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Posted: |
Sep 11, 2016 - 8:01 PM
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By: |
manderley
(Member)
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Not sure I understand the question. Hundreds have been released in stereo.
Well, there were those that released in Mono but also released in repossessed, "fake" Stereo.
None of the ones I bought were "repossessed." I still have them.
But some were "re-processed" into fake stereo.
Seriously, though, there were a number of re-recorded scores never re-processed into "fake" stereo, but that number is relatively small because most were recorded before the age of commercial stereo recordings.
Included among these might be the 78rpm re-recordings of THE SONG OF BERNADETTE (1943), FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS (1943), GOLDEN EARRINGS (1947), SPELLBOUND (1945), CAPTAIN FROM CASTILE (1947), THE PARADINE CASE (1949), FOREVER AMBER (1947), THE QUIET MAN (1953) and more. None of these were re-channeled in their reissues that I know of.
The early re-recordings of THE ROBE (1953) and THE EGYPTIAN (1954).....were re-channeled into duo-phonic stereo (although much of THE EGYPTIAN on this release was apparently actual soundtrack material so doesn't entirely qualify under your question).
This is a "loaded" question and would take many hours of labor to research and truly answer your question. My guess is that you're thinking more of the 1960s re-recordings than the 1930s-1950s re-recordings and if so, you need to look towards United Artists records, Decca Records and perhaps Capitol records, who were probably the biggest promoters of this process in the late '50s-early '60s.
And you haven't even asked about the huge number of actual soundtracks from the 1930s to the 1960s which were recorded stereophonically, but never released that way at all.
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Posted: |
Sep 12, 2016 - 1:43 PM
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By: |
manderley
(Member)
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Rather than that, I would like to know in which way, technically, they "re-channelled" those titles in the pre-digital era, as they sounds rather well, without phasing, panning, etc. The first of such items I got was a copy of the Mgm lp of GONE WITH THE WIND!
I'm certainly not a sound technician and can't describe these things in "soundspeak", but my impression from reading material in those days is that there were varied systems.
One, I believe, was to simply take the mono signal, run it to one side featuring the treble more than the bass, and run the same signal to the other side, featuring the bass more than the treble. So you have the treble-balanced signal on one side and the bass-balanced signal on the other. You could also give a directional quality to the material as it was re-channeled by riding the gain controls on each channel, a la Perspecta Sound in the movies, and making the sound seem like it was coming more from one or the other side at any given moment in time, based on the original material recorded.
Another system, I believe, was to channel the mono sound to two different large-scale speaker systems in a specially designed recording chamber. One large speaker would play the treble-balanced signal, the other the bass-balanced signal. A recording system of two (or possibly more) mikes set up in specifically chosen spots in the same room would record the speaker output as well as the reverb from the walls of the room on separate recording channels and thus give you a semblance of stereo depth when mixed into the final master.
Today's digital systems of stereo enhancement work on complex algorithm computations and seem to give a much better stereo impression that those early systems, but, of course, neither are true stereo if they are based on a single mono source.
Perhaps our occasional poster Stephen Pickard can go into all this and define these systems (and others) more accurately and in more detail.
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Posted: |
Sep 12, 2016 - 5:22 PM
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By: |
OnyaBirri
(Member)
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Rather than that, I would like to know in which way, technically, they "re-channelled" those titles in the pre-digital era, as they sounds rather well, without phasing, panning, etc.
Well, they often did not eliminate phase issues, which is one of the reasons that many of us hated rechanneled stereo. Here are some of the common methods, in non-technical terms.
1. Cut the high frequencies in one channel, cut the low frequencies in the other.
2. Put one channel on a split-second electronic delay.
3. Add stereo reverb
4. Add mono reverb to only one channel.
5. Various combinations of the above.
While none of these are desirable, some were more benign than others. Examples from the first category above often collapsed nicely to mono without any weirdness or artifacts. Examples from the second category typically sounded like hell when collapsed to mono, because of phasing issues.
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Posted: |
Sep 13, 2016 - 11:33 PM
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By: |
finder4545
(Member)
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Thanks Manderley and Onyabirri.
Bypassing hypothesis and suppositions, I was referring to official and recognized procedures eventually adopted by recording houses of the time, if protocols ever were fixed.
Spreading the sound onto two channels without a logical order and correctness, in fact, appears to be only a way to "deceive" the listener rather than add a stereo or spatial information.
Fair the idea of re-recording the score with the mikes getting a spaced sound from different loudspeakers, during a mono reproduction, to create informations for stereo impression (separation, echo, reverb, etc), BUT that procedure would be technically and concettually antithetical and counterproductive, due to the fatal worsening of the original sound, through the line of pick-up / playing-machine / ampli / speaker-system / room and air / new mikes / new rec.machines, etc., so that at last would remain only a pastiche and not a sound faithful to the original performance. On the contrary, I see that rechannelled items like THE ROBE or THE EGYPTIAN sound rather well and detailed, meaning that some controlled procedure was applied to assure quality.
