"Disney Digital Sound" ??

[Tiago Silva]

Last night I just caught the end credits of an '86 feature and, interested by the Depeche Mode song, went with it until the end. To my surprise, it featured the Ultra-Stereo and "Disney Digital Sound" logos.

Being a dyed-in-the-wool geek, and finding no information about this system, I've got to ask the veterans if they remember this system and what was it (number of channels, type of encoding, physical support) and how it worked. The "official" digital film sound timeline I learned was that it started with the Kodak/Philips "Cinema Digital Sound" around 1990 ("Dick Tracy"); this film is from 1986! It's "Modern Girls", directed by Jerry Kramer. (ah luvs imdb.com)

[MusicTrax]

The "official" digital film sound timeline I learned was that it started with the Kodak/Philips "Cinema Digital Sound" around 1990 ("Dick Tracy"); this film is from 1986!

Well, if you were watching it in 2005 on a DVD or Pay TV, it's always possible that the end logos were replaced sometimes in the last 20 years. Stranger things have happened.

I seem to recall seeing an all-digital release of Fantasia in the mid-1980s over at the old Plitt Theater in Century City around 1986, and I think they were trumpeting that as the first digital-sound motion picture release. God knows how they kept it in sync back then...

Note also that the Cinema Digital Sound thing went down in flames, after a few screenings of Dick Tracy resulted in the CDS electronics overheating and failing. Nobody realized how hot it got in many projection rooms, particularly those with carbon arc (or equivalent) lamp houses. There was no backup analog optical track for CDS, and that led to its downfall.

--Marc W.