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MOVIESOUND NEWSLETTER

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This is the part where we explain ourselves to ourselves and hope that you will read it, too.

What Is This?

Moviesound Newsletter is an independent journal about the techniques and aesthetics of commercial motion picture soundtracks. The issues printed nearly twenty years ago are a valuable archive of movie history, available now on the web for the first time.

How did this happen?

In 1989, we looked around outside of our Hollywood cutting rooms and noticed something incredible. The world of motion picture sound was a fast-changing and exciting place to be, but it seemed no one outside the world of the sound crafts was writing much about it. After Dolby stereo became the standard for most studio releases, and there developed a rich buffet of multi-channel formats available to theatres, audiences came to demand much more… first in the neighborhood theatre, and later in their home stereo equipment.

In those few years before DVD’s were available to the public, Hollywood was trying on for size several competing theatrical sound formats (using both analogue and the new digital technologies) for their bigger-budget releases. Planning a night at the movies, one could open the newspaper and face a confusing array of advertised and sometimes misleading sound-format logos. Home stereo enthusiasts were pioneering ways to converge their TV’s, VCR’s, and stereo sound systems. The idea of surround channels in a home system running Laserdics was wonderful to dedicated techies. It seemed at first that consumer audio manufacturers were very slow to build receivers designed to accommodate more than a left and right channel. Some experimenters revived their once-abandoned Quad equipment in this effort.

Free of advertiser’s motives

As the sophistication of movie theatre sound systems grew, we noticed that articles about sound systems came from two sources with opposite sets of values: On the one hand, one could pick up any number of slick trade publications with an advertising agenda bent upon hyping the latest professional hardware. Well and good, but readers could not trust the editorial content to be free of advertiser’s motives. In the opposition corner were independent, low-budget journals. Limited in readership, but never in strong opinion, such journals had always abounded in the world of the stereo sound enthusiasts. As early as 1957, the Stan Freberg radio show lampooned these hobbyists in a series of “Herman Horne on Hi-Fi” sketches. One memorable line was “The whole house becomes a speaker. You move into the garage!”

The perfectionist critics, engineers and fans of ideal audio reproduction were necessary gadflies through the second half of the 20th Century, and it took extraordinary engineering to make analogue taped sound with qualities nearly as perfect as the digital reproduction we now take for granted. Dolby SR theatrical releases were nearly as clean and dynamic to hear as digital tracks are today. As much as we admired the educated ear and the commercial independence of the “Tweaker Journals,” one sensed in their writers the presence of obsession.

Journal of the arts

Neither type of publication came from Hollywood craftspeople, whose experience working on real movies would inform their opinion of unfolding technologies and aesthetics, and put it in historical context. Many of us wanted to see something like a journal of the arts, where readers and writers would engage in dialogue about the aesthetics of the craft, from the points of view of both audiences and practitioners of movie sound. Not finding anything like that available to read, we were determined to create it.

On the cusp

In the early days of desktop publishing, one could push a newfangled personal computer to print out pages that nearly resembled professional printing, and one could print them up in large numbers and mail them out to friends. If MSNL had been born a little later, it probably would have been born as a website, but we were on the cusp between the shy flowering of desktop publishing and the explosive influence of the internet.

We proudly edited, printed, and mailed out a number of issues, always at some financial loss, until the shifts and tides in the lives of the entire MSNL team made it impossible to continue.

Within the old issues of this project is a mine (goldmine or landmine, you decide) of inspired criticism, informative looks behind the scenes, some entertaining novelty pieces, and a lot of technical history. Any serious student or fan of motion picture sound should enjoy MSNL. This period in movie sound was one of enormous leaps and bounds, a kind of second coming of the Talkies. Sound practitioners discovered new levels of command over the clarity, dynamic range, articulation, and imaging within the geometry of movie theatres. The impact of “Big Sound” on those audiences should never be forgotten.