A real telephone, recorded onto vinyl, sampled to digital audio, put into a scene with the wrong phone... pressed onto a DVD, bootlegged onto a CD with mpeg encoding, taped on to a VHS cassette in Extra Long Play mode... I fear the ring that we would hear.
Former Broadcast Engineer here. Certain sound effects were deliberately altered so listeners wouldn't answer their own phones! Some SFX such as sirens were prohibited by FCC Regs if the broadcast could be heard by drivers who might swerve off the road. But I've heard your 33-1/3 recording with it's unmistakable wow everywhere, sometimes with a click from a scratched record! (Check out the opening title of the Rockford Files!) Oh! And # is officially called a "number sign" in the US, and a "hash" in UK. Like what US people end sentences with a "period," and the British do it with a "full stop." Winston Churchill famously remarked, "England and the United States are two great nations divided by a common language."
We always called It the Numbers # sign in Australia. As in # 3 (number 3) and so on. Sadly the youngies nowadays call it the hash tag. I get that language or symbols change over time though. Also here we say Route as Rout, not Root as the US says it. It weird saying Root 45 when it spelt (to us) as rout 45 (Root has a diff slang meaning in the commonwealth as well).
Back in my days you could say the same about Wikipedia. Its 4AM and I need to go to Uni tomorrow morning, yet I sit at a computer reading about Cambodian revolutionary party.
That's honestly likely why they did it. Audiences prefer less realistic effects if it "feels cinematic" after decades of being trained to expect a certain thing.
@yondie491 that sounds so stupid to me! 😂 But then again, I barely watch any movies. Only once in a blue moon does something peak my interest enough to go to the cinema... 😅 I also don't get the preference for 24Hz, as if obvious stutter or extreme blur would make a moving picture look more realistic. What I do get from it is motion sickness during long camera pans/rides though! 🙃👍
@@LRM12o8the reason for 24 frames per second is to do with the introduction of sound. The film recording and sound recording had to played back at the same rate. And so in order that that sound recording sounds normal they had to play the footage at a rate of 24 frames per second. This change was almost a hundred years ago. 24 frames per second is close enough to how the eye perceives things so the vast majority of audience members won’t notice an issue with it. Audiences are so used to seeing films at that frame rate that any alterations seem wrong and ‘unnatural’
A few years ago I was one of the organizers of a kids summer camp. These kids decided they didn't want to sleep until about 4am. We took shifts and woke up the kids the next morning at 9am (we're not monsters) with a very similar recording that one of the other organizers found online (well, a little bit).. The kids went to bed at 8pm the next evening without any resistance.
Man, ascending and descending phone rings in films have driven me insane for ages, but I always assumed it was just some sort of Doppler effect due to a moving mic. Thanks for the explanation. Now my rage can be properly directed.
It always bothered me too. I figured it was flutter in the filming, thought surely they had an actual bell that a stagehand was operating. Nope, double-flutter. Source tape flutter added to the master film soundtrack flutter.
Fun Fact: The sound designer from _Star Wars_ (can’t remember their name, unfortunately) recorded the sound of a lightsaber by recording the frequencies from static & interference on a CRT TV. The changes in pitch you hear when a lightsaber moves were caused by a moving microphone, similar to, as you described, the Doppler Effect.
@@williamreid6255 ...That's actually super neat, thanks ^_^ I don't know why I never looked that up! Ben Burtt is the guy, and I know that because I *did* look him up when researching who the hell decided every single film in the series needed a Wilhelm scream as a running gag, but apparently after looking up how he did TIE fighter sounds and the like I stopped before getting to the iconic saber hum.
@@MisterNohbdy Yeah I know about the Wilhelm scream and all that he did, my brain just decided to off itself when I was leaving the comment last night and so I couldn’t remember his name :( Edit: Also, I just remembered, the Wilhelm scream (technically) first appeared in the 1951 film _Distant Drums_ where a man was being eaten by an alligator (dw, they didn’t show anything graphic). The most recognizable version of the scream, however, comes from _The Charge at Feather River,_ a 1953 western. The character Private Wilhelm (dk who played him) was sitting on his horse filling his pipe, when suddenly someone fires an arrow into his left leg, causing him to fall off his horse out of surprise, and triggering the most iconic scream in cinema history.
So funny. I miss that too. The other day I really needed to slam the receiver down on someone and had to just end the cell phone call like a wimp. Someone’s gotta think of an app!
No idea what you say in the States, but here in the UK we still say that someone put the phone down. Mind you, my kids understand the command to "pull the chain" after they've used the loo, when every toilet they've ever seen has a button or handle flush. And our road sign for a rail crossing features a cartoon silhouette of a steam engine, when trains haven't looked like that for over 60 years! I think I may have discovered a theme here...
Back in the '80s I worked in an office where every everyone had a 2500 set. They all sounded identical!! If you were away from your desk and the phone rang, you had no idea if it was your phone or one of the other 25 phones in the office. I solved the problem by taking a hack saw to the bells in my phone and cut little notches in them. Now my phone ring was unique from all the others.
Highschool teachers would talk about WW2 and make it seem so uninteresting (I love history) But you managed to get me to watch 15 min on a telephone ring. Bravo
It's simple to examine why. Teachers do a job to make money, rarely do they do their stuff with passion. This guy here does every supposedly boring topic with passion, so it turns out entertaining. Teachers can do the same, if they really find joy in the stuff they teach. Sadly, it's not a common sight.
@@marcfuchs6938 is actually because most teachers are bitter sexless women who failed at becoming anything else. This guy is just a really smart dude with a passion for nerdy shit
You know, as a sound editor, I know about this problem, and yet I still use the pitch-shiftey sound fx if I need an old timey phone ring. There's something about it that just places you in the time period, and since most consumers don't understand what's going on, I think it does a good job of subconsciously indicating a vintage sound. Of course, I wouldn't use the same sound effect for a modern phone, and sometimes I do run into the problem of having old sounds in my library that I can't use because the pitch is a bit too warped.
Some phones *did* sound like that, but if I remember correctly, it was usually cheaper phones that became available in the 80s. Some were quite flimsy, and the ring sounded anemic.
Thank you for mentioning not using that sound effect for modern phones. Always bothers me when modern TV shows use phones (mostly smartphones, but modern landline phones as well) sound like a 90s beeping ringtone.
This is an extremely interesting observation. More people have heard the ringing of a Bell 500 with the distortions than without. So to their ears, the distorted sound is more genuine than the real one. If a movie maker actually did a "good" job of making an accurate recording of one it would sound wrong to the audience. It's not the only place where movies have distorted our sense of reality so much that reality seems unreal.
