This is topic Sensurround in forum Film Handlers' Forum at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.
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Posted by David Stambaugh (Member # 1102) on 04-16-2002, 08:38 PM:
(This Sensurround discussion started in the "What's in your van's console?" thread)I vaguely remember seeing something (Earthquake?) in a theater with a temporary Sensurroud installation. Was probably the original Edwards Cinema in Costa Mesa, CA. There were a bunch of large odd-looking speaker enclosures sitting on the floor in front of the screen, and big thick cables leading to them. I honestly don't remember how well it worked, but I do remember the LA Times running a story saying some Sensurround theaters were having problems with things like falling ceiling tiles, and that they had to be careful not to overdo it or they risked cracking the plaster walls (OK, I might be embellishing the part about cracks in the walls).
Posted by Greg Mueller (Member # 17) on 04-16-2002, 08:43 PM:
If you do a search on it in the archives there was quite a discussion on it a while back------------------
Greg Mueller
Amateur Astronomer, Machinist, Filmnut
http://www.muellersatomics.com/
Posted by Mark Lensenmayer (Member # 134) on 04-17-2002, 03:01 PM:
David,You might check with Thomas Hauerslev. He has been collecting material on this topic. Thomas has been know to visit these parts on occasion.
Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 04-17-2002, 10:52 PM:
The original Sensurround is an odd format. Mono with a LFE channel added. A DVD of "Battlestar Galactica" has a Dolby Digital 1.1 reproduction of the Sensurround mix. "Sensurround Plus" was tag given to some 70mm presentations, but Format 42 already had two subwoofer channels.
Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 04-18-2002, 12:00 AM:
Hmmmm, aren't Woody Allen movies mono with subwoofer? If so, let's all advertise "Sensurround" on his next release. 
Posted by Paul Linfesty (Member # 214) on 04-18-2002, 12:24 AM:
Actually, the first Sensurround film, EARTHQUAKE played in first-runs with mag stereo prints (without a surround track). The optical track of the film included the tones to switch the "rumble box" control on and off. 70mm prints were used outside the United States for EARTHQUAKE, but used the standard SENSURROUND tag.ZOOT SUIT was the one and only to utilize the SENSURROUND PLUS name (on 70mm prints). This referred to the fact that DBX noise reduction was used for the entire soundtrack, and not just for the Sensurround effex portions used on the second (MIDWAY), third (ROLLERCOASTER), and fourth (BATTLESTAR GALLACTIA), all of which WERE optic-mono releases.
Posted by Paul G. Thompson (Member # 655) on 04-18-2002, 12:51 AM:
As most of you know, Cerwin-Vega built most (if not all) the 18-inch subwoofer speakers for the movie Earthquake. At the end of the Earthquake movie run, the speaker boxes and speakers were promptly abandoned. I have been told the speakers served no practical purposes after the movie, because they were so non-linear. Supposedly, it was cheaper to abandon them that to have them all shipped back to Universal.
How many are left, I don't know. But I know of a few that still exist and are in service as sub-woofers. They were designed to make noise, and that's what they do.
Posted by Michael Coate (Member # 757) on 04-18-2002, 03:25 AM:
quote:
ZOOT SUIT was the one and only to utilize the SENSURROUND PLUS name (on 70mm prints).
Some 35mm engagements also advertised Sensurround Plus (such as the Edwards Cinema in Costa Mesa, CA)
quote:
This referred to the fact that DBX noise reduction was used for the entire soundtrack
Sensurround Plus also incorporated an in-theater lighting effect.
Posted by Michael Coate (Member # 757) on 04-18-2002, 03:42 AM:
quote:
DVD of "Battlestar Galactica" has a Dolby Digital 1.1 reproduction of the Sensurround mix.
The DVD soundtracks are 1.1 as well for "Midway" (the second release, from Universal; first DVD from Image is 1.0) and "Rollercoaster."
Posted by Brad Haven (Member # 954) on 04-18-2002, 06:09 AM:
i believe that our company has two of the sensurround speakers that came from melbourne, we have one in our cinema 1 and there is one at the luna leederville cinema 1 , that was the sales pitch anyway ! . they have both been re coned with plain 100w speakers, they certainly do make plenty of noise, we run in SR which doesn't help!
