8mm Forum: Super 8mm Sound

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Posted by Jon R Light (Member # 963) on December 02, 2008, 10:21 PM:

Can anyone tell me if magnetic sound or optical sound is the more common in Super 8 film?

Tnxs, Jon [Cool]

Posted by Paul Adsett (Member # 25) on December 02, 2008, 10:34 PM:

Jon,
Magnetic sound is by far the dominant system for super 8. Magnetic sound was used almost exclusively by all the major distributors of super 8 sound features and digests. Most magnetic sound prints are mono, utilising the main wide magnetic stripe. There are a few stereo release prints which use the wide main stripe for the left channel and the narrow balance stripe track for the right stereo channel. The optical sound prints were used mainly for prints delivered to the airlines for on-board film projectors. Magnetic sound has much greater frequency response than optical sound, so you typically get much better fidelity on mag sound prints, although this is by no means universally true.

Posted by Osi Osgood (Member # 424) on December 02, 2008, 11:41 PM:

Paul is right. Mag has much more variety, in some ways.

The one plus to optical sound films, is that there is a great variety of full features on optical sound that have never been released on regular magnetic super 8. Sometimes in magnetic super 8, they will only have a digest version of a film, (as in the case of the 70's gangster film "Dillinger"), but the same film will be a full feature on optical sound super 8.

The other great plus is that in nearly every case, they put out for the airlines whatever was currently in release in the speicific year, (which ranged from 1967 to 1990), and they would use the studio's best materials, which would lend to a
sharpness that would honestly rival that which you would get on 16MM, and that's no lie.
By the end of optical sound Super 8, the frequency range of the soundtrack was a lot better, BUT it was still mono. I still think mag stripe, (especially the more modern grey stripe/chrome stripe) offers far more potential for great playback.

The other thing to watch out for with optical sound films is sadly, they were put out on whatever stock was available, and often, it was a poorer grade of Super 8 stock, which means that they have tended to fade by now, but that's mostly because people didn't know the terrible fade properties of Eastman color prints.

I have 50 features in optical sound and they are a handsome collection. I have been fairly lucky in that bearly everyone of my prints has little or no fade, with now three exceptions.
But when you can get Rocky 3, Children of a Lesser God, and such titles as that among others, it's worth the looking for!

Posted by Maurizio Di Cintio (Member # 144) on December 08, 2008, 05:33 PM:

Hi, Osi!
Are you referring to the 'new' paste stripe applied by Derann since around 2000? The greysh one? Is it chrome? SO that would explain why it performs so bad on my projectors. How is it they decided to use such a formulation when CrO2 tracks need a totally different Bias operating point? In fact I guess S/8 projectors were factory adjusted for ferric oxide magnetic stripes only. Any ideas?...

Posted by Osi Osgood (Member # 424) on December 08, 2008, 10:44 PM:

I must say that it is my assumption that it is a Chrome or metal based magnetic tape film stripe, but this is only based on my use of all three types of magnetic tape before, whether in recording studio's or dealing with good ole cassette tapes.

A chrome or metal tape will give a higher frequency of sound, and that is true whether we are talking about using a Dolby unit to "squeeze" a little more frequency from the classic old brown stripe. Once I had listened to the sound quality from a Chrome and then the metal audio tape, I never went back to standard tape. I was really stunned when I used a metal tape and recorded Dolby C noise reduction, (definitely better than Dolby B), and when I hit that button, (after recording) it would take literally every shred of tape hiss out of the tape, while leaving the full frequency of the recording from the CD.

Some may ask, why still use cassette when CD has arrived? That was back when a portable CD player was a major luxury, and a handy little cassette player was still the big thing.

Anyhow, back to our projectors.

If these grey stripes are in fact chrome or metal tape, though I can't think of any projector that has actual Dolby noise reduction or playback capability, still, the sound frequency will be better than with standard brown stripe, though I dare say that many on the forum have become quite expert at recording on the old brown stripe, (as my print of the Beatles Magical Mystery Tour proves, I was amazed at the full stereo sound quality achieved), I'm betting that the sound quality that can be achieved on that grey stripe should be even better.

Anybody want to weigh in on recording on those grey stripes over brown stripes?

By the way, i found that the standard old cassette decks would play the brown as well as grey audio tape, and I'd assume that the same would be true for the mag heads on our projectors.

Posted by Maurizio Di Cintio (Member # 144) on December 09, 2008, 02:11 PM:

Wait a sec.
True it is, you can play back any type of tape on any cassette deck, for example you can play metal tape cassette on standard only cassette tape decks; the excess of high frequency output, due to improper equalization, can be reduced by adjusting the tone control over the amplifier.

BUT you can’t do the reverse, as your post seems to suggest, i.e. while you can always record a standard ferric oxide tape on any cassette recorder, you can only record chrome and metal tapes on equipment that can handle them, that’s to say with the proper bias operating point, as these tapes need a higher ‘quantity’ if I may say so, of premag current (bias). If you record a chrome/metal tape on a deck that is not designed for these tapes, you will get a low output level (especially with metal), no matter how much you compensate for this during recording (actually compensating makes things worse, since the sound head saturates very easily when using improper tape), and extremely harsh high frequencies. BTW this is exactly what happens when I record with my GS on the new Derann greyish stripe: poor output level (somewhat saturated) and excess in high frequency, along with a series of other problems maybe due to poor smoothening of the stripe’s surface.

This does not happen when I record on older brown stripes.

Perhaps I need to recalibrate the bias on my GS, but then what if I use my own Agfa F-5 for striping my own films?
Any ideas?

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