VistaVision Returns!

[Steve Guttag]

The Perspecta titles I heard definitely had more high-end than a typical optical track. Perhaps they boosted the high-end on the recording side or the decoders did that on the decode side...taking advantage of the control tones to turn off the channel (and essentially the noise), when the channel wasn't in use.

I would agree that Perspecta never had the depth or fidelity of 4-track. I was just impressed with what they could do with such constraints as it had.

I did not hear Popeye or Dragonslayer in Parasound or whatever they were calling it in the day but knew of it and I have heard the 4-channel mixes of Popeye, for sure. I believe the 4-channel mixes were what was used for the home video releases of those titles on Laserdisc, back in the day.

[Frank Angel]

I really don't know how it would be possible for Perspecta to create artificial stereo that had depth because it was essentially an automated pan pot, although unlike pan pots, it could send to left and right at the same time.

I agree, Marty. The late Bruce Sanders had a Fairchild Perspecta Sound Integrator unit and we were experimenting with it in his basement theatre with a print of NBNW; while the steering was done very unobtrusively and smoothly, with music never resembled the spatial depth that can only be achieved with true binaural sound consisting of two different perspectives of the music. Remember, stereo sound excites more than just hearing; it gives the has essential information that excites the brain in a way it can create a FEELING of space and depth; it is very much an added sensation above and beyond the sound itself. That simply can't happen if that essential difference information is not recorded via two channels during the recording. Try to fabricate that spatial information artificially simply wont work because information that the brain needs is missing. It's like the con artists during the dawn of color TV broadcasts who hawked acetate overlays that gullible B&W tv owners would buy to put over their B&W tv screens. The overlays had blue at the top, yellow in the middle and green at the bottom. Yah, there was color all right, but hardly a real color image. And yah, with Perspecta sound there were three stage speaker all right, but hardly able to create the feeling of depth and space of real stereo sound.

How did I get to this age and not know know about Vitasonic 4Trk Optical? I thought I was pretty knowledgeable about film audio formats. Then again, I certainly know that multiple optical identical tracks of mono sound were used on many soundtracks to minimize azimuth errors -- the more "lines" of track you have, the less error if the scanning slit is not 100% off the absolute 90°. I remember running a gorgious16mm IBTech print of a series produced by Bell Labs (The Human Body an NBC series) "Hemo the Magnificent." They originally aired on NBC and I ran them when I was in college and again 10 years later. Thing is, even back then, I was struck by the fact at in the that 16mm soundtrack area, there were SIX (that's right, I counted them) six soundtracks. I remember pondering, if they were able to fit that many soundtracks in the 16mm soundtrack geography, they certainly could easily fit at least 4 maybe 5 in the 35mm soundtrack space -- and they would be DISCRETE tracks. Given the very impressive noise reduction possible with DBX (I was always blown away with how impeccably clean/silent DBX's noise floor sounded -- more so than Dolby A), on a 35mm print, they probably could have gotten 3 screen channels and dual surrounds without breaking a sweat. It just seemed to me that Dolby's approach of sticking with the two tracks and then jumping thru all that matrixing slight-of-ear business to get that mono surround, maybe they should have seen what was possible fitting in a few more discrete tracks.

Side note: in the early days before Dolby, and just because i loved to tinker, I was unhappy with the used Altec tube preamps we had for the solar cell and so I used two Shure off the shelf mic mixers instead. The film I ran after I made the change was YELLOW SUBMARNE -- let me tell you, play a modern film without that Academy filter and you could almost believe it was a mag print -- the extended high end was like a blanket was lifted off the speakers. I had musicians come it and listen to see if perhaps my enthusiasm for what I was hearing was coloring my objectivity, but not at all, everyone to a person insisted it sounded better. I listened for hours and could hear no unpleasant artifacts, and why would there be, it was just removing a filter that was needed to compensate for the noise on the soundtracks of 20 years earlier.