Vitaphone

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Vitaphone

Vitaphone.jpg

The Warner Bros. Vitaphone logo.

Type subsidiary of Warner Bros.

Founded 1925

Defunct1961

Headquarters United States

Products Motion pictures

Parent Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc.

A Vitaphone projection setup at a 1926 demonstration. Engineer E. B. Craft is holding a soundtrack disc.
The turntable, on a massive tripod base, is at lower center.

Premiere of Don Juan in New York City

Vitaphone was a sound film system used for feature films and nearly 1,000 short subjects made by
Warner Bros. and its sister studio First National from 1926 to 1931. Vitaphone was the last major analog
sound-on-disc system and the only one that was widely used and commercially successful. The
soundtrack was not printed on the film itself, but issued separately on phonograph records. The discs,
recorded at 33+1⁄3 rpm (a speed first used for this system) and typically 16 inches (41 cm) in diameter,
would be played on a turntable physically coupled to the projector motor while the film was being
projected. It had a frequency response of 4300 Hz.[1] Many early talkies, such as The Jazz Singer (1927),
used the Vitaphone system. The name "Vitaphone" derived from the Latin and Greek words,
respectively, for "living" and "sound".

The "Vitaphone" trademark was later associated with cartoons and other short subjects that had optical
soundtracks and did not use discs.

Contents

1 Early history

2 Process

3 Vitaphone soundtrack discs

4 The Vitaphone Project

5 Legacy

6 See also

7 References

8 External links

Early history

In the early 1920s, Western Electric was developing both sound-on-film and sound-on-disc systems,
aided by the purchase of Lee De Forest's Audion amplifier tube in 1913, consequent advances in public
address systems, and the first practical condenser microphone, which Western Electric engineer E.C.
Wente had created in 1916 and greatly improved in 1922. De Forest debuted his own Phonofilm sound-
on-film system in New York City on April 15, 1923, but due to the relatively poor sound quality of
Phonofilm and the impressive state-of-the-art sound heard in Western Electric's private demonstrations,
the Warner Brothers decided to go forward with the industrial giant and the more familiar disc
technology.

The business was established at Western Electric's Bell Laboratories in New York City and acquired by
Warner Bros. in April 1925.[2] Warner Bros. introduced Vitaphone on August 5, 1926 with the premiere
of their silent feature Don Juan,[3] which had been retrofitted with a symphonic musical score and sound
effects. There was no spoken dialog. The feature was preceded by a program of short subjects with live-
recorded sound, nearly all featuring classical instrumentalists and opera stars. The only "pop music"
artist was guitarist Roy Smeck and the only actual "talkie" was the short film that opened the program:
four minutes of introductory remarks by motion picture industry spokesman Will Hays.

Don Juan was able to draw huge sums of money at the box office,[2] but was not able to match the
expensive budget Warner Bros. put into the film's production.[4] After its financial failure, Paramount
head Adolph Zukor offered Sam Warner a deal as an executive producer for Paramount if he brought
Vitaphone with him.[5] Sam, not wanting to take any more of Harry Warner's refusal to move forward
with using sound in future Warner films, agreed to accept Zukor's offer,[5] but the deal died after
Paramount lost money in the wake of Rudolph Valentino's death.[5] Harry eventually agreed to accept
Sam's demands.[6] Sam then pushed ahead with a new Vitaphone feature starring Al Jolson, the
Broadway dynamo who had already scored a big hit with early Vitaphone audiences in A Plantation Act,
a musical short released on October 7, 1926. On October 6, 1927, The Jazz Singer premiered at the
Warner Theater in New York City, broke box-office records, established Warner Bros. as a major player in
Hollywood, and is traditionally credited with single-handedly launching the talkie revolution.

At first, the production of Vitaphone shorts and the recording of orchestral scores were strictly a New
York phenomenon, taking advantage of the bountiful supply of stage and concert hall talent there, but
the Warners soon migrated some of this activity to their more spacious facilities on the West Coast.
Dance band leader Henry Halstead is given credit for starring in the first Vitaphone short subject filmed
in Hollywood instead of New York. Carnival Night in Paris (1927) featured the Henry Halstead Orchestra
and a cast of hundreds of costumed dancers in a Carnival atmosphere.

