Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Stereophonic re-mixes of mono soundtracks

This is topic Stereophonic re-mixes of mono soundtracks in forum The Afterlife at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

To visit this topic, use this URL:
https://ft-forum.com/ft/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=12;t=000443

Posted by Robert Harrison (Member # 3202) on 11-13-2005, 09:57 PM:

Does anyone else out there become aggravated when they purchase a DVD of a movie they know was originally in mono that now claims to be "remastered in 5.1 digital sound?" Now, I'm not talking "purist" here. I have nothing against this practice, except when the results are truly awful.

A case in point would be the new box set of "Billy Jack" movies. While they did manage to keep the dialogue centered on all four films, everything else was coming mostly from the right channel. Also, reverb was added to the sound effects. Fortunately, they did include the original mono track as an option.

Fox DVDs are notorious for always claiming to have "stereo" tracks on many titles (although not going so far as to say 5.1), such as "One Million Years, B.C.," "Silver Streak" and "Wizards." In each case, the sound, including dialogue, is all over the room, in what I have dubbed AmorphouSound. (Even with their original 4-track titles, the dialogue tends to drift around a bit. That may be attributable to multiple microphones on the stage, I can't say for sure.)

I realize that if they only have a composite track to work with, that there is only so much that can be done. Some seem to do it better than others. A good, or at least acceptable, re-mix of such is "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly." On other Eastwood titles, remarkable re-mixes have been accomplished. On those, they must have had the separate dialogue, music and effects tracks to work with.

Some Elvis Presley movies have limited stereo, usually with everything imaging between the left-center and right-center positions. Then, there is something like the new issue of the 1953 "War of the Worlds" (listed as a 2.0 stereo track), where sound is panned here and there, front and back, yet there is no separation on the music, as you would find on "Blazing Saddles" or the new issue of "The Sting."

Then there are some early Godzilla titles, which go from strictly center to surround, with no attempt to have any separation effects in the front left and right. They also added some obnoxious .1 boom effects here and there that seem to be coming from another movie. The worst of these is the original "Godzilla, King of the Monsters" which promises the obligatory 5.1 mix. It turns out to be just another AmorphouSound deal with reverb added.

Then, we have the films that were originally 4-track magnetic or Dolby matrix, that are suddenly "5.1." In a lot of these cases, I wonder how many have actually been re-mixed or, at least, run through a Pro Logic II decoder.

My statement, then, would be: If you can't do a decent re-mix, don't bother. And, please, don't call it 5.1. It's a rip-off. Some of us (and you boogers at the video companies know this) will buy a new issue of a movie only because of the supposed stereo re-mix. I'm contemplating buying the new issue of "The Battle of Britain," since the original DVD was only mono.

Sometimes, I get lucky, like with "Black Sunday." At other times, I wind up with AmorphouSound.

Anyone else out there as picky (or gullible) as me?

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 11-13-2005, 11:16 PM:

I know the results are pretty bad when they "remastered" all of the Star Trek episodes from mono to 5.1. It was really really bad. Even worse wa when they did the same to the original Transformers. Fortunately the original mix is still an option.

Posted by Paul Linfesty (Member # 214) on 11-14-2005, 12:02 AM:

quote: Robert Harrison
Even with their original 4-track titles, the dialogue tends to drift around a bit. That may be attributable to multiple microphones on the stage, I can't say for sure.

Many early Fox films recorded with three mikes lined up within the composition of the image, others used pot-panning in the sound mixing stage. In either case, this was known as "directional dialog" and was quite common in 4 and 6-track magnetic films from the 50's through mid 70's. It was very deliberate and some appreciate that the original mixes are being kept by Fox.

Posted by Monte L Fullmer (Member # 2797) on 11-15-2005, 12:06 AM:

quote: Paul Linfesty
Many early Fox films recorded with three mikes lined up within the composition of the image, others used pot-panning in the sound mixing stage.

..if you see any production picts of "the ROBE", you can see this "tree" holding these three mics above the camera.