Posted by Thomas Hauerslev (Member # 566) on 04-18-2002, 08:23 AM:
Since my last Sensurround posting a year ago, I've recieved a couple of complete Sensurround processors and a manual. Only for substandard movies (35mm), however. If anyone have the 70mm cards lying around, I'd be happy to give the cards a safe retirement in Copenhagen. Wonder what will happen if I actually fire a processor up and connect the processor to the LP soundtrack with the Sensurround sample or perhaps a LD/DVD?The most likely scenario is probably blown speakers, a stunned wife, a nice white jacket with long sleves that can be secured on the back for me and a long visit to the local (projectionist-)asylum.
------------------
Cheers, Thomas
www.in70mm.com - The 70mm Newsletter
www.dp70.com|www.70mm.dk|www.hauerslev.com|http: //hjem.get2net.dk/in70mm
Posted by Per Hauberg (Member # 529) on 04-18-2002, 01:16 PM:
Thomas said >wonder what will happen...<Easy: Charlotte will order new locks for the whole house, next time You are out, and you will never live on Frederiksberg again...
and thats it
happy new year
Posted by Bill Carter (Member # 156) on 04-18-2002, 01:51 PM:
A couple of quick Sensurround stories...When Earthquake opened where I grew up in Roanoke, Virginia, the first performance brought down ceiling tiles in front of the screen at the Terrace Theater. The newspaper reported that the audience clapped and cheered wildly... thinking it was part of the show.
The stories from here in Minneapolis aren't quite as funny... up here, Earthquake shook down 50 years worth of dust and dirt from the walls and ceiling in one of the big old downtown houses, prompting (according to local legend) a patron's fatal asthma attack.
Posted by Frank Angel (Member # 248) on 04-18-2002, 02:46 PM:
So it was a sound system AND a theatre cleaning machine!!Problem with those Cerwin-Vega boxes was that they were designed to couple with the walls; they had units that were designed to be placed vertically in the rear corners of the room and the massive throated units that sat in front of the stage with the mouth opening right in the face of the folks in the front seats. As well as smaller units that sat vertically on either side of the stage. These thing had to be against the walls to work so they really couldn't be kept in the theatres if aesthetics were considered.
All these bins coupling to the walls and pumping out resonating low end....the SPL was spectacular. I would love to know what they were able to achieve. It was so loud that it actually modulated the sound from the main speakers -- I saw EARTHQUAKE in 4 track mag and once the Sensurround kicked in, it was like the dialogue was filtered through a fan....kind of a sympathetic vibration taking place. It was totally awesome and the day I went, I stayed for every show until the theatre closed.
IMHO, the system ONLY worked well for EARTHQUAKE where the synthesizer was external to the soundtrack. Once they tried to adapt it to reproduce part of a non-descrete soundtrack, it didn't work nearly as well. Yah, you got subbass sound, but it really was just trying to reproduce components of the existing mono track -- basically just normal low end sounds. Only they were too loud, as mentioned, the Sensurround reproduction was nonlinear, in other words, just big, poorly designed subwoofers trying to reproduce normal low-end sounds. And the processing had terrible artifacts going on -- lots of false triggering of the low-end system by sound that were just at the edge of the threshold, like vocal "P"s and "B"s which would pop into the Sensurround channel and blast out like cannon explosions. Very annoying. Bad system.
But the original design for EARTHQUAKE with 4 track mag -- fabulous. I think with today's technology, you would run EARTHQUAKE and come pretty close to the Sensurround SPL levels with just a really good subbass system, maybe needing to add a few more bins, like in the back corners of the room. And of course you would need that synth box, but today you could create that random rumble sound in a synth generator in about 5 minutes, record it on a CD, set it to repeat play in a CD player and let the Sensurround tones trigger the audio from the CD player.