As a kid, when I mostly watched older movies and cartoons, I used to notice the "wow" all the times. Growing up together with the technology I heard it less and less until I eventually forgot about it. You just brought it back and explained it at a technical level, and every minute of it all was beatifully entertaining and fun. You rightfully earned one more subscriber.
I remember hearing wows all the time in movies when I was a kid, and that was only 20 or so years ago. The memories brought back from hearing that wonky pitch...
I wonder if the incorrect recording in the Dick Van Dyke show was a deliberate decision by the producers to avoid confusion with their viewers mistaking it for their own phone ringing during the show. If basically during that era everyone's phone sounded the same then this may have been considered a customer service action to deliberately have an incorrect ring sound.... or it could have just been laziness :)
That's a good thought, but wouldn't the ring in the show sound quite different than a phone ringing in your living room, because sound quality on 70/80's TV's was pretty shitty, right? I don't know, I wasn't around, but I think you'd hear an obvious difference between a Low-Fi recording played back over (by today's standard) horrible speakers and the sound of the actual thing.
There's a whole lot to this, and some of it is still valid. FM has its own requirements (because not everything will take up the same amount of bandwidth when played on FM) or in the case of USA, signal notes to trigger ads, nuclear alerts, and what have you. There is all sort of strange side-channel stuff :)
Many homes back in the day had a set of bells on the hall or kitchen that sounded similar to ring in this show. These ringers had a 4 inch bell and also had a chine mode. WE F1A. th-cam.com/video/jFayaKP7w1w/w-d-xo.html
@@bgundercover That's kinda what I remember as well. If you had those 4-prong wall sockets for your phone (VERY cutting edge compared to all phones being hard wired to the wall), I think the phone company would install a wall-mounted ringer to let you know you had an incoming call in case you had unplugged your phone and forgot to plug it back in again. Could that be what we were hearing in the Dick Van Dyke scene?
It's weird, but now that I'm paying attention to that fluctuation in pitch, I feel like most of the phone sound effects I've heard in movies/TV have always had that fluctuation. And I realized just now that for me, it actually evokes classic films and the cinematic experience. As a filmmaker myself, I may consciously choose to use a recording like that because there's something so familiar about it now.
You get it. Sound designers and directors love these sounds because they evoke the older films they were raised on. They have an almost subconscious richness to them that most people won't notice.
I got so many of those Western Electric 500 telephones ☎️, my pops worked for the phone company ,also got the 554 wall sets as well as the 1500 & 2500 as well as Trimlines & the loved princess phone....even had payphones
Only in the film industry do people view deliberately making the same mistakes as their predecessors instead of learning from them and doing better as a good thing! 🤦🙄 This is is why movies suck so much these days: instead of moving forward with new ideas and keeping to push the boundaries of realism with the new tech, they all just rehash the much more technologically restricted old stuff for no good reason!
The two bells weren't always quite in tune. This caused a beat frequency unrelated to recording problems. It bugged me so much as a child I took all six house phones apart and sorted the bells to get the best ring from each pair. A little known option on 500 sets were alternate bells pairs for use in offices with nearby phones, even on the same desk. AFAIK it was seldom requested.
Lease fees were pretty low in the 70's. I was so much of a phone nerd my parents leased two gadgets from the business office for me. A speakerphone and a card dialer, which used cards you punched out with your friends numbers to save you all that button pushing. It was great for calling into radio station contests. For three years with the exception of clothes the lease fees were my christmas and birthday presents. I think it saved my mom and dad money compared to the toys I would have got.
Don't get me started on how some modern shows have British telephones making the same ringing pattern as American ones. Phones in the UK had an initial long ring, followed by ring pairs, but it seems that a distressing number of young sound designers are just searching for "telephone ring" on the Internet and using the first one that they find...
@@davidewhite69 there was actually an Australian TV series from the late 60's where the phones were ringing with the U.S. cadence. Stuck out like the proverbial.
Phone guy for 45 years. Now retired. That sound is so dear to my heart!! Thanks! As an aside, the voice quality of the 5xx series had a very distinctive sound to it. It's hard to explain but if you want to hear it, search for an old country music song. Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn singing "As soon as I hang up the phone" Conway had two PSTN lines ran into the studio to make this song happen instead of using two extensions off of the electronic system he had as (with him and Loretta being musicians) he knew the sound would not be perfect. The result is classic! Good stuff! I miss the job.
I used to work in the data center for a old computer company named data General, I remember in the early 90s they had a stock room FILLED with old phones, rotary to Touch tone, a museum of 70s and 80s office phones. They finally got rid of all of it 😢to a "recycler", they were all destroyed
I remember the last time time I did that, when I was somehow caught in the middle of an argument between my husband and his brother. Husband had gone out, brother called wanting to talk to him and didn't believe me telling him he wasn't there and even cussing at me. "He's not here! Good-BYE!" Slam.
@@EverlastingHobnocker I had the ex boyfriend from hell who even after I told him I didn't want to see him anymore, kept calling and calling. finally I said, "Call me one more time and I'm getting a restraining order" and slammed the phone down it felt sooooooooooo good
Oh, naturally. If you were paying for people's phones, you'd want them to last forever. But if they're buying them from you.. why put all that engineering effort in? Just make 'em eviscerate if you toss it onto your bed too sternly, and have them buy another.
@@StrayGuitarist "... if you toss it onto your bed too sternly..." For some reason, the image of someone "sternly" tossing their phone onto a bed made me laugh.
@@goopah Hehe, guess it is a pretty odd phrasing. Glad to have made you laugh though, I was hoping I'd be able to pick vocabulary out-there enough to assemble something funny.
The phone company was not only responsible for fixing or replacing a broken phone; they also were responsible for sending a tech to your house to diagnose whatever problem you were having! They really didn't want to do that, so they made the phones reliable.
I’ve worked sound for film, both pre and post production, and I will say, I simultaneously sympathize with the frustration of hearing subpar individual sound effects, and with the hard working folks who placed those sound effects. Production can absolutely bust their butts knocking it out of the park in terms of on set sound capture, and post production will still have their work cut out for them in terms of crafting a believable soundscape that serves the story. Sometimes you just grab whatever sound file you can find in the limited timeframe you have. Sometimes you switch to something that “sounds right” which is different from what is “historically accurate.” With something as particular as a phone ring, directors almost always have their hands in the cookie jar, which is completely valid, as it impacts scene pacing, but that throws another iron in the fire. At the end of the day, a phone ring matching the receiver model or even being clean (without flutter or warble) takes a back seat to the serving of the narrative. It’s entirely possible that a director or sound designer first tried a crisp new digital recording, and preferred a distorted recording for its “vintage” sound. WE notice of course, and are offput by that choice, but most folks just hear “old timey phone.” If I were in charge of, say, Wandavision... I’d be rushing out to sample that Dick Van Dyke ringtone for use on my show just for the esoteric reference, with zero regard for the accuracy of the ringtone to the onscreen handsets. Heck, it probably IS an alarm clock and not a phone at all... but that almost makes it interesting, and almost makes it a foible worth repeating for old times sake. Are there truly no top quality recordings of these ringers? I have an extremely high quality 32bit float 196k digital recorder and some top notch microphones if that’s what needs to happen.
