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

1. Cinema’s Hidden Multi-channel History and the Origins of Digital Surround

19 Cinema’s Hidden Multi-channel History and the Origins of Digital Surround It was at the 1987 October SMPTE meeting. People were saying, “How many channels should there be [in the digital sound standard for cinema]?” And people said two . . . people said four . . . one said eight. And I put my hand up and said, “five point one.” Everybody went, “What is he talking about?” Tomlinson Holman, audio engineer and inventor of THX Today, digital “5.1” sound—the “5” referring to the configuration’s five full-range channels and the “.1” to its bass-frequencies-only low-frequency effects (LFE) channel—is commonplace is homes and nearly ubiquitous in theaters. But in the late 1980s, when Holman made his proposal to the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), no one was sure what form cinematic digital sound would take or how successful it would be. The movie industry, after all, had a long history of introducing new sound technologies only to quickly discard them. This book is ultimately less interested in the factors leading to the adoption of 5.1-channel digital surround sound as the exhibition standard than in the ramifications—both for filmmaking and for film studies—of that decision. That said, digital surround sound (DSS) did not spontaneously spring, fully matured, out of a vacuum; its design and effects are rooted in earlier systems’ successes and failures. Understanding DSS and its effects thus requires knowing a bit about the long 1 20 · Production and St yle history of multi-channel sound in the cinema. A detailed exploration of the entire history of multi-channel cinema sound in all its forms, however, would take the space of an entire book. This chapter thus offers an intentionally incomplete history, focusing only on events and technologies directly relevant to the eventual creation and standardization of 5.1 digital surround sound.1 This condensed history can be conceptually split into four parts. First, an overview of the history of multi-channel sound in cinema demonstrates where DSS draws inspiration from previous systems. Understanding why some of these systems succeeded while others did not—in particular why technologies representing technical or aesthetic “improvements” over the prevailing standards of the time often failed— will provide crucial context about the factors necessary for DSS (or any other new sound system) to be widely accepted. The second phase of this historical exploration is a close look at Dolby Stereo, digital surround sound’s immediate predecessor as the exhibition standard. Many of the specific technical specifications of DSS are direct responses to the strengths and weaknesses of Dolby Stereo; understanding Dolby Stereo helps explain the design of DSS systems and why the film industry was willing to embrace DSS. Third, an examination of the companies, technologies, and outside factors involved in the launch of DSS and its subsequent expansion from the cinema to the home and other venues explains how DSS became common enough to affect the way filmmakers make movies. Finally, a brief exploration of the limitations of 5.1-channel digital surround sound offers ideas about where sound technology might be headed in the future, a question that will come into play in chapter 5 when considering the likely longevity of filmmaking practices based in 5.1-channel sound. The Origins of Multi-channel Though multi-channel sound (i.e., soundtrack formats with two or more distinct channels of audio) may be considered by many theatergoers a relatively recent innovation, its roots reach back decades. Like other technologies, it has an intricate history of success and failure, progress and regression, that precludes a simple “technological developmental ” history. Its development has been influenced not just by Cinema’s Hidden Multi-channel History · 21 advancements in technology but also by aesthetic practices, the economics of the film industry, audience/consumer expectations, and the growth of the home market. While the introduction of digital surround sound in the 1990s was a clear technological change, DSS’s widespread success reflected lessons learned over the previous sixty years about the importance of these other factors to the viability of a new system. The idea of multi-channel sound predates cinema itself by at least sixteen years, to Alexander Graham Bell’s experiments on two-channel sound transmitted by two telephones in 1879.2 Other sound pioneers continued to play with the effects of two-channel audio transmission, but cinema would first be invented and...