I was lucky enough to get one of the original EARTHQUAKE soundtrack LPs; cut 1 opens with a recording of the actual rumble noise from the synthesizer. They removed that from subsequent pressings because it cause lots of damage when people turned it up too high. If you look closely at the grooves, they are spaced very far apart -- space needed so the cutting lathe wouldn't cut into the walls of the adjacent groove walls. Played on a good system, the effect is quite impressive.
A local TV station here in NY had the broadcast premiere of the film and they made a big promotional deal about broadcasting it with Sensurround. They actually mixed the rumble synth sounds in with the audio. I recorded it on 3/4 in tape (Beta and VHS hadn't been invented yet) and it was very effective -- again, only if you had a good playhback system. I can't imagine what kind of havoc this created for the transmitter engineers, trying to keep overall modulation within limits and yet still getting dialogue to read.
Posted by Gordon McLeod (Member # 33) on 04-19-2002, 07:21 PM:
Rollercoaster and Midway and Earthquake were shown in Canada in 4 track mag sensuround and there was DBX on all tracks
Posted by Paul Mayer (Member # 355) on 04-20-2002, 01:06 AM:
As to the whereabouts of those original cabinets, eight of them live on (in reworked form) as subwoofers under the screen at the Hitchcock mixing stage on the Universal lot. I attended a SMPTE/AES meeting there last year and got to hear the depthcharge sequence of U-571 on that system. Impressive, but the performance of the system did make me feel queasy. The room engineers claimed during the Q&A that the original tuning was flat down to 10Hz--they had to raise it due to complaints of discomfort.The room's performance with those cabinets is impressive, but I wonder what accomodations the guys have to make when mixing a production on that stage. I've never heard that kind of LF performance at any "regular" theatre.
Paul
Gimpy Film Putter Inner
Posted by Gordon McLeod (Member # 33) on 04-20-2002, 10:32 AM:
We have a bunch of them at cinepshere as the subs for the 35/70 presentations and they make the place rock
Posted by Edwin Graf Diemer (Member # 545) on 04-21-2002, 06:40 PM:
Sensurround was great fun, especially with "Earthquake". In Delaware it played first-run at the Branmar Cinema in Wilmington-the only theater in the state to have it at the time. The theater was in a strip mall and Mom still remembers seeing the lines of people from the bookstore she worked at. It still had cracks in the projection booth ceiling when it closed years later because of the engagement.NBC broadcast "Earthquake" on its "Big Event" series. The Sensurround effect was simulcast on various NBC FM affilliates-for example, WFLN in Philadelphia carried it. It worked very well-the film was shown over two nights and the earthquake segment was on the first, so that evening was the only one to be simulcast.
Another "Sensurround" story-I remember reading in a film magazine about kids seeing "Earthquake" over and over again. They would stand in the back of the theater, and when the quake hit they would grab their legs and roll down the aisle!
Posted by John Walsh (Member # 168) on 04-21-2002, 08:57 PM:
A friend of mine told he ran Sensurround at a theater in Florida. There was a pet store next door, and it killed all the fish. They (insurance) had to buy new fish.
Posted by System Notices (Member # 2357) on 11-25-2011, 04:25 AM:
It has been 3504 days since the last post.
Posted by Jerry Axelsson (Member # 3175) on 11-25-2011, 04:25 AM:
Hello friends,
I am looking for SENSURROUND documentation. Manuals, ads, info sheets 35mm ads, trailers etc. Please contact me off-site if you can help out.
Any scanned pdf:s would be greatly appreciated.
Also looking for a SENSURROUND processor in good, working condition.
Please contact me off-site.
Thank you in advance.
Posted by Frank Angel (Member # 248) on 11-25-2011, 11:44 PM:
Jerry, the American Cinematographer Mag had a full issue on EARTHQUAKE and probably the most complete information about every aspect of the sound system, even including the worldwide print inventory with format information. If you can get your hands on that at a public library, that would probably be exactly what you are looking for. My copy is in storage otherwise I would give you the issue volume number and year. Look thru the issues the same year EARTHQUAKE came out.
Posted by Don Furr (Member # 1469) on 11-26-2011, 07:16 AM:
Jerry that mag that Frank is talking about seem to be for sale on Ebay. Check item #360384363491.