Exactly what came to my mind - that I would bet they had a mic on the set of the Terminator and then they realized/decided that the accurate sound just didn't feel right for some artistic reason.
Not to mention the same screech you hear every time you see a hawk fly across the screen.....or an eagle......or a falcon..... All the owls sound the same, too.
My first foray into telephone vandalism included: Swapping the bells in two 1500 so that one would ring with the high tone, the other ring with the low tone, Then removing the plastic dampers from the bells so that the ring had a much longer sustain. (My office had two lines so that I could call one phone from the other to hear the results of my tampering.) I also discovered that the electronics in the AT&T phones were highly potted so what was going on inside was even more mysterious. Thanks for the videos, brings back so many memories.
Personally, i hate the metallic "shwanng" sound inserted when someone is supposedly drawing a sword. A scabbard is padded for the protection of the blade, you know.
is it truly quiet? I understand it may be very well exaggerated for emphasis, but I feel like in the year 1,200 for example that it would be more of metal on metal, maybe lined with fur or leather but that would end up blood soaked and not rinse out very well.
I dislike that it, like the "Eagle Cry" is the *same* sound. I watched a movie where they actualy foleo'd different sliding sounds and at least it was different new sliding sounds. They might be wrong but they didn't pull me out of my suspension of disbelief.
12:46 In episode 2F09, when Itchy plays Scratchy's skeleton like a xylophone he strikes the same rib twice in succession yet he produces two clearly different tones. I mean, what are we- to believe that this is some sort of a-a magic xylophone or something??? Boy I really hope someone got fired for that blunder!
Tom5tom Entertainment I was going to say the same thing. The ring tone "mistake" in Terminator 2 was almost certainly an Easter egg, considering how obsessive the sound design was in that movie.
Lol I used to drive my wife mad by picking up on this on TV "hah! That phone's a statesman but the ring was from a viscount" for some inexplicable reason this got me labelled geek
next time, you can point out other inaccuracies, like, "the car sounds like it is increasing its engine speed forever" or "if they were really upside down, their clothes and hair would hang out" or "an electric shock does not make you jump away" etc
@Thu Nell Ⓥ A music lover is somebody who uses audio equipment to listen to their music. An audiophile is somebody who uses music to listen to their audio equipment.
2:30 Don’t think I wouldn’t notice you calling the Emergency Services. Did you know that they have faster response times and better looking drivers? It’s best not to email them though...I so wasn’t expecting to see that IT Crowd reference, especially since I didn’t notice it when I first watched this video when it came out, but I am so happy I did. Great video as always, and I love this channel!
I'm so glad I wasn't the only one who caught this! At first I saw him just dialing numbers and thought it was random, but I started paying attention right around when he dial 911, and what really tipped me off was him coming back for the 3. Once I saw that I backed it up and watched to make sure my suspicion was correct. Brilliant.
A car guy like me knows that a lot of cars in movies don’t actually sound like the soundtrack they use including the engine starter sound. Also a lot movies use the same generic car alarm sound when arming and disarming a car. Great video. Thanks for posting.
I've never actually heard any car in real life make that particular "chirp-chirp" noise when the alarm is set. They all either make no sound (and just flash the lights) or make some other noise, usually a beep.
Or something on the History channel where they use a recording of a diesel-electric locomotive, with multi-chime air horn, to accompany silent footage of a steam locomotive. Ai-yi-yay!
Wow, nostalgia is amazing - I love that tone shift, I always thought it was just American phones, I actually thought there was something wrong with your phone because they sounded so bland. Even after you explained the travesty of what they’d done, I still preferred the slow warped ringing sound from the vinyl recording, like the whammy bar on a electric guitar
probably the same dude as the uploade of this. AKA the only person who ever noticed in the first place, or cared enough to time it. He was like "did you hear it, it's really noticeable isn't it?" and I'm like "sounds perfectly fine to me" Not to mention that he didn't even mean the ring itself, but rather the chiming out. With someone talking over it!
OmikronWeapon I noticed it before he showed what part it was. It’s not hard to hear the pitch changing. But then again I’ve always had good ears, I can hear things others can’t all the time. Then a few seconds later they hear it, and go “wow, how’d you do that?”.
I amazed how you take some of the most boring technology and make it not only interesting, but I just watched nearly 15 mintues of phones ringing. Unfortunately, I will now notice the flutter and wow in those movies. Thanks buddy, thanks a lot. Seriously though keep them coming, love your stuff.
So did mine. At some point they put a new slip behind the dial with a fully numeric phone number on it, but it had a tear in it for some reason and you could see the old number with the named exchange (HEmlock) below. It worked out to the same number, so I don't know why they bothered.
Mine too. Until the day she left her home for the older living apartment… that same phone sat there year after year so dutifully working…. And I remember the pulse (ahem!) Rotary dial phone that it replaced. I use to like swirling that stupid dial to call numbers. Even though it would have been a terrible thing if you had to call 911.. Probably why they chose the number 911 because 9 means you mean it, it's not an accidental nudge but 1 1 makes it faster to dial on older phones rather than 9 9 9… lol.. Just a guess.
hooking up these old phones can be hard to do these days. as most "modern" phones only use 2 of the 4 wires, and many modern home phone systems no longer put current on the other 2 wires. With these older phones that can cause issues as often they drew current for the bell ringing system from the other 2 wires. So if you hook one of these old ringing phones up it might not ring properly.
I uploaded the recording of the Model 500's ring to my Google Drive and made a shrareable link! Feel free to download it if you like: drive.google.com/file/d/19XDbxMFrhL3ck53M4NCWJu58jW-X9xJ-/view?usp=sharing The Model 500 phone certainly was a common sight (and sound!) in the US. But, the idea of a "standard issue telephone" is not unique to the American phone system. It's quite possible the problem I describe in this video made its way into other countries, as well! And for anyone who isn't familiar with the term "Touch-Tone", this was the Bell system's trademark for DTMF push-button dialing. That's actually a pretty interesting technology, particularly with how early it was first deployed, and is worth a read!
And quite a big issue in VOIP phone systems, some admins select different options, rfc2833, inband,info,shortinfo are the ones I could pick from in my systems, most systems support rfc2833, ive not seen one that doesnt, perhaps thats in other countries (non UK)... but ive called some companies where DTMF hasnt worked, meaning it mustve been another type...
Or perhaps worth a video 😉 speaking of VOIP, I got an avocado green model 2500 and had to switch VOIP boxes because the one I had couldn't drive the ringer mechanism!
