"Ultra Stereo" Sound Format?

[Bobby Henderson]

I remember Ultra•Stereo being somewhat popular with B-movie productions and indie films in the 1980's and going into the 1990's. I definitely noticed the logo in end credit scrolls and on movie posters.

IIRC, Cobra (1986) was the only movie to have 70mm prints with the mag tracks encoded with Ultra Stereo noise reduction.

[Pete Naples]

I remember during the 1995 Edinburgh International Film Festival, we had a print of a film made by a university lecturer of mine, 'The Limits of Thermal Travelling'. It came in for a press-show, and we noted it was an Ultra Stereo soundtrack.
To be honest, we had never seen a print with it before, a few cinemas here in the UK had the processors, installed by Jacro. They were decent enough. But we never saw prints.
After a lot of head-scratching and phone calls, we ran it in Format 04 on our Dolby CP55, it sounded great.

[Steve Guttag]

Even USL is still somewhat around in some shape or form, as part of QSC

Um...no. the last vestiges of USL at QSC have been stamped out. What is left is all EOL (when they're gone, they're gone). The UPC based ADA equipment is now owned by Moving Image Technologies so that will be USL's last legacy item. The JSD line of processors are done. The CM monitors are done. All test equipment, done.

[Sam Chavez]

It's a shame to let some very fine products lapse. JSD 60 for sure still has a market. It was great having someone like Jack and hs team always working on the next great idea for cinema.

[Mike Blakesley]

Our first and second stereo processors were Ultra Stereo. I still remember the "wow" when I heard the Ultra "logo tag" for the first time.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Um...no. the last vestiges of USL at QSC have been stamped out. What is left is all EOL (when they're gone, they're gone). The UPC based ADA equipment is now owned by Moving Image Technologies so that will be USL's last legacy item. The JSD line of processors are done. The CM monitors are done. All test equipment, done.

Thanks for raining on my parade here with your harsh reality... Let's see it this way: Everytime you touch a modern QSC product, you can still feel a little bit of USL in there, can't you?

Back in the late 90s at a cinema I worked, we still had an JFM20 racked in our biggest house as a backup for the CP500...

[Steve Guttag]

I'd say that you can't feel ANYTHING of USL in a QSC product as I don't think anything USL has influenced anything QSC currently makes or will make. I agree with Sam and I think the industry was better off with USL in it than gone. I agree that the JSD60 has a market though I come back to, the JSD60, with another two channels so it would be a 7.1 with HI/VI would have really hit it right.

I'll admit an issue I'm running into now are active speaker crossovers. We have old amplifiers dying (say 20+ year for analog ones and 10+ year for the ones with DSP...like the Crown DSi line)...QSC canned the XC-3 for the DCA line (before the pandemic), can't supply DCMs until 2023 and the DCM-300 is a pricey beast to obtain for just crossovers. Most cinema processors have the crossover built in but most cinema processors are unobtainium! Obviously, for a Q-SYS guy like me, crossovers are trivial but that means changing out more than just amps (loads more money) and Q-SYS suffers from supply chain issues like everything else that has DSP involved.

[Leo Enticknap]

The other example of a knockoff Dolby SVA mastering system one encounters occasionally in theaters that still play archival film prints is "DTS Stereo," used for Universal features in the mid-1990s, and some indie productions from around the same time. As with Ultra Stereo, Universal decided that they didn't want to pay Dolby any licensing fees, and so these prints (one of the Jurassic Park movies from the '90s sticks in my mind as a prominent example) come with either a DTS digital timecode or the DTS Stereo SVA track. Given the difficulty of getting hold of the discs or files nowadays, a screening of a surviving print is likely to have to use the latter. I remember notes on or in the cans telling projectionists to play it in SR, but finding that it sounded shite in SR (clipping and distortion in the higher frequency ranges, especially, and notable crosstalk), but just about acceptable in A-type.

[Pete Naples]

Was that DTS Stereo, or DTS 6 track? I can't remember. I want to say it was DTS Stereo (Fed Lt/RT into the P2 input, with the NR disabled IIRC)
What I do remember was going round upgrading a bunch of early DTS players (the white ones with SCSI CDR drives that used a cartridge).
I'm pretty sure I converted some of them from DTS Stereo to DTS6 track. The early UK UCI sites IIRC. Around the same time a colleague was going round them installing basement readers for SRD on Century and Vic 5 mech's. He's no longer with us sadly, his memory was always better than mine.

[Gordon McLeod]

Was that DTS Stereo, or DTS 6 track? I can't remember. I want to say it was DTS Stereo (Fed Lt/RT into the P2 input, with the NR disabled IIRC)
What I do remember was going round upgrading a bunch of early DTS players (the white ones with SCSI CDR drives that used a cartridge).
I'm pretty sure I converted some of them from DTS Stereo to DTS6 track. The early UK UCI sites IIRC. Around the same time a colleague was going round them installing basement readers for SRD on Century and Vic 5 mech's. He's no longer with us sadly, his memory was always better than mine.

