Question about sound quality in older movies

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Oller Visuals

Well-known member
Watching Batman (1989) it struck me how poor the audio quality is (dialouge, sound mix etc) compared to early 90's movies like say Jurassic Park and Terminator 2, although it's just a few years between them.

Was there some technical breakthrough around this time? I'm really curious about this since it's such a huge difference in audio quality.
 
Probably more the distrbution chain than the actual sound quality the recordist filmed and the mixers mixed. In 1989, they were still using optical soundtracks on film prints, you are probably hearing truncated dynamic range and lots of analog noise. Once things went digital, they got a lot cleaner with much more dynamic range. Generational noise became a non-issue. If you saw the original print of Batman in a theater, it would probably sound a lot better than what you heard off of DVD/VHS, transfers to home video formats used to sometimes be pretty crappy. I work with DTS and yes, Bruce, you have a good sense of history, Jurassic Park was the first, we put that right in their new hire orientation video.
 
Professional audio recorders were out in the early-mid 70's and digital recording went big time in 1979, with Christopher Cross's "Christopher Cross" being the first digitally recorded and mastered super hit (5 Grammy awards, making at least one of those Christopher Crosses very happy). Now, a film projector uses different system, obviously, during a presentation but one has to assume that the archiving by a major studio was done at the highest of classes.
 
Sound was recorded on Nagras at that time. The RDAT format had come in 1987 and was also used. But other than that, everything was the same. We still had 35mm sprocketed magnetic film for sound in post. Other than the RDAT in the field, everything was analog. Jurassic Park was re-recorded by sound designer Gary Rydstrom at Skywalker Sound and Terminator 2 was also done by Gary at Skywalker. I was working there at the time and nothing new was coming along except RDAT. Post production did not change during that time. But if I may say, Skywalker had an especially talented crew who were well equipped by George. Perhaps that made the difference. Gary had to audition sounds for the dinosaurs before getting the job.

Yes, DTS was out at that time and was used on Jurassic park, but I don't know how much that affected the overall quality of the sound.

Trivia you don't care about: I had nothing to do with T2, but I did get a line added by Arnold "I can't self destruct. You'll have to lower me in".
 
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Is think PureD's on the right track. When I watch an old film at home, if I slip in a Criterion Edition disc (or similar carefully-restored edition), I tend to hear very good sound (and see very good pictures).
 
Oller Visuals said:
Was there some technical breakthrough around this time?
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I find this an interesting question, so I did some more looking around. Turns out that 1992's release of Batman Returns is the first 35mm release print with 5.1 sound.

Notice too that we got DVDs in 1995, which decoupled the sound from the picture (as opposed to 35mm release prints anyway).

Then in 2006 we got blu-rays (lossless sound up to 7.1). And DCPs right around that same time. Both of these in the run up to the transition from analog to digital TV in the USA (2009) and around the world.

So there were changes in the early 1990s that were basically the change from largely stereo analog (LCR) to digital surround sound (5.1). Then changes in the mid 2000s which changed the packaging even more and gave more space to the audio, less compression (lossless audio), more dynamic range, etc. Oh, and kick-ass LFE channels :laugh:.

It seems to me that the OP has identified the beginning of the changeover from analog to digital that took about 15 years to complete. If I'm wrong, please correct me, but that's what I'm seeing from the cheap seats.
 
Back in 1985-86, the big deal in VCR's was HiFi audio that allowed for the first 3-channel (left, front, rear) Dolby Surround. We'd play "Top Gun" for people on the sales floor and the said people were peeing into their pants from the amazement (but not literally)

By 1988, the ProLogic receivers were out. Those added the fourth (center) channel. I recall working in a SF Valley store toward the end of 1988, when George Kennedy of the "Cool hand Luke", the "Airport" and the "Naked Gun" films fame called in. George was asking about the recently released Pioneer receiver, which no one had in stock at that time. To me, that was less important because George was talking on a hands-free set and sounded like G-d. Not George Burns but real G-d as portrayed in the movies.

"Batman" came from that era and I wonder of the source had both the ProLogic 4 channel or the "regular" Surround 3 channel option, which eliminated the center channel and whether one could adjust it in the playback.
 
