I vaguely remember seeing something (Earthquake?) in a theater with a temporary Sensurroud installation. Was probably the original Edwards Cinema in Costa Mesa, CA. There were a bunch of large odd-looking speaker enclosures sitting on the floor in front of the screen, and big thick cables leading to them. I honestly don't remember how well it worked, but I do remember the LA Times running a story saying some Sensurround theaters were having problems with things like falling ceiling tiles, and that they had to be careful not to overdo it or they risked cracking the plaster walls (OK, I might be embellishing the part about cracks in the walls).

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I have been told the speakers served no practical purposes after the movie, because they were so non-linear. Supposedly, it was cheaper to abandon them that to have them all shipped back to Universal.

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ZOOT SUIT was the one and only to utilize the SENSURROUND PLUS name (on 70mm prints).

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Some 35mm engagements also advertised Sensurround Plus (such as the Edwards Cinema in Costa Mesa, CA)

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This referred to the fact that DBX noise reduction was used for the entire soundtrack

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DVD of "Battlestar Galactica" has a Dolby Digital 1.1 reproduction of the Sensurround mix.

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The most likely scenario is probably blown speakers, a stunned wife, a nice white jacket with long sleves that can be secured on the back for me and a long visit to the local (projectionist-)asylum.

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Cheers, Thomas
www.in70mm.com - The 70mm Newsletter

www.dp70.com|www.70mm.dk|www.hauerslev.com|http: //hjem.get2net.dk/in70mm

Easy: Charlotte will order new locks for the whole house, next time You are out, and you will never live on Frederiksberg again...

and thats it

When Earthquake opened where I grew up in Roanoke, Virginia, the first performance brought down ceiling tiles in front of the screen at the Terrace Theater. The newspaper reported that the audience clapped and cheered wildly... thinking it was part of the show.

Problem with those Cerwin-Vega boxes was that they were designed to couple with the walls; they had units that were designed to be placed vertically in the rear corners of the room and the massive throated units that sat in front of the stage with the mouth opening right in the face of the folks in the front seats. As well as smaller units that sat vertically on either side of the stage. These thing had to be against the walls to work so they really couldn't be kept in the theatres if aesthetics were considered.

All these bins coupling to the walls and pumping out resonating low end....the SPL was spectacular. I would love to know what they were able to achieve. It was so loud that it actually modulated the sound from the main speakers -- I saw EARTHQUAKE in 4 track mag and once the Sensurround kicked in, it was like the dialogue was filtered through a fan....kind of a sympathetic vibration taking place. It was totally awesome and the day I went, I stayed for every show until the theatre closed.

IMHO, the system ONLY worked well for EARTHQUAKE where the synthesizer was external to the soundtrack. Once they tried to adapt it to reproduce part of a non-descrete soundtrack, it didn't work nearly as well. Yah, you got subbass sound, but it really was just trying to reproduce components of the existing mono track -- basically just normal low end sounds. Only they were too loud, as mentioned, the Sensurround reproduction was nonlinear, in other words, just big, poorly designed subwoofers trying to reproduce normal low-end sounds. And the processing had terrible artifacts going on -- lots of false triggering of the low-end system by sound that were just at the edge of the threshold, like vocal "P"s and "B"s which would pop into the Sensurround channel and blast out like cannon explosions. Very annoying. Bad system.

But the original design for EARTHQUAKE with 4 track mag -- fabulous. I think with today's technology, you would run EARTHQUAKE and come pretty close to the Sensurround SPL levels with just a really good subbass system, maybe needing to add a few more bins, like in the back corners of the room. And of course you would need that synth box, but today you could create that random rumble sound in a synth generator in about 5 minutes, record it on a CD, set it to repeat play in a CD player and let the Sensurround tones trigger the audio from the CD player.

I was lucky enough to get one of the original EARTHQUAKE soundtrack LPs; cut 1 opens with a recording of the actual rumble noise from the synthesizer. They removed that from subsequent pressings because it cause lots of damage when people turned it up too high. If you look closely at the grooves, they are spaced very far apart -- space needed so the cutting lathe wouldn't cut into the walls of the adjacent groove walls. Played on a good system, the effect is quite impressive.

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