I don't get why they didn't just all use a ringer box to set it off they are not exactly hard to build. Ours in the UK are a little more tricky as it should be a 75V 25 Hz feed but you need to build in something to interrupt it for 0.2 seconds in every 0.6 second cycle as ours cycles 0.4s on, 0.2s off. Still easy enough to build just takes a couple of extra components but could knock one together in about 10 mins using components laying around the house probably here, make that 30 if you have to make a run to the store first.
I think this is my third time watching this video. And for the first time today, I realized two things that I’ve never picked up in this episode before. First, the audiophile/audio file joke. Wow. Second, the recording of that record as being the origin of the white zone/red zone joke in Airplane. Great video, man.
I always felt like they wanted us to notice those sounds. There's tons of recycled sounds and every movie kinda becomes a "can you spot the recording" It was definitely done out of budget cuts and simplicity at first but it then turned into tradition, and it's still done today just to maintain that connection to the movie medium heritage. That's how I see it at least.
I used to play with one as a child and I am speaking of a real rotary phone. I can not remember it do that, but I remember trying to catch my finger on the hook/backstop. Haha! What I do remember using a pencil on is a cassette tape, although you could squeeze your finger into it as well, those little spikes did hurt after twisting the cassette tape in a circle around your finger or you kept pulling and pushing your finger into the wheel grooves.
@5:23 This shot is a famous error in the film, "he is talking on a handset which has an RJ (Registered Jack) style connector. These style jacks were not introduced until the mid 1970s as ordered by the FCC."
Shirley there is a missed opportunity at the end of this video to ask us to ‘ring the bell’. Fantastic work as always - your editing continues to inspire us smaller TH-camrs!
It might be just because I'm old, but I remember a time when youtube didn't have a bell. You just subscribed, and got notified, none of this newfangled algorriphm stuff! Gosh-dang whippersnappers... Anyway, maybe this video pre-dates the "bell of ensured notification"? I can't actually recall when they introduced that 😆
I think the phone ring in T2 is as iconic as the "Wilhelm Scream". Or the creaky door that is used in almost every video game and movie. I think the use of these sounds is 3 fold. Paying homage to the source (even if that is lost to time). These are the sounds we are used to this object making. And finally... people are lazy. If someone has already created a sound you need, why recreate the wheel?
I think there is a fourth fold: This was the early era (relatively speaking) of both phones _and_ TV, so maybe they simply wanted to make sure that no viewers would get confused and try to answer their phone, maybe even shutting off the TV to do so. Not sure about the timeline, but this may even be prior to every TV being shipped with a remote, and of course the phone would be out in the hall. A far cry from today's "mute TV and pull your phone from your pocket" 😆 Not that anyone still uses ring tones... Or TVs...
@sourcererseven3858 I don't think so. If you couldn't distinguish between the ringing coming from your landline vs out of your TV speakers back then, then you must have been really hard of hearing! 1. Most people could easily locate wether the ringing came from the TV right in front of them, or from the hallway further away. 2. Most old CRT TVs had a really echo-y and undetailed sound. The sound coming from your TV would sound nowhere near as crisp and clear, as the sound of the actual bells in your telephone 3. Also, every single unit had a somewhat different tone to its ring (The ones shown in the video are a half-step apart!), so the tone of the telephone in the movie wouldn't match anyway. Most people would (subconsciously) realize those slight differences in pitch to their own phone, which they've heard ring a thousand times and are very familiar with, even if they couldn't tell a half-tone difference in two unfamiliar sounds. 4. Finally, the volume of the rong from the TV would seldomly match the volume of your actual telephone. So yeah, I don't believe this was much of an issue at all!
@@LRM12o8 not saying it was an actual issue, I'm saying it might have been a _concern_ the producers may have wanted to address preemptively. Your points are all valid.
I was pulling the old phone system out of a building so I could put a VoIP system and bossman threw the 5 line version of this phone across the room. When I heard the bells clang I asked if I could keep one. I now have 3 of them and the 1A2 key system that ran them in the original installation.
Seriously; you have a great show going. You are knowledgeable and very precise in your delivery. You are turning into one of my favorite TH-cam channels, keep up the great work!
I still have our old black rotary phone. I keep it connected to our landline (yeah, we still have that too) because the real metal bell ringer is so much louder and easier to hear than the electronic "chirping" of my more modern phone.
did you see the black old rotary phone on eBay, this guy turned it into a wireless Bluetooth telephone. In the description it tells about when a call comes in the ringer starts up. LOL no flutter or wow recording, it's the real thing! I found it while looking for western electric stuff, searching 'western electric bluetooth' will help find it faster
Fun fact: Because these phones only use the landline, you are covered in case of emergency or blackout. (So long as your provider isn't totally out too, i guess)
When I hear that ringing sound, I always expect to it to be followed by "This is Jim Rockford. At the tone, leave your name and message. I'll get back to you."
Growing up we had a wall model and when my dad saw there was a $400 phone bill, between my mother calling my grandmother in Florida and my sister calling her boyfriend in Alabama, my dad ripped the phone off the wall and threw it across the room. The only damage was a small piece of plastic cracked off, but it still was in perfect condition.The floor on the other hand had a huge dent. Plus we had the "cordless" model. The 50' cord, stretched to 100'.
The visual joke on the Pound key is so subtle and so perfect lmaooooooo. I absolutely love your sense of humor, from subtle jokes like that to your often deadpan delivery to your running joke about "the power of buying two of them" with its recent incredible payoff in your video following up on the dishwasher detergent thing (for anyone who hasn't seen it, go watch "I messed up. You're using too much detergent." right now, it is so worth it even tho the video is long).
Now that you've pointed it out I'm going to hear this every time. I must say - the sound of the wow actually adds something to the emotion. I wouldn't be surprised if the choice of using a slightly distorted sample is on purpose.
@Russ Gallagher Not entirely accurate. While the phone was included with your service, you were still paying to use it, and it still belonged to Ma Bell. Most of these phones still have stickers or stamps that read something to the effect of "Bell System Property - Not For Sale", and to tamper with these phones, steal them, or intentionally break them could land you with some hefty fines from your service provider. After the breakup in 1984, however, you could choose to own or lease your phone.
Cool! Now do one about how almost all helicopters in the movies sound like Bell H47s, or why computers are constantly making beeping noises. Sound cliches drive me crazy.
Please watch the car chase on Bullitt (1968) and tell me how the Mustang sounds like? For bonus points you can count the times you see the same VW beetle :D
While i am not enough of a helicopter afficonado to be able to notice that phenomenon, i always notice the insane bipping from movie computers; it annoys me so much!
