Beyond Dolby (Stereo): Cinema in the Digital Sound Age

Appendix A: Timeline of Common Sound Exhibition Formats

329 The Mono Era (1927 to late 1970s) The first sync sound films were in mono, with a single channel of audio played back through a speaker located in the front of the auditorium at the horizontal center of the screen. Various multi-channel analog formats appeared over the years, starting with Fantasia’s Fantasound in 1940. Some of these multi-channel formats, such as CinemaScope , Todd-AO, and Cinerama, enjoyed some success during the widescreen boom of the 1950s. None, however , supplanted monophonic sound as a widely adopted standard until the 1970s. The Dolby Stereo Era (mid1970s to mid-1990s) In the mid-1970s, Dolby introduced a method for encoding four channels of audio—left, center, and right across the width of the screen (L, C, R) and a surround channel (S) in the space of the theater—into the same space on 35mm film prints that had been used for a mono soundtrack. This configuration was highly successful and remained the norm for theatrical exhibition until digital systems appeared in the early Appendix A: Timeline of Common Sound Exhibition Formats 1990s. Dolby Stereo first appeared as a three-channel format (L, C, R) in Lizstomania (1975); the four-channel matrix configuration (L, C, R, S) did not appear until 1976’s A Star is Born. Its use in blockbuster films such as Star Wars (1977) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1978) encouraged adoption of Dolby’s sound system across the industry. In 1986, Dolby Laboratories introduced Dolby SR encoding. In its 35mm incarnation, Dolby SR uses the same four-channel-matrixed configuration as Dolby Stereo but offers a greater dynamic range (difference between the loudest and the softest sounds possible). The first theatrical releases with Dolby SR–encoded soundtracks were Innerspace (1987) and Robocop (1987). Dolby SR would remain the standard for film exhibition until it was supplanted by digital surround sound systems in the 1990s. Even today, though, 35mm prints continue to include Dolby SR soundtracks, both to ensure compatibility with non-digitally equipped theaters and to serve as a backup in case of technical problems with the digital soundtrack. 330 · Appendix A The Digital Surround Era (early 1990s to present) The specifications for theatrical digital surround sound systems were created by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) in 1987. Their specifications included at least three front channels across the width of the screen (left, center, right), at least two surround channels (left surround, right surround), and a separate low-frequencies -only channel (LFE, for lowfrequency effects), all of which were to be discrete (rather than matrixed). This configuration would come to be known as 5.1-channel (pronounced “five point one”) sound, with the “.1” being the frequency-limited LFE channel. After some initial market shakeout, by the mid-1990s three digital surround sound formats remained. The first was Dolby Digital (initially dubbed Dolby SR-D), which officially debuted in 1992 with Batman Returns. The original Dolby Digital format utilized the 5.1-channel configuration specified by SMPTE. Dolby Digital Surround EX, or Dolby Surround EX, later expanded this system to 6.1 channels by adding a matrixed center surround channel; this system was first used for 1999’s Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. The second was DTS, whose 5.1-channel base configuration first appeared in Jurassic Park (1993). The original DTS codec left room for expansion, a capability exploited by the discrete 6.1-channel DTS-ES format that debuted with The Haunting (1999). Like Dolby Surround EX, this configuration added a center surround channel to the normal 5.1 setup. The third format was Sony Dynamic Digital Sound (SDDS), which premiered in 1993’s Last Action Hero. SDDS specifies an eight-channel configuration with five channels across the width of the screen (L, LC, C, RC, R) in addition to stereo surround channels and the LFE channel, though the format can also encode traditional 5.1-channel mixes. SDDS stopped selling decoding equipment in the early 2000s, though film prints continue to include SDDS to maintain compatibility with SDDS-equipped theaters. Since 2007, however, no films have been mixed with a full eight-channel SDDS soundtrack. ...