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You oughtta get a little preamp and use a drive-in speaker until your sound rack is complete!

Ken Layton is here somewhere ...

This will provide proper loading and impedance matching of the solar cell to the pre-amp.

A 1/4 or 1/2 watt resistor will do.

You mean you can go "directly" from the solar cell to a pre-amped turntable input on one of my DJ mixers? Where does the "cinema processor" come into play. I was always under the assumption that I had to have a cinema processor of some type to decode the output of the solar cell?

If this is truly the case.... why would I bother with a cinema processor in the first place?

In essence.....
I could feed the projector sound to "Channel 1", and CD players (you other guys refer to it as "non-sync")to "Channels 2 & 3", and still have the Microphone inputs available for paging and announcements. I could feed field speakers with the "Record Output", feed the transmitters with the "Master Output" and feed the concession stand and booth monitor with the "Booth Zone/Cue" output. Is this practicle or even feasible?

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At the drive-in I did, we didn't use field speakers, so we went directly from the solar cell to the "projector" input on the transmitter. The transmitter also had a non-sync and a couple of mic inputs, too. We used a home stereo (tuned into the appropriate frequency) to run the speakers for the booth, concession and patio.

A Cinema Processor is only necesary if you are planning to extract 4 channels from a matrixed stereo print, and/or add the required noise reduction. Since you mentioned that it was a mono cell already, then yes it shpould work fine when properly preamplified. To improve the sound you might consider a 1/3 octave equalizer between the preamp and power amp, and using pink noise and an RTA adjust the equalizer to the proper freq. response curve.

If the pre-amp is not transformer input, the loading resistor is required. The solar cell wants to look into a load of 600 Ohms or so.

The solar cells will be too wild in gain and frequency response without the proper loading, and will sound like shit.

Gordon, I used a Shure Microphone Mixer with a Mono solar cell (Radio Shack $3.00 special) glued to a broomstick handle jammed into a Weber Syncro-Film Sound head. I was very impressed with the frequency response when I loaded it with a 680 ohm resistor. It made all the difference in the world.

Download one of the Dolby manuals in the Manuals section of Film Tech. Preferably the CP200 manual would be the best since it covers the Magnetic and optical domain. The CP65 would be a second best. Also if it is available download the Dolby MPU manual. All Dolby manuals do have a preface and documentation on how Sound is recorded and decoded. You can also visit John Allen's website at www.hps4000.com He does a majority of the Sound articles in Boxoffice magazine and has his articles archived on his site.

Also.... after reviewing the manuals for the RCA 9030 soundheads.... I cannot find any wiring diagrams that tell you what to hook to where... anyone care to chime in?

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