A long-time friend retired a few years from the Sound Editing profession (her pension comes from the MPSE) and I use the Wilhelm Scream as her ringtone on my phone. I'd say she is just as - what was the word - as you. Why? Well, if she's not perfect, we will notice when something is off even by just a little bit. When she started in the business, it was still mag tape and having to slice & dice it all to ensure it was all synch'd up. I remember going to visit her in LA years and she was working on a film and one day I got to sit in the back while the crew was doing the actual dubbing of the sounds to the final reel (I'd don't know all the tech names, but I do know all the foley artists had recorded what was needed and now those bits were being inserted into their designated spots). So there is a bunch of back and forths (play, rewind, play, repeat). When they kept doing it at a certain scene, I kinda groaned and the crew chief (sound engineer?) turned around and asked me, Are you trying to watch the movie?. Yeah. Well, don't, cause we're going be doing this all day long. That was good advice because yeah, they kept doing it like that. Oh, footsteps are the toughest (well, they were back then) and they did them as a single pass through the movie reel. She told me the story of Gregory Hines and the movie TAP. Normally footsteps are recreated by the foley artists usually putting their hands into the shoes and tapping the correct floor material. And for most footstep scenes that's fine. But, come on, how are you going to recreate the footsteps from Mr. Hines during his dancing routines? Well, he came back to the recording studio and recreated the scenes so they could actually record the sounds from his steps. By the way, my friend did not work on the movie. I'm gonna share this video with my friend. We had Princess phones in our house growing up. Mom really liked them. Sure made entering radio contests easier (the touch-tone aspect, not necessarily the Princess phone itself).
Yes, my father created a demon summoning portal inside our house, which his witchcraft books clearly said should only be made outside, and our house has been haunted ever since, even though he is no longer with us.
6:00 Saskatchewan's telephone company is SaskTel, which is a Crown Corporation, which is a corporation which is technically owned by Her Majesty the Queen but is in practice a government entity. Until the advent of cellphones, SaskTel was the only phone company in the province (and still heavily regulates third-party cellphone and landline service providers). This may explain the slow adoption of modern technologies since different companies are not competing in a free market. In fact, even to this day large swaths of rural Saskatchewan are still without cellphone service, something the current Government is working to address. Just thought I would provide this tidbit.
SaskTel has better rural service than private telecom companies since they will actually run lines to secluded areas even if it's not profitable. It's also cheaper service since in publicly subsidised. Good luck getting Verizon to hook up phone and internet in northern Sask lol
@@user-tg4hi6bj3j I agree that AT&T was a monopoly, but government can break up private enterprise monopolies but private enterprise monopolies cannot break up government monopolies.
Anchorage Telephone Utility allowed purchase of phones from the mid 70's; we had purchased phones, including a pay phone, in home from 1978. The lease charge was made up for after the first year. They also offered alternate bell sets; one replacement bell was a 3rd lower (forming a p5), the other a 3rd higher than the high bell. This was specifically for PBX uses. Also note that modular was available from abut 1974, but it was not the rj-11... it was a 4 pronged block plug. ATU predated (and postdated) the AT&T monopoly, as a city-owned utility... but for long distance, you had to have an AT&T/Alascom account. It was possible to have local-only phone service.
William Hostman Fascinating! But why did your family have a pay phone in your home? I'm assuming that by pay phone you mean a phone that takes quarters. Why wouldn't you just have a normal telephone instead?
Leroset to keep friends from asking to use it. And it was 10 cents, not a quarter, for a local call. It wasn't actually on a payphone line, but my friends didn't know that...
I knew a few people that bought payphones for the house after the bell breakup as a way to restrict the usage of the phone and long phone calls to friends.
I remember my parents talking about "renting another phone" so my father could have one in his office back in the late 70's. The telephone industry was a captive market. Still is in some ways, most cable and telephone providers will supply cable boxes and internet modems to the customer that require to be returned at termination of service.
I kinda looked at that remark through the other end of the telescope. Today we laugh uproariously at the audacious concept of Apple or whoever owning “our” product, but we accepted it unthinkingly back then. I remember a telephone technician swapping out my old phone for a newer one, and I thought “thank god it’s not mine, or I’d have to pay for that. One less thing to worry about”. So maybe if Apple had vast warehouses of phones and freely swapped out broken ones for new ones, they could win over our sympathies.
Main difference is Apple doesn't own any mobile phone network. The rationale for the telephone companies owning the phones where that apparatuses not fully compliant to the phone companies specifications actually could take down the network (not so much burning it out physically as by causing interference). Apple say they want "a consistent user experience", but that does not work the same way, as one user doing funky stuff with their own phone will NOT cause *other* costumers to have *their* experience altered to any significant degree.
I remember about 2003 some older friends of mine realized they had been paying a rental fee on their avocado green phone since the 70's. The cost seemed astronomical to me at the time. Something like $10/mo or maybe even more. That was when landlines were still common and you could buy a wired phone outright for probably $10. They probably payed thousands for that one, and had to give it back in the end.
(Edited to fix a typo since, of course, proofreading is so much more effective *after* publication.) Heh, I still have a model 2500 that I use every day. They really do last forever. Also, being an old AT&T guy, I call the "#" sign an "octothorpe."
It just occurred to me that you cannot judge the ringing sound used on the Dick Van Dyke show by what the 1957 red 500 phone you heard on youtube sounds like because even though the base plate might say it is from 1957 the ringer may have a later date of manufacture. The reason for that is because back in the day, before you could buy your own phones, when phones were turned back in to the phone company, they would be dismantled down to their individual pieces and the pieces put in bins of like components. For example all the ringers would go in the ringer bin, rotary dials in the rotary dial bin etc. Receivers, ear and mouth caps, cords etc. were not only sorted by what item they were but also by color, i.e. white cords in the white cord bin, red handsets in the red handset bin. Then, when a new subscriber ordered a phone to be installed, the parts were plucked out of their respective bins and put together according to what type and what color the subscriber ordered and that is why I have a WE 500 with a base plate from 1961 and a mouth & ear cap from 1968 and a network from 1971. What you need to listen to is a 500 with matching dates on all the components which means the phone was put into service and not taken out of where it was originally installed until after the break up of Ma Bell. While all date matching vintage phones are not real common they do exist and I have 2 from 1956 (both working) and one from 1957 (untested and awaiting restoration). I will be glad to plug in of the 1956's and see how the ringer sounds and let you know what I find out.
Even further, the phone in the show looks like it could just as easily be a model 302 (the precursor to the 500 which looked almost identical). And the 302 had a one-bell ring.
... Why? Surely the labor cost of disassembling the phones, reassembling the phones, and testing the phones was more expensive than just sticking them in a box and shoving it in a warehouse.