Process

From the perspective of the cast and crew on the sound stage, there was little difference between
filming with Vitaphone and a sound-on-film system. In the early years of sound, the noisy cameras and
their operators were enclosed in soundproofed booths with small windows made of thick glass. Cables
suspended the microphones in fixed positions just above camera range, and sometimes they were
hidden behind objects in the scene. The recording machines were usually located in a separate building
to completely isolate them from sound stage floor vibrations and other undesirable influences. The
audio signal was sent from an on-stage monitoring and control booth to the recording room over a heavy
shielded cable. Synchronization was maintained by driving all the cameras and recorders with
synchronous electric motors powered from a common source. When music and sound effects were
being recorded to accompany existing film footage, the film was projected so that the conductor could
synchronize the music with the visual cues and it was the projector, rather than a camera, that was
electrically interlocked with the recording machine.
Except for the unusual disc size and speed, the physical record-making process was the same one
employed by contemporary record companies to make smaller discs for home use. The recording lathe
cut an audio-signal-modulated spiral groove into the polished surface of a thick round slab of wax-like
material rotating on a turntable. The wax was much too soft to be played in the usual way, but a specially
supported and guided pickup could be used to play it back immediately in order to detect any sound
problems that might have gone unnoticed during the filming. If problems were found, the scene could
then be re-shot while everything was still in place, minimizing additional expense. Even the lightest
playback caused some damage to the wax master, so it was customary to employ two recorders and
simultaneously record two waxes, one to play and the other to be sent for processing if that "take" of the
scene was approved. At the processing plant, the surface of the wax was rendered electrically conductive
and electroplated to produce a metal mold or "stamper" with a ridge instead of a groove, and this was
used to press hard shellac discs from molten "biscuits" of the raw material.

Because of the universal desirability of an immediate playback capability, even studios using sound-on-
film systems employed a wax disc "playback machine" in tandem with their film recorders, as it was
impossible to play an optical recording until it had made the round trip to the film processing laboratory.

A Vitaphone-equipped theater had normal projectors which had been furnished with special
phonograph turntables and pickups; a fader; an amplifier; and a loudspeaker system. The projectors
operated just as motorized silent projectors did, but at a fixed speed of 24 frames per second and
mechanically interlocked with the attached turntables. When each projector was threaded, the
projectionist would align a start mark on the film with the film gate, then cue up the corresponding
soundtrack disc on the turntable, being careful to place the phonograph needle at a point indicated by
an arrow scribed on the record's surface. When the projector was started, it rotated the linked turntable
and (in theory) automatically kept the record "in sync" (correctly synchronized) with the projected
image.

The Vitaphone process made several improvements over previous systems:

Amplification – The Vitaphone system used electronic amplification based on Lee De Forest's Audion
tube. This allowed the sound to be played to a large audience at a comfortable volume. Vitaphone was
far from the first sound film system to use this technology, but it had amplifiers and loudspeakers,
developed by Western Electric, which were state-of-the-art. Their performance was greatly superior to
anything else of the kind then available, including the equipment used by De Forest to present his own
Phonofilm sound-on-film exhibitions.
Fidelity – Contrary to conventional wisdom, neither Vitaphone's ability to fill a theater with an adequate
volume of sound nor its success in maintaining synchronization was unprecedented. Léon Gaumont's
sound-on-disc films, which were being shown twenty years earlier, were successfully synchronized by the
use of electrically interlinked multi-pole synchronous motors, and a pneumatic amplification system
more than sufficed to fill Gaumont's 3,400-seat flagship theater in Paris with the recorded sound.[7] That
sound, however, had to be recorded by the same insensitive non-electronic method introduced by
Thomas Edison in 1877, or alternatively by a very crude microphone-based variant which had logistical
advantages but did not offer improved fidelity. The resulting sound, however greatly amplified it might
be, was tinny and unclear and speech was difficult to understand. The footsteps and other incidental
sounds that audiences instinctively expected to hear were missing. It did not sound "natural". The
Vitaphone system derived from extensive work on electronically recording and reproducing sound that
had been carried out at Western Electric during the first half of the 1920s. Western Electric's engineers
had developed a highly sensitive full-frequency-range condenser microphone, capable of capturing a
whisper from several feet away, along with the electronic and mechanical equipment necessary to
adequately record the audio signal it produced. As a result, the quality of Vitaphone sound in the theater
came as a revelation to the audience at its public debut in 1926. It easily and dramatically surpassed
anything previously achieved. It even surpassed the sound quality of Western Electric's own sound-on-
film system, developed concurrently with the sound-on-disc system but still in the laboratory at that
time, because at first the discs yielded better fidelity than an optical sound track.

