that there was no charge for using the QS system but there was for using the logo or specifically mentioning QS.

Doug

Thanks for backing up Jay's information - now I won't be providing flat-out wrong info about QS licensing in future posts.
 
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