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Woody Allen is an accomplished musician. He plays the clarinet in a local NY jazz band. You would think that he knows a lot about sound. By his letters I think he knows a lot about projection. He just prefers mono. Go figure.

I have always appreciated his notes to the projectionist. Even if I am confused by the man.

To answer your question, yes the digital tracks hold nothing more than the center channel. Why this took 2 DTS discs I have no idea. Certainly ONE channel of audio could've been burned onto one cd...but perhaps there is a technical thing I do not know about regarding DTS encoding. As to SDDS, he probably didn't want the digital cutting in and out, which is respectable.

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Yes. I previewed the film twice and I played SR-D the first time (there was no disk with that print) and DTS the second time. It's center channel only. The DTS track I had was a single disk.

Woody Allen feels that the story and the acting are the most important elements in his films so not only does he use mono sound but also keeps his titles a very simple white on black.

As for digital the reason is the same as for using SR: high fidelity. Some of you may not realize that on a cinema processor when you punch mono not only is the noise reduction disabled and the stereo matrix switched to simply sum Left-Total and Right-Total into the Center channel but a very severe high frequency roll off known as the Academy filter is introduced. Mono films have a pre-emphasis that takes this into account but it still greatly limits the fidelity.

This is because the mono standard is based on 1930's technology and was one of the reasons that before Dolby came along people were certain that optical sound was simply incapable of high quality. Dolby threw that out to allow the full range to come through, added EQ, and compensated for the added hiss with their noise reduction. This resulted in the Dolby Mono (optical) process that predates Dolby Stereo. You select this format easily with a CP-50, 100, and 200 but not directly on later processors, hence Woody Allen movies being labeled for Dolby Stereo or Dolby Stereo SR playback even though they are Dolby Mono. They play fine in stereo mode though you can avoid leakage through the wrong channels by shutting down those amps.

Even on a CP-500 where you can custom program formats you can program one with SR NR *on* but if tell the matrix you want mono that is where the Academy roll off is invoked. So if you want to create a custom format for Dolby SR Mono what you would do would be leave the matrix in Pro Logic mode but go to the patchbay-like output matrix (where outputs of the processing section are sent on their way to the B chain EQ and fader) and lift the connections from everything except C. Or C & Sub. (Actually just copy format 05 Dolby SR and go right to the output matrix and change that and you're done.)