Early analog stereo recordings also used this "tree" concept for three-track recording - to elimate the "hole" effect with having the center mic to fill in that "hole."

Decca took this tree method and called it "the DECCA tree" of three mics on a pole with a "T" across the top of the pole with center in the middle and the left and right on the ends of the "T" - hanging over the orchestra.

I heard that studio session masters were done on 6trk, 65mm film - this is probably why the DVD's can be issued in 5.1 whereas the titles were originally released in mono for the theatres. I could be wrong on this and maybe someone can "fill in the blanks" on this area.

-Monte

Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 11-15-2005, 06:49 PM:

The recent DVD release of "The High And The Mighty" has a Chase re-do on it and its unimpressive at best. Don't know if this Warners Cinemascope job was actually miked in stereo or not but I suppose it could have been... I would have thought the music woulda been real stereo though.

I highly reccomend this DVD though as its a neat time capsule to watch and it represents the first major "Air Disaster" epic made a long time before the Airport movies were even an idea. I'd go for a ride in that DC-6 with Wayne and company any day!! The big bonus is the second disk that has a ton of stuff on BATJAC Productions and how and why John Wayne formed it and how it was named. There are also pieces on Demetri Tiomkin, William Wellman, and the writer of the book as well as stuff shot at Chase doring the re-mix, and during the restoration of the film itself. Excellent value... I think I paid 9.99 for this DVD. A little seen John Wayne film that not been around in decades.

Mark

Posted by Robert Harrison (Member # 3202) on 11-16-2005, 05:45 PM:

Let me add that I do enjoy directionalized dialogue. I was even hoping it would come back into vogue with the digital sound formats. Apparently, only some CGI movies are doing this. I will say, though, that something like "Voyage To the Bottom of the Sea" is a bit much in a home system such as mine when the speakers are located outside the edges of the picture. I'm sure the same soundtrack was wonderful in a theatre with the speakers positioned behind the screen, where the voices could match the positions of the actors.

My comment about dialogue jumping around was a reference to how, in the same scene, one person's voice would be fairly localized at a certain position, while another person's voice sounds like it is coming from all over the place. "Prince Valiant" is an example. Also, "Journey To the Center of the Earth" sounds a bit "phasey" to my ears. And on "Shining Star," some background sound effects jumped around WITH the dialogue.

Posted by Monte L Fullmer (Member # 2797) on 11-16-2005, 06:02 PM:

quote: Mark Gulbrandsen
The big bonus is the second disk that has a ton of stuff on BATJAC Productions and how and why John Wayne formed it and how it was named.

Wayne and producer Robert Fellows founded Batjac in 1952 as Wayne/Fellows Productions. When Fellows left the company years later, Wayne re-named the corporation after a ficticious trading company mentioned in the 1948 film "Wake of the Red Witch". With this formulation of this company, Wayne had control of his own films instead of having the studios having their say.

Kinda like what happened with Buster Keaton in the silent era: Keaton had control of the movies that he made under his own company until he blundered and "signed his life and career away" with MGM in 1928, whom later on, in 1933, fired Keaton for his bad abuse of alcoholism. From then on, Keaton never regrouped himself until it was almost too late.

Kinda fun being your own boss...

-Monte

Posted by Frank Angel (Member # 248) on 11-26-2005, 01:46 AM:

As with most things old, the amount of preservation when it comes to motion picture original elements, it swings widely from title to title, studio to studio. It can go from all the elements being kept safe and secure and not deteriorated, to elements totally ruined or even lost, and this even on blockbuster films that you would think, "gee, what kind of morons would 'loose' the sound elements of a picture like SPARTACUS, or LAWRENCE OF ARABIA?" Total morons it seems.

Then there are quite a few films of the 50s and 60s that had music recorded stereophonically but only ever got released in mono, or were played in stereo interlock in only limited engagements, while everywhere else they played with only standard mono prints. The DVD releases on such titles naturally can go back to the vaults and do restoration from real stereo elements, again, if they do still exist.

