"Ultra Stereo" Sound Format?

[Sam Chavez]

It's a shame to let some very fine products lapse. JSD 60 for sure still has a market. It was great having someone like Jack and hs team always working on the next great idea for cinema.

[Steve Guttag]

Even USL is still somewhat around in some shape or form, as part of QSC

Um...no. the last vestiges of USL at QSC have been stamped out. What is left is all EOL (when they're gone, they're gone). The UPC based ADA equipment is now owned by Moving Image Technologies so that will be USL's last legacy item. The JSD line of processors are done. The CM monitors are done. All test equipment, done.

[Pete Naples]

I remember during the 1995 Edinburgh International Film Festival, we had a print of a film made by a university lecturer of mine, 'The Limits of Thermal Travelling'. It came in for a press-show, and we noted it was an Ultra Stereo soundtrack.
To be honest, we had never seen a print with it before, a few cinemas here in the UK had the processors, installed by Jacro. They were decent enough. But we never saw prints.
After a lot of head-scratching and phone calls, we ran it in Format 04 on our Dolby CP55, it sounded great.

[Bobby Henderson]

I remember Ultra•Stereo being somewhat popular with B-movie productions and indie films in the 1980's and going into the 1990's. I definitely noticed the logo in end credit scrolls and on movie posters.

IIRC, Cobra (1986) was the only movie to have 70mm prints with the mag tracks encoded with Ultra Stereo noise reduction.

[Marcel Birgelen]

There were actually some high-brow titles in there...The Player being one. But, by and large, the bulk of Ultra*Stereo releases were "thrifty" features that seemed to favor horror/slasher movies.

The Player was mostly independently financed and produced and not backed by any major studio. I guess the big studios wanted to have the Dolby logo on the poster.

I guess that Ultra Stereo is one of the alternative "formats" that actually made some ground, especially because it was compatible with Dolby A. Even USL is still somewhat around in some shape or form, as part of QSC... That's more than most other alternative audio formats and their sponsoring companies can claim.

[Harold Hallikainen]

Their encoding was also used on 1421 U.S. made films as well. The last one appears to have been mixed in the late 90's. Harold may know more about this. Also note that the USL Type A noise reduction was in reality 3-1/2 bands, not 4. . The list is here:

I didn't start at USL until 2007, though I did a little contract work before that (on the JSD-80). So I know almost nothing about the film encoding system. But, there were lots of movie posters around the office for movies using Ultra Stereo sound.

Harold

[Brad Miller]

Ultra Stereo vs Dolby processors at a theater.
Pepsi vs Coke products at a restaurant.

It's the same thing. Just cheap owners cutting corners everywhere they can, not worrying about quality or customer satisfaction, only about counting pennies.

[Steve Guttag]

There were actually some high-brow titles in there...The Player being one. But, by and large, the bulk of Ultra*Stereo releases were "thrifty" features that seemed to favor horror/slasher movies.

[Jon Dent]

mostly slasher/low-rent horror stuff.

How dare you say that about the original "Cube"!

[Geoff Jones]

I've got a message for you, and you're not going to like it.

So awesome that Alamo is showing this on their biggest screen in SF. Here in Colorado, they've got it on small screens not worth leaving home for, as usual.

(And selling more tickets than the new releases that are on the biggest screens, as usual.)

[Steve Guttag]

3-1/2? Genuine Dolby-A was sort of like that. It had four companders where band 4 overlapped band 3 rather than 4 completely non-interacting bands.

[Jim Cassedy]

Thanks, all- - Dolby A would have been my guess, but I wanted to get some opinions.
There was a gap in the mid 1980's where I worked in TV production & as an AC on some
low budget flix, so I missed out on the Ultra-Stereo era. I do have a working USL decoder
frame in my collection of filmstuff, but I wasn't going to hook it up for a one-night show.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Their encoding was also used on 1421 U.S. made films as well. The last one appears to have been mixed in the late 90's. Harold may know more about this. Also note that the USL Type A noise reduction was in reality 3-1/2 bands, not 4. . The list is here:

[Gordon McLeod]

It was Dolby A (aka 04) we had for many years two UltraStereo encoders here in Toronto and a fair number of French Language titles were mixed with them and I know the used the USL for decode as well
Also I remember seeing Ultra*Stereo on some Hindi titles as well

[Steve Guttag]

Ultra Stereo's NR was "compatible" with Dolby-A so that would be the proper selection. I wouldn't call Ultra Stereo encoding "popular." One of its "bigger" titles was Cobra. I had a tee-shirt that listed all of the Ultra-Stereo movies at that time...it was a who-isn't-who of "B" flicks...mostly slasher/low-rent horror stuff. The very people not too interested in getting the Dolby license. As to Ultra-Stereo improving on Dolby...believe what you want. Just know, when they mixed the movie and determined the channel and frequency response results, they didn't monitor it on the Ultra stuff...so any change you make isn't an improvement, it is an altering. Then again, those that were buying JS series processors were doing so for cost, (or possibly availability), so precise playback was likely not the primary concern.