VHS Hi-Fi was awesome, especially piped through a 200-watt stereo system. Never was there a greater mismatch between audio and video quality. I have even heard that some small recording studios used VHS Hi-Fi to record musicians.

To the original poster, it sounds like you are judging a whole era by one movie. Batman never struck me as bad sound, but I'm not a sound guy, and it might have less than the best sound to someone paying attention. The movie has a distinct style, which you might call Circus Grunge, practiced by directors such as Tim Burton and . . . Tim Burton. I don't know, maybe they were even trying to echo a little bit of the 1960s campiness.

I would be interested in what you thought after watching some other specimens of the decade, like the aforementioned Top Gun, as well as Raiders of the Lost Ark, Return of the Jedi, or Back to the Future.
 
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combatentropy said:
VHS Hi-Fi was awesome, especially piped through a 200-watt stereo system. Never was there a greater mismatch between audio and video quality. I have even heard that some small recording studios used VHS Hi-Fi to record musicians...
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People did this at home too. By the late 80's-early'90, it was an inexpensive way to record to a reel-to-reel quality. It gave a mid-80's S/N ratio compared to the mid-60's for a casette. The difference was that a consumer VHS HiFi had all sort of tape/head misalignment problems, whereas a high end reel-to-reel deck was built like a tank.

The second "Indiana Jones" had a great sound scene where the antidote vial was kicked all across the room. That was a big time effect. "Back to the Future", of course, had that DeLorean scene - whoosh. When the 11" laser discs came out, we had the "Empire of the Sun" up in a continuous loop for months at a time. I still remember a very young Christian Bale screaming every couple of hours, "P-51, the Cadillac of the sky!"*

*This, of course reminds of an old Steven Wright joke : "My friend and I drove from Boston to Phoenix and we only had one tape to listen to on our way there. Three thousand miles and only one tape. - TAKES A LONG BEAT - I can't remember what it was".
 
The forerunner to R-DAT was the Sony F1 converter box, which used a VHS recorder/media. As I recall it was 44.056 kHz and 14 bits.
Otherwise, the VHS Hi-Fi (AFM) tracks were much better than the standard VHS audio. And a lot of those VHS standard audio trk. releases had a really bad sounding auto-gain .
 
Interesting topic. The first thing that jumped out at me was who did the films. The "good" ones you mentioned were done in the Bay Area, which was becoming the place to be for film sound and the other was done in LA. So the more "exciting" work was definitely coming from Gary. Technically all would have been analog mixes and we were still using 1/4 as the gold standard in the late 90's and DAT as the backup. A few things might have had something to do with "quality". First I'm assuming you are comparing DVD's not original 35mm prints, and that may be THE difference. Batman would have been mastered for VHS, and probably just encoded for DVD where the other two were probably mastered for DVD.

The technical things that might have made a difference are that Dolby SR came around somewhere in there and that lowered the noise considerably for analog dubbers and such. As late as 97 we were still making Dolby A prints for theatres that didn't have SR, but on the mix-stages everyone was using SR. Nagra went to a new bias "Nagra Master" and that may have helped with production recordings. And automation was getting better. By the mid 90's "flying faders" was making level automation in the mix possible, and projectors were able to play in reverse. Earlier projectors only went forward and so films were mixed a reel at a time in one realtime pass.

These things all came in at different times but you can't really go by when something was available because post facilities adopted them at different times and old school mixers tend to want to do things the way they are used to. So it's entirely possible that LA adopted some of these breakthroughs a lot later than the radical young punks up north.

But if I had to bet I would guess that it's probably that the DVD was just a transfer of the VHS "video mix" and the others had a mix better designed to work on DVD. That and well Gary...
 
Noiz2 said:
... But if I had to bet I would guess that it's probably that the DVD was just a transfer of the VHS "video mix" and the others had a mix better designed to work on DVD. That and well Gary...
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When compact discs were becoming an "in" device for audiophiles in the mid-80's, many top albums from the 1960's-70's were just copied off the analog mixes ... and they sounded horribly. I remember playing "Whole Lotta Love" in a store once and it was all hiss between the guitar riffs. By the mid-late 80's - and this is especially true with the sets that came out around Christmas - the classic rock recordings were carefully cleaned up. As I recall, to do a computer cleanup of a full LP took in excess of 24 hours of continuous rendering before an actual audio engineer reviewed the results.
 
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