I have not read anything definatively about THE ROBE's soundtrack, if the original multitrack mag elements still exist, all I know is, neither the CD nor the DVD has real stereo music, which is an awful shame given the great score by Alfred Newman, albeit self-pirated. In fact, what they have done on both CD and DVD is a terrible fake stereo job that adds echo and splits the frequency bands, alternating from them left and right. [puke]

IMHO it's the music that is the only good thing about the film -- what a shame not to have the original stereo. Who cares if Newman "stole" it from his Academy Award winning score for THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME (listen to the soldiers march and then again to the finale -- identical for both pictures). Guess he figured, "Hey, if Fox is willing pay me twice for the same music, more power to me." To his credit tho, THE ROBE does have some very haunting melodies which he added, but THE ROBE finale is note for note, chorus and all, as HUNCHBACK. Check it out sometime.

Posted by Paul Linfesty (Member # 214) on 11-28-2005, 12:05 AM:

quote: Frank Angel
what they have done on both CD and DVD is a terrible fake stereo job

AFAIK, the DVD features the correct 4-track mix, albeit with a clipped high end (to get rid of that "hiss" that Fox loves to do.

Posted by Frank Angel (Member # 248) on 11-28-2005, 03:24 AM:

I don't know Paul, I've been a sound mixing and recording engineer most of my adult life, and I've listened to both the CD and the DVD many times on monitors, with headphones, in the same recording studio with URI monitors that we used to mix an album that won the Phoenix Award for Best Quadraphonic Recording of an Original Cast Album Rubber Nickles. At no time do I actually hear a real stereo soundfield of THE ROBE. Unless the original recording was so badly done (which I doubt), there is no way this is real multitrack stereo. There's no stereo imaging, which is what you get with slice-and-dice shifting of frequency bands. Just listen to one channel at a time A-B them, and you'll hear the very different coloration between the two. That's because of the artificial removal of half the bandwidth in chunks on one channel with the opposite chunks left in place on the other channel -- leaving it to sound like someone totally readjusted a graphic equalizer between each switch back and forth. And that's because they DID.....to make pseudo-stereo. It's a dead give-away. In natural stereo, both channels would have the same tonalilty.

I am not saying they didn't put 4 channels of audio on the DVD, I am just saying they are not real stereo.

And I wouldn't go by what hype the studios put on their DVD boxes. Like they don't lie thruough their teeth. These are the same guys who keep saying DVDs will "last forever" (Jack Valentie's own words when trying to argue before Congress why consumers shouldn't be allowed to make even a single backup copy of their legally purchased DVDs and CDs) when any archivest will tell you that DVDs and CDs are all subject to "rot." The aluminum substrat becomes too non-reflective for the laser to read it and they also fail due to delamination, where the the layers separate, again making them unplayable. Those guys.

Posted by Jeff Taylor (Member # 443) on 12-01-2005, 03:23 PM:

In Ron Haver's "A Star is Born" book he mentions the frustrations of trying to restore that film, and specifically the fact that Jack Warner ordered the re-use of the magnetic stereo masters of their '50's titles for TV work. It's kind of a crime to think that those stereo Garland tracks ended up being recorded over by a Sugarfoot or Hawaiian Eye episode! For ASIB they ended up dubbing the sound from the last remaining mag print, which was in extremely poor shape.

Posted by Robert Harrison (Member # 3202) on 12-04-2005, 05:45 PM:

And now I would like to discuss the soundtrack for "White Christmas." We wind up showing this film every year at this time where I work as projectionist. Two years ago, we showed the DVD. It listed a 5.1 soundtrack. It didn't sound very good. Of course, I had to use the 2 channel mixdown from the DVD player into the non-sync of a CP55, which left me with left, right and surround. Still, a friend owns a copy of the DVD and he said it didn't sound that great on his 5 channel home system.

Last year, we got a 35mm print. It had a stereo optical track. It wasn't really marked as to particular noise reduction format so I played it in A-type stereo with surround (we do have an outboard SR adapter). I went downstairs and at first thought, "Hey, not bad." It was a scene of a bunch of soldiers singing and their voices were coming quite prominently from the surrounds.