The question is not so simple, if one wants to be scientifically correct, respecting the parameters from beginning to end. Moreover, there was in those years a question of compatiblity, it was the time of turntables, vinyl, grooves and stylus, transition from mono to stereo in a hybrid market of long play requiring both them. The stereo grooves and stylus were designed to be compatible with the old mono units, so pressing a stereo Lp with a signal having a slight phase-error in the grooves (just as said Onyabirri), would make it unlistenable through a mono ampli: I am sure many of us experienced how terrible was the sound of a stereo tape or cassette with a wrong azimuth, when listened on a mono unit (and even Rozsa suffered of a similar accident when EL CID was recorded in Italy)!
I think sound-engineers and technicians of the tubes-era, working for Decca, MGM, Capitol, developed some specific devices to maintain quality on those products, and if I think it was the same generation who managed things as Cinerama and VistaVision (look at the scheme of a Perspecta integrator!), my curiosity increases. By the way, I am anxious to see if the booklet of the coming TEN COMMANDMENTS will say something about the re-recording in stereo of the score, after the mono recording intended for the Perspecta system.
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Posted: |
Sep 14, 2016 - 5:46 AM
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By: |
OnyaBirri
(Member)
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...Fair the idea of re-recording the score with the mikes getting a spaced sound from different loudspeakers, during a mono reproduction, to create informations for stereo impression (separation, echo, reverb, etc), BUT that procedure would be technically and concettually antithetical and counterproductive, due to the fatal worsening of the original sound, through the line of pick-up / playing-machine / ampli / speaker-system / room and air / new mikes / new rec.machines, etc., so that at last would remain only a pastiche and not a sound faithful to the original performance.
UNLESS the original, clean recording was on one track of a multi-track tape, and the stereo channels using miking were added to complement the sound of the original and not replace it.
To this day, in the classical world, a dry recording may be played back in a hall renowned for its acoustics, and the sound of the hall is miked and added to the original recording.
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Posted: |
Sep 14, 2016 - 6:30 AM
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By: |
finder4545
(Member)
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...Fair the idea of re-recording the score with the mikes getting a spaced sound from different loudspeakers, during a mono reproduction, to create informations for stereo impression (separation, echo, reverb, etc), BUT that procedure would be technically and concettually antithetical and counterproductive, due to the fatal worsening of the original sound, through the line of pick-up / playing-machine / ampli / speaker-system / room and air / new mikes / new rec.machines, etc., so that at last would remain only a pastiche and not a sound faithful to the original performance.
UNLESS the original, clean recording was on one track of a multi-track tape, and the stereo channels using miking were added to complement the sound of the original and not replace it.
To this day, in the classical world, a dry recording may be played back in a hall renowned for its acoustics, and the sound of the hall is miked and added to the original recording.
So once more Manderley proved to be well informed of the processes behind the scene! Thank, Onyabirri: I see there is always something new to learn in fact of sound and music.
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Posted: |
Sep 14, 2016 - 3:11 PM
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By: |
manderley
(Member)
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.....Fair the idea of re-recording the score with the mikes getting a spaced sound from different loudspeakers, during a mono reproduction, to create informations for stereo impression (separation, echo, reverb, etc), BUT that procedure would be technically and concettually antithetical and counterproductive, due to the fatal worsening of the original sound, through the line of pick-up / playing-machine / ampli / speaker-system / room and air / new mikes / new rec.machines, etc., so that at last would remain only a pastiche and not a sound faithful to the original performance.
UNLESS the original, clean recording was on one track of a multi-track tape, and the stereo channels using miking were added to complement the sound of the original and not replace it.
To this day, in the classical world, a dry recording may be played back in a hall renowned for its acoustics, and the sound of the hall is miked and added to the original recording.....
Does anyone besides me recall, quite some years ago, when Lukas---posting on this Board about trying to reconstruct QUO VADIS---said that he came upon a music track for the film in the vaults that he played back and that it was virtually unusable, because it was so echoey and reverbed that the sound became muddy? At least that was the general impression I got from his description.
For several years I mulled this over and couldn't quite understand 1) Why they HAD a track like this in the first place and, 2) Why they even SAVED and vaulted a track like this.
Then a light went off over my head! I'll bet this track was achieved by the above process, where a mono track (of the QUO VADIS score) was played back and the reverb re-recorded onto mag film. Then in a new mix this track was used as the basis for the stereo surrounds for the 70mm blow-up/stereo reissue of QUO VADIS in the International Market in the 1960s-70s.
In this period, MGM reissued a number of their high-end films as 70mm blowups for this market. JULIUS CAESAR and SEVEN BRIDES FOR SEVEN BROTHERS certainly already had true stereo tracks for remixing, but QUO VADIS, THE THREE MUSKETEERS, THE GREAT CARUSO and others didn't, so I'll bet this was one way of creating at least a false stereo ambience on the 70mm prints, particularly with regard to the surrounds.
What is ironic in all this is that, with the exception of QUO VADIS, they probably actually did have unused multi-track materials in their vaults for THE THREE MUSKETEERS and THE GREAT CARUSO in those days, but no one probably thought about it, or wanted to pull them out and spend the extensive money to reconstruct all this. (Now, of course, much of the original multi-track/stereo stuff in this late 1940s-early 1950s period at MGM has disappeared or deteriorated so it's no longer possible to do a proper stereo procedure.)
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