@@angolin9352 they had to fix or replace them whenever they failed, because they were just being leased to you. Much cheaper to make sure it works than to send out a technician whenever a faulty phone kicks it
The Matrix series used Model 500s in various places. Some shows purposely use wrong sounds for various reasons: licensing, copyright, reality immersion, or just to dig at people like you and me for noticing it. Model 500s are so resilient that they're the only phone guaranteed to outlast a Nokia cuz they're still in use today, unlike Nokia phones. Side note: Cable MTAs will not accept pulse-tone dialing. I work for a cable ISP and had to tell a customer their kitchen phone can only receive calls, not make them. They were cool with it.
If you listen more closely he never says the t. Because the key itself is just called the hash key. Hence a social media tag marked with a hash being named a hash tag.
Carbage Man - Watch the video at 1:30 - the # changes to £ - it is symbolic of his dry sense of humour, if you'll excuse the pun, and comments on this misnomer of many Americans. It comes so quickly after the (also very droll) "hash cough cough cough" that was probably missed by many.
In fact I think probably 90% of all telephones ringing in TV shows have a wrong ring frequency. In the bell system, phones ring with a precise frequency the shows get it wrong.
@@jamesbattista1466 Party lines used different ring frequencies for different phone numbers on the same line. The ringer is a resonant circuit, with 20 Hz being the base frequency. 1A2 Office phones used a small DC powered buzzer, a mechanical interrupter and a subcycle power supply to provide their ring signal when bells were used in muti-line phones. They were interfaced with the 400 series KTU cards.
Funny story from working at radio shack back in the day when they sold phones. They had two that looked almost identical to a 500. One was $19.99 the other was either 29 or $39 I can't remember which. Everybody would walk in and pick up the handset on the $19 one and feel how cheesy and cheap it felt. Then they would pick up the expensive one and it felt good had a nice heft, it was just clearly a better handset so 9 out of 10 people would buy the expensive one as soon as they felt the difference. What they didn't know was that radio shack was using the same handset. There was a small iron bar glued inside the expensive one to make it feel heavier and better made. We also had a list of things that we were required to try and upsell. Everything from phone amplifiers to longer cords to detanglers. There were normally seven things that you could add to a phone with a single sale if you could talk them into it. The only thing I ever really offered was the longer cords if they needed it and the detangler because I hate Tangled handset cords.
Speaking of pet-peeves. Could you do a video on adjusting ASPECT RATIO of widescreen TV's? Just about every widescreen TV that I see in a restaurant or bar has it's aspect-ratio mis-adjusted. There seems to be NO standard to this nomenclature. Most remotes have a button labeled "PICTURE SIZE", "ASPECT RATIO (what's that?), or "WIDTH" :(
My Roku TV seems to auto adjust it fine. Vizio never seems to work. Vizio TVs are not very impressive in that respect. No setting on my Vizio of the WIDE button seems to work period. Analog stations are the 4:3 ratio. There are no standards.
That is the main reason I completely stopped watching TV live when we switched to Digital. I can not stand the aspect ratio being wrong at every commercial, and even changing from one commercial to the next! stupid! It is another case where the standard was not fully thought out before implementation, so there IS NO standard to automatically work correctly all the time. There is a place for a "flag" in the data stream for the tv to change aspect ratio modes, but many tvs do not monitor it, and it seems to rarely be used on broadcasts.
Most TVs in the past 20 years or so have a 1:1 pixel ratio mode but every manufacturer calls it something different. Saying there is no standard is not really true either, it can only be 16:9 or 4:3. If neither of those seems to work then its a problem in the broadcast not the TV/STB. Content in other ratios should have hard-coded black bars.
The hackles stand up on my neck every time a pinball machine appears on screen and the sound editor sticks in a Gottlieb chime unit sound. Williams, Stern, and Bally chimes all sound different, and it's especially annoying when they play the electromechanical Gottlieb chimes over solid state games that had digital sound and no bells at all.
Many years ago I worked lights & sound in a small community theatre. We had two ways of ringing a phone. One was a generic ringer located behind a teaser above stage left. This was all well and good if the phone on stage was located on that side. But if in center or stage right, it was obviously fake. I was one of the few people who knew we could actually make the phone on set ring, though it would require a lengthy wire to the terminal box be the stage manager. I still recall with a great chuckle a show where we had the actual phone on set wired to ring (controlled by a pushbutton in the light booth). During a rehearsal break one evening, I started "ringing" the phone, and eventually an actor came over, and thinking it was the actual theatre's phone, answered it saying "Good evening, ---------- Playhouse." I already had the PA system turned on and the over-stage speakers turned on and responded, "Oh, hi, this is the light booth. Why are you answering a prop phone?" The look on the actor's face was priceless, as he proceeded to call me a crude epithet for a particular excretory orifice. lol! Now in 2020, it would be fun to repeat this, but with the ability to actually call the prop phone, and when some poor victim answers it, say "Hi, this is the light control room. We've been trying to reach you about your car's extended warranty." (Yes, I would totally do that!)
I wish I hadn't known about flutter/wow. This reminds me of kerning... It's not a problem until you're made aware of it, at which point it becomes infuriating whenever encountered.
“if you hear flutter in the sound of a phone, then you know you’re listening to an analog tape recording.” *phone rings* sounds like someone rattling a spoon in a ceramic bowl....
It is funny, been studying AT&T/Bell Systems, and they put a ton of videos out on AT&T's Tech Channel as archives, I would imagine since AT&T, having the technology to force a phone to ring... Still has the pitch dip you mentioned, now I can't stop hearing it!!! Only came back to just complain you got me noticing the ringers of a phone being faked.
Funny thing is, pre-divestiture, Bell charged not only extra for Touch-Tone service, but also a higher lease fee for the (largely-similar) phone. That service fee continued long after; when I got my own phone, 25-odd years ago, there was still an itemized 98-cent charge on my bill. And funny stories about people ringing up the telco to cancel it & save the roughly $12/year. However, I've heard that they usually wouldn't even bother to remove the service from the line (although, it has happened!)
Madness832 - in our market it was also that way. They charged extra for touch tone service, even though it cist them less. If you cancelled the touch tone add-on depending on which exchange you were on, it would remove the ability or not. it all depended on the updates and available circuits on the exchange you were physically wired to, and what was easier for them.
Phone companies still charge extra for touch-tone dialing in some places, including mine. Since my mom is a cheapskate, my household is one of like 3 that still has only pulse dialing. VWestlife is one of the others.
Yep, happened to me, too. My first apartment out of college was in Downey, CA, in 1985, with GTE as the local provider. They tried to charge me $1 a month for touch tone. I told them to get lost. I had a new phone that only had a keypad, but it had a switch that enabled it to send pulse instead of DTMF. They actually DID disable DTMF -- I tried it. So they had to support extra hardware to service cheapskates like me who refused to pay them extra to not use it. Monopolies (even second rate ones) do weird things.