Well, I had other screens to run. I come back later during a dialogue only scene and hear every word coming out of the surrounds! I ran upstairs and switched to stereo WITHOUT surround.

Yes, the system was calibrated. No other film exhibited this problem. So, here's my theory:

If the original soundtrack was Perspecta (a 3 channel process that was basically mono shifted from speaker to speaker), could it be that someone at the Paramount sound department took an original Perspecta track, decoded it through a Perspecta Integrator and sent the outputs to a Dolby matrix encoder? This was probably done a long time ago as I remember having an optical stereo print play here once back in the 80s. Since the matrix decoders will send any out of phase stuff to the surrounds, I'm thinking this might be what the problem was. (I don't recall what it sounded like back then.)

The bottom line: we are showing it again on the 13th. This time I will leave the surround channel off.

Posted by Steve Guttag (Member # 268) on 12-04-2005, 07:48 PM:

Well...whereas Perspecta had a mono track that was shifted between the three front channels via sub-tones...these tone would raise and lower the level on the various channels. As such, there should be zero phase differences between the channels, even if run through a Dolby encoder.

Now if there was ever a 4-track magnetic version created for the film after the demise of Perspecta...then the opportunity for phase issues to exist does come into play. Any anomolies on the master recordings of such a 3 or 4-track magnetic print could indeed wack out a "pro-logic" decoder.

Posted by William Hooper (Member # 71) on 12-05-2005, 02:26 AM:

Vistavision, originally with a mono soundtrack with optional Perspecta steering, so I'd bet that a print with a Dolby stereo optical track is a re-mix done in the SR period.

Posted by John Koutsoumis (Member # 1855) on 12-05-2005, 08:21 AM:

Is it possible that the print of "White Christmas" is actually a mono track? Not remixed in stereo. I've run it from DVD in 5.1 through a CP55 (via the 4 track mag input), it didn't sound bad at all. Very little surround though. High Society was the same kind of 5.1 mix but that looked and sounded brilliant.

Worst stereo re-mix for of a mono film I've experianced would be "Vertigo". I know there were problems in not having full access of the soundtracks etc, but gee whiz! [Eek!]

Posted by Christian Appelt (Member # 1067) on 12-05-2005, 06:01 PM:

The only Perspecta-to-Dolby-SVA remix I ever saw was in a 35mm studio print of LUST FOR LIFE (1954), and it sounded quite accurate. As for DVDs, I wish they would always include the original mono track - I hate those "reprocessed" mono tracks. FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX was definitely spoiled for me by the tinny, hollow pseudo-stereo remix. AS long as they can put "5.1 Dolby Digital" on the box... [Frown]

BTW, some studios never care to find stereo versions of foreign language dubs. In Germany, nearly every 70mm spectacle has been issued on DVD with the English version in 5.1 multichannel and the dubbed version in plain mono from optical sound, although these versions exist in perfectly usable archival and collector's prints. MY FAIR LADY, AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS, EL CID and many CinemaScope 4-track productions come to my mind.

Posted by John Koutsoumis (Member # 1855) on 12-05-2005, 07:09 PM:

The "White Christmas" DVD has the restored mono track as well as the 5.1. "High Society" was a great multi' channel mix. All the Musical numbers were possibly 3 channel stereo originally. For the most part the effects and dialogue are center channel and the rest kick in with the musical numbers which I think is a nice touch, especially if you have a great sound system.

But I agree in most cases in they should also have restored mono tracks. On the other hand although I haven't heard it in full 5.1 "A Clockwork Orange" sounds better in stereo than the mono track I experienced when I saw it in 35mm 2 years ago.

Posted by William Hooper (Member # 71) on 12-06-2005, 12:36 AM:

If Chace or someone has created fake stereo for the track from mono, beware of ugly flangy mushy artifacts & sound if it's played back in mono.

