Adventures in Super 8 Sound.

[Rob Young]

With the other topics discussing super 8 sound, this started me thinking, what experiments have you tried with super 8 sound?

I’ve messed around a lot with different ways of recording and replaying those super 8 stripes.

Around 1990 I was working in a hi-fi shop when we started selling the very first domestic Dolby Surround decoders. These were quite basic, just identifying the surround track from stereo hi-fi VHS tapes and outputting line out to amplify and place speakers at the back of the room.

I borrowed one and recorded the surround track from VHS onto cassette from movies such as Alien, Superman, Star Wars.

I then tediously recorded the right segments onto the balance stripe of the relevant 400ft extracts using my ST-1200.

Next step, feed the track 2 output to my hi-fi amp and place the speakers at the back of the room.

So running the 400 footers, the main track came from a large Craven speaker under the screen as usual, but there was also the surround from the hi-fi speakers at the back.

I remember a mate watching Alien as the Nostromo lands and looking around rather startled said, “There’s sound coming from everywhere!!”

That comment made me so happy. Remember these were the days before Dolby Digital 5.1, when even basic surround in cinemas was still a big thing.

Happy times.

Anyone else tried such crazy experiments?

[Brian Fretwell]

The only thing I did was to connect rear speakers in serieson a 2 chanel stereo amplifier by outting them across the two positive terminals of the two chanels (with a high power resistor in series) to play the undecoded out-of-phase surround chane without a decoder. That worked very well.l.

[Rob Young]

Yes, Brian, I did that as well! Someone at my cine club gave me a diagram to make it up and whilst I never used it on super 8, I did wire up my parents VHS player in the front room with some surround speakers to provide "surround". I recall that my new "Star Trek II The Wrath of Khan" VHS Hi-Fi tape worked very well with this set up.

Not quite the 70mm 6 track I heard at the Odeon Glasgow when I was 11 years old, but pretty good to pretend.

Again, great times!

[Osi Osgood]

Once upon the time, when I had my first collection of super 8 ( back in the 90's, stupidly parted with the whole blessed collection, got back in, in the early 2000's), I had a whole bunch of magnetic striped leader, and I spliced it altogether. It came to a full 50ft reel. Just for the heck of it, I had just bought my first portable CD player and my first CD, which was "Breads greatest hits" ( still have it ), and I had never recorded with my Chinon 9500, so I plugged that CD player directly into it, and recorded "Baby I Want You', as it was a shorter song. I played it back, and was surprised as to how good it sounded, except for, of course, the splices on the reel.