These innovations notwithstanding, the Vitaphone process lost the early format war with sound-on-film
processes for many reasons:

Distribution – Vitaphone records had to be distributed along with film prints, and shipping the records
required a whole infrastructure apart from the already-existing film distribution system. The records
would start to suffer from audible wear after an estimated 20 playings (a check box system on the label
was used to keep count) and were then supposed to be replaced with a fresh set. Damage and breakage
were inherent dangers, so a spare set of discs was usually kept on hand, further adding to the costs.

Synchronization – Vitaphone was vulnerable to severe synchronization problems, famously spoofed in

MGM's 1952 musical Singin' in the Rain.[8] If a record was improperly cued up, it would start out of sync
with the picture and the projectionist would have to try to manually acquire sync. If the wrong record
had been cued up there was no realistic option but to pause the show for a few minutes while swapping
in the correct disc, resetting everything and starting that reel again. If the film print became damaged
and was not precisely repaired, the relationship between the record and the print would be thrown off,
also causing a loss of sync. Vitaphone projectors had special levers and linkages to advance and retard
sync, but only within certain limits. Scrupulous care and attention were demanded from the
projectionist. In the absence of human error and the occasional malfunction that can befall any
complicated machine, the Vitaphone system worked as intended, but when a problem did occur it could
be an embarrassing disaster.
Editing – A phonograph record cannot be physically edited, and this significantly limited the creative
potential of Vitaphone films. Warner Bros. went to great expense to develop a highly complex
phonograph-based dubbing system, using synchronous motors and Strowger switch-triggered playback
phonographs. Multiple source discs would be carefully cued up, then parts of each in turn were dubbed
to a new master disc. The cutting of the new wax master could not be paused, so each playback
turntable had to be started at just the right moment and each signal switched to the recorder at just the
right moment. The system worked, but imprecisely enough that the reel of film often required some
adjustment, by adding or removing one or more film frames at imperfectly matched edit points, to
conform it to the disc of edited sound. This discouraged frequent changes of scene in the film and the
lively pace that they created. Editing sound on disc was a nightmare for the editor, and it was
increasingly obvious to everyone that while the system sufficed for musical shorts and a synchronized
musical accompaniment for otherwise silent films (the only applications originally planned), it was a
clumsy way to make a feature-length film with "live" sound. By the middle of 1931, Warner Bros.-First
National had thrown in the towel and was recording and editing optical sound on film, like all the other
studios, and only then dubbing the completed soundtrack to discs for use with the Vitaphone projection
system.

Fidelity versus Sound-on-Film – The fidelity of sound-on-film processes was improved considerably after
the early work by Lee De Forest on his Phonofilm system and that of his former associate Theodore Case
on what eventually became the Fox Movietone system, introduced in 1927. The De Forest and Case-Fox
systems used variable-density soundtracks, but the variable-area soundtrack used by RCA Photophone,
introduced in 1928, eventually predominated. Although the fidelity of optical sound never quite caught
up with ongoing improvements in disc recording technology, for practical purposes the early quality
advantage of discs had been overcome within a few years.

After the improvement of the competing sound-on-film systems, Vitaphone's disadvantages led to its
retirement early in the sound era. Warner Bros. and First National stopped recording directly to disc and
switched to Photophone sound-on-film recording. Warner Bros. had to publicly concede that Vitaphone
was being retired, but put a positive spin on it by announcing that Warner films would now be available
in both sound-on-film and sound-on-disc versions. Thus, instead of making a grudging admission that its
technology had become obsolete, Warner Bros. purported to be doing the entire movie industry a favor.

A significant number of theater owners, who had invested heavily in Vitaphone equipment only a short
time before, were financially unable or unwilling to replace their sound-on-disc-only equipment. Their
continuing need for discs compelled most Hollywood studios to prepare sets of soundtrack discs for their
new films, made by dubbing from the optical soundtracks, and supply them as required. This practice
continued, although on an ever-dwindling scale, into the mid-1930s. Despite the fact that Warner Bros.
still used Vitaphone as a brand name, the soundtrack-disc era was largely over by 1931.[9]