Posted by John Koutsoumis (Member # 1855) on 12-06-2005, 07:09 AM:

Any titles in particalur that are done by Chace or other baddies?? Would they have been invloved in the stereo mix of "North by Northwest" that is heard on the deluxe special edition Laserdisc? Don't know of the foley effects were re-done but on the stereo track they are very loud!

Posted by Frank Angel (Member # 248) on 12-17-2005, 10:16 PM:

William, that's a good rule of thumb when playing back any pseudo-stereo mix -- NEVER sum the channels back to mono. One of the main tricks that almost every pseudo-stereo generator employs is adding delay in varing amounts to various slices of the audio spectrum. It's usually added at specific frequences with different time values. Mixing this stuff back to mono usuall makes it sound like the track it's playing from a speaker under water, what with all the flanging going on.

Posted by Claude S. Ayakawa (Member # 1401) on 12-24-2005, 03:26 AM:

Regarding Mark's comment about the Chase stereo remix for "THE HIGH & THE MIGHTY". I do agree with him about how unimpressed he was with sound. Yes, the film was released in four track mag stereo and I did see it presented it that way in 1954 when it was first released. The theatrical stereo mix was awesome and featured discrete sound in the front sound field with awesome mono surround. I was hoping the original stereo mix was preserved but I think I read about Jack L. Warner ordering all stereo recordings at Warner Brothers erased so the tapes could be reused. The sound on the DVD was ok but no way as great as the original theatrical presentaion.

-Claude

Posted by Paul Linfesty (Member # 214) on 12-24-2005, 12:23 PM:

HOwever, in the case of THE HIGH AND THE MIGHTY, they did have the original mixes (although in bad condition). They changed it anyway.

Posted by Ron Lacheur (Member # 1126) on 01-08-2006, 06:56 PM:

quote: Paul Linfesty
AFAIK, the DVD features the correct 4-track mix, albeit with a clipped high end (to get rid of that "hiss" that Fox loves to do.

Rolling off the higher frequencies is not an acceptable method of eliminating hiss. If they had the budget to do a correct audio restoration, I'm sure they would have ran it through a Cedar NR unit.

It's questionable as to how many of these " remixes " are actual remixes. There is a plugin available for the TC 6000 called " Unwrap " which will pull a stereo source and create a 5.1 enviroment.

Posted by Robert Harris (Member # 1712) on 01-17-2006, 09:26 AM:

A few thoughts re: stereo re-mixes...

Our ability to derive quality audio is based solely upon the survival of prime elements, and the intent of the studio at the time of the production.

Many films which were released as monaural or Perspecta had stereo music stems in either 3 or 4 track. Some of the studio productions from the 1940s were recorded with multiple mikes, which allow for the creation of stereo, although that may not have been the original intent.

North by Northwest is a good example of a film for which the original stems had survived.

As to some specifics...

Lawrence was recorded as a 4 track, however the master would not run in '87 and the audio was derived from the print master (the mag used to sound hundreds of mag prints), in addition to newly recorded dialogue and older bits and pieces.

Some of the original 6 track masters for Spartacus had survived from either preview or roadshow cuts, with superb audio.

My Fair Lady, which was a 4 track original, was missing several units of 4 track, which necessitated the use of the 6 track print master, which had been overused and was missing high end. Intercutting the two sounded wrong from a quality position.

"Vertigo" was an interesting case, as no original mixed audio survived, and no magnetic dialogue or effects. The best quality was found on used 35mm prints. We did, however, locate the original music floor recordings, some of which were mono and some 3 track stereo. The sound was and is incredibly clean and superb. While a proper restored soundtrack using the stereo music was researched and planned, the studio desired a more "modern" sound, hence the added effects tracks, of which no one one the restoration team is terribly fond, but the studio pays the bills and makes those decisions. We were simply "out-voted." The tracks can still be re-done properly and to Hich's specs. Birds in the dead forest was not in Hitchcock's notes.

Please also note that many DVDs use the term 5.1 not as a reference to the reality of the tracks, but rather, to the holding technology available, and into which the tracks have been placed. Occasionally, we'll see this correctly stated as 3.0 or 4.0.

Hope this is helpful.

RAH