Sound designers sometimes use certain classic sfx as a a sort of Easter egg/inside joke. The old slightly warbly Universal Studios telephone ring is one of them. "Hello, this is Jim Rockford. At the tone, leave your name and message and I'll get back to you."
I expect the phone sound in Terminator WAS digitized. They just digitized the existing sound instead of recording a new one. That's the fastest, easiest, cheapest thing to do and they figured hardly anyone would notice... or care. People like us are weird.
The Trading Places 2554 Wall phone also has the incorrect ring. The 2554 wall phone had the same single steel bell ringer that the Trimline series had. Not the dual brass bells of the 500 / 554 / 2500 series sets.
So that's what it is! I've definitely heard that flaw before. Always thought it might have just been a microphone moving that caused the change in sound. Since the ring is usually accompanied by a panning shot to the phone and figured a microphone might be part of the camera to pick up sound from where the scene is being played. Now I know it's sloppy sound effects, that's gonna bug me now. Thanks.
Oh damn, there was a 554 in the basement of the house i basically grew up in. I used it because i could even though there were newer phones in the house since i thought it was super neat. Rotary phones were neat as hell too.
Bring back the land line and rotary dial. If you have the old pre 50's you can dial the numbers by hitting the hang up button. My friend taught me how to do it. The buttons were flat on top and was easier and the finger didn't slip off. The newer ones were hard to click the pulses. Also I used to play Yankee doodle on the DTMF buttons. Cell phones are boring. Ok guess I could have my own phone system at home by using a phone line simulator. Makes a good intercom and can program my own numbers to dial. I could make a TH-cam video. Oh the last thing I missed is when you made a long distance phone call like from Pittsburgh to Lakeland Florida you could hear the computer sounds before the call was connected. 73
I actually find the movie ring sound more right somehow. Ive never had one of these dial phones, so my entire perception of how they should ring relies on these old movies
@@javo.illanes it's just different names for the same symbols. I know the "star key" as an asterisk, and the "hashtag" aka "pound key" as an octothorpe! I'm just poking fun
Glad you actually said the name of the movie because I wasn't sure because I haven't seen that movie in a while (but also many other people watching this might not have gotten that reference)
FWIW, the commentary track on the DVD confirms that the announcements in Airplane! were specially recorded for the movie. However, they ARE the same two voices. The directors made a point of tracking down the man and woman who recorded the original announcements.
A real telephone, recorded onto vinyl, sampled to digital audio, put into a scene with the wrong phone... pressed onto a DVD, bootlegged onto a CD with mpeg encoding, taped on to a VHS cassette in Extra Long Play mode... I fear the ring that we would hear.
uploaded on youtube
2006 youtube and downloaded/compressed
then converted to mov, reuploaded to youtube in 2018 with pitch shift to keep it from being flagged for copyright infringement
Someone has to do it now xd
Congrats, I will now have nightmares over this.
Former Broadcast Engineer here. Certain sound effects were deliberately altered so listeners wouldn't answer their own phones! Some SFX such as sirens were prohibited by FCC Regs if the broadcast could be heard by drivers who might swerve off the road.
But I've heard your 33-1/3 recording with it's unmistakable wow everywhere, sometimes with a click from a scratched record! (Check out the opening title of the Rockford Files!)
Oh! And # is officially called a "number sign" in the US, and a "hash" in UK. Like what US people end sentences with a "period," and the British do it with a "full stop." Winston Churchill famously remarked, "England and the United States are two great nations divided by a common language."
Spot on mate full stop number sign good job!
We always called It the Numbers # sign in Australia. As in # 3 (number 3) and so on. Sadly the youngies nowadays call it the hash tag. I get that language or symbols change over time though. Also here we say Route as Rout, not Root as the US says it. It weird saying Root 45 when it spelt (to us) as rout 45 (Root has a diff slang meaning in the commonwealth as well).
Actually the official name of a #, is octothorpe. The rest are colloquialisms.
Im still picking up my phone when one rings on movie
@@wonniewarrior I've heard route pronounced both ways here in America. Just depends on which regional dialict you hear it from.
I just spent 15 minutes watching a video about a telephone ring... and damn, it was interesting!
I wonder what I am doing with my life too. I'm scared.
I can't believe I stuck around long enough to read replies about a video on phone ringers.
You are geh
That sums this channel pretty well
Back in my days you could say the same about Wikipedia. Its 4AM and I need to go to Uni tomorrow morning, yet I sit at a computer reading about Cambodian revolutionary party.
When I hear that distinct wobble in the pitch, I say to myself, “now THAT’s the sound of a REAL movie telephone.”
That's honestly likely why they did it. Audiences prefer less realistic effects if it "feels cinematic" after decades of being trained to expect a certain thing.
I have to say, I really do like how a movie telephone sounds.
@yondie491 that sounds so stupid to me! 😂
But then again, I barely watch any movies. Only once in a blue moon does something peak my interest enough to go to the cinema... 😅
I also don't get the preference for 24Hz, as if obvious stutter or extreme blur would make a moving picture look more realistic. What I do get from it is motion sickness during long camera pans/rides though! 🙃👍
@@LRM12o8 humans, amirite?
@@LRM12o8the reason for 24 frames per second is to do with the introduction of sound. The film recording and sound recording had to played back at the same rate. And so in order that that sound recording sounds normal they had to play the footage at a rate of 24 frames per second. This change was almost a hundred years ago. 24 frames per second is close enough to how the eye perceives things so the vast majority of audience members won’t notice an issue with it. Audiences are so used to seeing films at that frame rate that any alterations seem wrong and ‘unnatural’
"The only audio file guaranteed not to start an argument" I'm dying.
I don't get it...
That could be sarcasm or it could be TH-cam restrictions or it could just be the de facto standard, still slightly confused
@@imark7777777 The joke is that audiophiles will argue about anything that has to do with sound quality.
@@OtakuUnitedStudio AH ok. makes sense now lol
A few years ago I was one of the organizers of a kids summer camp. These kids decided they didn't want to sleep until about 4am. We took shifts and woke up the kids the next morning at 9am (we're not monsters) with a very similar recording that one of the other organizers found online (well, a little bit).. The kids went to bed at 8pm the next evening without any resistance.
Man, ascending and descending phone rings in films have driven me insane for ages, but I always assumed it was just some sort of Doppler effect due to a moving mic. Thanks for the explanation. Now my rage can be properly directed.
It always bothered me too. I figured it was flutter in the filming, thought surely they had an actual bell that a stagehand was operating. Nope, double-flutter. Source tape flutter added to the master film soundtrack flutter.
And I don't hear a difference at all. Lucky me, I guess.
