when did they start doing surround sound for movies? (1 Viewer)

[Ken Garrison]

I think it's very cool to tune to TCM and see a 1950's movie playing and having some directional sound on it. Kiss me Kate was one I saw and noticed the music was in stereo and I go "Holy F***!" I knew fantasia was the first surround sound film, but didn't really think a lot of movies were in stereo back then, but I guess they are. I also love seeing those 3 panel Cinerama movies on TCM. I know they're better with the huge curved screen. There's this newly restored Cinerama theater in Seattle I'd like to go to someday. Probably go see The Wonderful World Of The Brothers Grimm or THIS is Cinerama if they have it.

 

[Peter Kline]

Felix, after "This Is Cinerama" opened in 1952 to huge success the major studios rushed to put out their own versions of wide-screen and stereo sound. 1953 was the first year MGM, WB, 20th et al started releasing some films in Cinemascope/VistaVision and magnetic stereo soundtracks.
The Seattle Cinerama only showed 3 projector Cinerama films two years ago when it reopened. It has, to the best of my knowledge, not done so again. The two films they showed. TIC and HTWWW were borrowed prints from private collector John Harvey. They were in pretty good shape but not perfect.

 

[Chad R]

now the question is, was there a receiver that did CDS?

CDS died out because it had no back up as the CDS took up the space where a conventional stereo track usually goes (I think). If the sound dropped out there was just silence. Current digital systems fall back on the stereo tracks and one print can have ALL the current digital systems (just the timecode for DTS's interlocked CD) printed on them negating the need for multiple inventories.

 

[Morgan Jolley]

Last year in a film studies class we talked about how Apocalypse Now was the first movie with a 5.1 equivalent. Back then, it was called quintophonic. It probably was only in a few theaters, though.

 

[GregK]

Ahh yes.. "Quint"! Who wants Quad when you can have Quint?
I think the first film that used the term "Quintaphonic"
was The Who's rock-u-drama "Tommy". It had a discrete
center channel and used the QS quad matrix format to
extract the other four channels from tracks two and three.
The DVD provides this unique track in discrete Dolby
Digital 5.0 along with the more widespread Dolby Stereo
4-2-4 encoded 2.0 mix.
Besides Cinerama, but before the 70mm Dolby split-surround
era, does anyone else know of other Quintaphonic films?

 

[Rob Lutter]

Superman was the first movie released on 70mm with split surrounds (like Dolby/DTS have today)