Posted by Mitchell Dvoskin (Member # 751) on 11-27-2011, 03:19 PM:
Was there ever a Sensurround processor? While I would not rule it out, in all the Sensurround booth I was in back then, it was either just a crossover routing the extended sub bass to some powerful Cerwin Vega amplifiers, or in one case, a manual switch that turned on a "rumble" generator that sent rumble to the Sensurround amps.
Anyone know if there was ever an actual Sensurround processor?
Posted by Robert Throop (Member # 61) on 11-27-2011, 03:40 PM:
There certainly was a SenSurround processor. I had two which I sent to Thomas Haurslev in Copenhagen. There were different mods depending on the film. For example "Earthquake" had a rumble generator triggered by control tones on the soundtrack. "Midway"
used information from the soundtrack and sent it to different banks of speakers.
Posted by Bill Gabel (Member # 1105) on 11-28-2011, 10:24 AM:
There was four versions of the Sensurround processor.
Mod. I (Earthquake), Mod. II (Midway, ...), Mod. III (mine has a 1979 conversion date on it, from Mod II) and Mod. IIIA .
The Mod. II versions was converted to Mod. III's & Mod. IIIA's.
The Mod. I version is the rarest of the units, because of how Sensurround changed the system for later films. I know of only three Mod. I units in the U.S. (Dolby has two and I have Mod. I unit #24).
I have one Mod. I unit and two Mod. III units.
Posted by Thomas Hauerslev (Member # 566) on 12-17-2011, 11:26 PM:
More about Sensurround - my units are now stored in Karlsruhe, Germany.
http://www.in70mm.com/library/process/sensurround/index.htm
Posted by System Notices (Member # 2357) on 02-09-2018, 02:10 AM:
It has been 2245 days since the last post.
Posted by Allan Barnes (Member # 5178) on 02-09-2018, 02:10 AM:
Does anyone have the BLUEPRINTS to build these Sensurround speaker cabinets ?
Posted by Frank Angel (Member # 248) on 02-09-2018, 06:50 PM:
Funny that the Mod I is so hard to come by, given how the film played pretty extensively all over the country and overseas. What happens to all that hardware...theatres just chucked it in the dumpsters?
They released an LP of the soundtrack -- I have it -- and the first track which only last a minute or two takes up what normally would contain 4 or 5 minutes of "normal" audio. The grooves had to be spaced very widely apart to prevent the modulation from cutting into the adjacent grooves. Many a home speaker system was damaged by playing that cut at normal levels.
Thing is, even if you didn't have the processor, today you could use that recording (which was recorded directly from the output of the processor) to recreate it. If memory serves, I believe there were only 4 volume levels so it would just be a matter of knowing where in the film the rumble needed to come on and at what levels, pretty easily done using a multitrack recording program and adding the rumble audio to additional tracks at appropriate levels, then author a DCP with an additional channel assigned to the rumble audio. Of course you will need a really hefty sub-bass system, I mean, those Cerwin Vegas literally vibrated the organs inside your damn body! But with today's available low end systems, while you might need to add a bunch more equipment, but it could probably be done pretty effectively and easily.
Posted by Donald Brown (Member # 5427) on 02-10-2018, 02:25 PM:
Edwin's post brought back a memory that I have always discounted as deceptive advertising, but perhaps not!
I was in my teens when both Earthquake and Midway were released. I saw both titles in indoor theatres, Cinema 28 and the Cape Cod Mall Cinema, respectively, where the Sensurround speakers were arrayed in the rear of the auditorium. When Midway was released, the Wareham Drive-In Theatre advertised the engagement in Sensurround.
Edwin's reference to the network broadcast of Earthquake and the accompanying Sensurround simulcast leads me to wonder if the drive-in's ad might have been accurate, with the Sensurround effect presented by radio broadcast and the standard soundtrack by in-car-speakers?
Posted by William Kucharski (Member # 7246) on 03-07-2018, 11:13 AM:
![[Frown]](frown.gif)