Dts Stereo was a optical system compatible with DOLBY 04 but also was a system using a single dick that was fed to the projector 2 optical input of the processor (the flaw was they didnt think of two projector booths) It was rapidly changed to the DTS 6 5.1 system only and DTS Stereo was just the back up optical track A type compatible until the quad tracks appeared and with the introduction of SRD the optical was by default SR

[Marcel Birgelen]

The other example of a knockoff Dolby SVA mastering system one encounters occasionally in theaters that still play archival film prints is "DTS Stereo," used for Universal features in the mid-1990s, and some indie productions from around the same time. As with Ultra Stereo, Universal decided that they didn't want to pay Dolby any licensing fees, and so these prints (one of the Jurassic Park movies from the '90s sticks in my mind as a prominent example) come with either a DTS digital timecode or the DTS Stereo SVA track. Given the difficulty of getting hold of the discs or files nowadays, a screening of a surviving print is likely to have to use the latter. I remember notes on or in the cans telling projectionists to play it in SR, but finding that it sounded shite in SR (clipping and distortion in the higher frequency ranges, especially, and notable crosstalk), but just about acceptable in A-type.

Those movies also usually have the DTS Stereo logo in the end credits, I guess the last one around must have been in the late 1990s. In the absense of DTS, I played them as Type A and that sounded mostly right. Apparently there are also DTS Stereo SR prints out there, but I've never seen one myself.

[John Eickhof]

I had a long standing great relationship with Jack and USL, the early products were very innovative and they made it possible for a small regional dealer like me to be able to offer the small town theatres a great product at an affordable price plus having future needs designed in ! It was very simple to install in booths that had 3 track and 4 track mag sound and when early digital came in it was also easily added without expensive board mods or additional processing equipment. as much as I liked the sound of the competitor, I finally retired my old processors (CP-50) and installed a USL processor in my screening room....mainly due to ease of operation and again, multi-system playback, Io have 2 projector 35mm w/4track mag, and 3 track dubbers on changeover plus DTS and Dolby digital, no sophisticated IMG_0744.JPG switching necessary! sounds great! and I have lots of spare cards!

[Terry Monohan]

Seems Ultra Stereo® was put in cheaper cinemas that did not have Dolby® Most of these low budget theatres never even bothered to have a sign or advertise they ran movies in Ultra Stereo® like the Dolby® theatres did.
.
In movie newspaper ads in the 80's many listing had a * for Dolby® and something else like a check mark for Ultra Stereo® The better cinemas always had Dolby® listed. Same with 70mm they had another type of check mark on the name of the theatre and address.

I remember some cinemas ran a little logo trailer with the Ultra Stereo® demo clip.

I even have a color 16mm mono copy in my trailer vault collection. It was very cheaply done not like the many great Dolby Digital ® logos. Only once during a 16mm trailer bash showing did a person from the film group comment that the Ultra Stereo® logo I used sounded mono. I have no 16mm movies in stereo, I don't even know If any were ever released in stereo in the 16mm format and what 16mm projectors ran stereo.

[Gordon McLeod]

16mm stereo existed AMC had a experiment with converted Eastman 25 that played stereo with a Kintek processor. I dont think it accurate to say Ultra was the processor of choice for poor theatres. Kintek was often that choice or Eprad.

[Mike Blakesley]

Seems Ultra Stereo® was put in cheaper cinemas that did not have Dolby® Most of these low budget theatres never even bothered to have a sign or advertise they ran movies in Ultra Stereo® like the Dolby® theatres did.

When upgrading a movie theater you buy what you can afford. The word "cheaper" has a negative connotation to it. It doesn't always mean the owner doesn't want high end. People who turn up their noses when something isn't "the best" can be annoying, because there is probably a reason the owner did it the way he did. (Same reason we have Pepsi here instead of Coke -- it's not the quality of the beverage or the cost, it's because the Coke people in this area are unhelpful twits.)

I remember when we did our first 5.1 installation, we had quotes for three systems to look at. The "top of the line" one had a Dolby processor, and I believe all the speakers were JBL. The mid-range system had a USL processor and Peavey speakers. The lowest had a similar processor but was a "center surround" system with only a center screen channel. (I knew we didn't want that.) Of course I wanted the top of the line system, but I think it was at least double the price of the midrange and far out of our budget, so we bought the midrange system and started saving up for a better one. We've done several upgrades since, both to the processor and the speakers, including adding a baffle wall behind the screen.