Fun Fact: The sound designer from _Star Wars_ (can’t remember their name, unfortunately) recorded the sound of a lightsaber by recording the frequencies from static & interference on a CRT TV. The changes in pitch you hear when a lightsaber moves were caused by a moving microphone, similar to, as you described, the Doppler Effect.
@@williamreid6255 ...That's actually super neat, thanks ^_^ I don't know why I never looked that up! Ben Burtt is the guy, and I know that because I *did* look him up when researching who the hell decided every single film in the series needed a Wilhelm scream as a running gag, but apparently after looking up how he did TIE fighter sounds and the like I stopped before getting to the iconic saber hum.
@@MisterNohbdy Yeah I know about the Wilhelm scream and all that he did, my brain just decided to off itself when I was leaving the comment last night and so I couldn’t remember his name :(
Edit: Also, I just remembered, the Wilhelm scream (technically) first appeared in the 1951 film _Distant Drums_ where a man was being eaten by an alligator (dw, they didn’t show anything graphic). The most recognizable version of the scream, however, comes from _The Charge at Feather River,_ a 1953 western. The character Private Wilhelm (dk who played him) was sitting on his horse filling his pipe, when suddenly someone fires an arrow into his left leg, causing him to fall off his horse out of surprise, and triggering the most iconic scream in cinema history.
I loved the ring when slamming the receiver. I miss that. So satisfying.
I want my iPhone to use the Haptic Touch to detect when I angrily hang up and make that sound 😂
So funny. I miss that too. The other day I really needed to slam the receiver down on someone and had to just end the cell phone call like a wimp. Someone’s gotta think of an app!
@@jimmyb1559 It's like storming out of a tent and trying to slam the flap.
No idea what you say in the States, but here in the UK we still say that someone put the phone down. Mind you, my kids understand the command to "pull the chain" after they've used the loo, when every toilet they've ever seen has a button or handle flush. And our road sign for a rail crossing features a cartoon silhouette of a steam engine, when trains haven't looked like that for over 60 years! I think I may have discovered a theme here...
With the little iphones we have now.. i don't know how to slam the phone down to hang up to show how angry i am at telemarketers.
Back in the '80s I worked in an office where every everyone had a 2500 set. They all sounded identical!! If you were away from your desk and the phone rang, you had no idea if it was your phone or one of the other 25 phones in the office.
I solved the problem by taking a hack saw to the bells in my phone and cut little notches in them. Now my phone ring was unique from all the others.
DIY ringtone
That would bug me enough also to figure out a solution
Smart trick.
Highschool teachers would talk about WW2 and make it seem so uninteresting (I love history) But you managed to get me to watch 15 min on a telephone ring.
Bravo
@@LogiForce86 the problem with why in history is that it's always going to be subjective.
if you liked this video, you should check out all the videos he's made about lightbulbs
LogiForce86
underrated comment of the month award
It's simple to examine why. Teachers do a job to make money, rarely do they do their stuff with passion. This guy here does every supposedly boring topic with passion, so it turns out entertaining. Teachers can do the same, if they really find joy in the stuff they teach. Sadly, it's not a common sight.
@@marcfuchs6938 is actually because most teachers are bitter sexless women who failed at becoming anything else. This guy is just a really smart dude with a passion for nerdy shit
Was nothing like slamming the phone down on someone. It's just not the same anymore
Seinfeld had a great skit about it - *Slams phone down* "Yeah!" vs *Looks for and tediously pokes a button* "Ah, that sure showed them!"
Yeah, we need to make smart phones with a "slam" button that will play something annoying and hang up
Shout "BANG!" before disconnecting your smart phone call.
Nothing like the sassy snap of a flip phone haha
you can slam your thumb down
I'm just glad his name wasn't Alexander Graham Siren.
HA! I like that!
🤣🤣 brilliant
@Eli Z "stealing" is the wrong word there
@Eli Z god damn it. That's not how comedy works...
Isn't that from an old George Carlin special?
You know, as a sound editor, I know about this problem, and yet I still use the pitch-shiftey sound fx if I need an old timey phone ring. There's something about it that just places you in the time period, and since most consumers don't understand what's going on, I think it does a good job of subconsciously indicating a vintage sound. Of course, I wouldn't use the same sound effect for a modern phone, and sometimes I do run into the problem of having old sounds in my library that I can't use because the pitch is a bit too warped.
I was really secretly hoping for some crazy frog.
Some phones *did* sound like that, but if I remember correctly, it was usually cheaper phones that became available in the 80s. Some were quite flimsy, and the ring sounded anemic.
Thank you for mentioning not using that sound effect for modern phones. Always bothers me when modern TV shows use phones (mostly smartphones, but modern landline phones as well) sound like a 90s beeping ringtone.
This is an extremely interesting observation. More people have heard the ringing of a Bell 500 with the distortions than without. So to their ears, the distorted sound is more genuine than the real one. If a movie maker actually did a "good" job of making an accurate recording of one it would sound wrong to the audience.
It's not the only place where movies have distorted our sense of reality so much that reality seems unreal.
Terminator 2 used that famous ring with a DIGITAL phone!
As a kid, when I mostly watched older movies and cartoons, I used to notice the "wow" all the times. Growing up together with the technology I heard it less and less until I eventually forgot about it. You just brought it back and explained it at a technical level, and every minute of it all was beatifully entertaining and fun. You rightfully earned one more subscriber.
I remember hearing wows all the time in movies when I was a kid, and that was only 20 or so years ago. The memories brought back from hearing that wonky pitch...
I wonder if the incorrect recording in the Dick Van Dyke show was a deliberate decision by the producers to avoid confusion with their viewers mistaking it for their own phone ringing during the show. If basically during that era everyone's phone sounded the same then this may have been considered a customer service action to deliberately have an incorrect ring sound.... or it could have just been laziness :)
That's a good thought, but wouldn't the ring in the show sound quite different than a phone ringing in your living room, because sound quality on 70/80's TV's was pretty shitty, right?
I don't know, I wasn't around, but I think you'd hear an obvious difference between a Low-Fi recording played back over (by today's standard) horrible speakers and the sound of the actual thing.
There's a whole lot to this, and some of it is still valid. FM has its own requirements (because not everything will take up the same amount of bandwidth when played on FM) or in the case of USA, signal notes to trigger ads, nuclear alerts, and what have you. There is all sort of strange side-channel stuff :)
Good point! Ringing phones, and to a lesser extent car horns, on TV were and still are a pet peeve of mine.
Many homes back in the day had a set of bells on the hall or kitchen that sounded similar to ring in this show. These ringers had a 4 inch bell and also had a chine mode. WE F1A. th-cam.com/video/jFayaKP7w1w/w-d-xo.html
@@bgundercover That's kinda what I remember as well. If you had those 4-prong wall sockets for your phone (VERY cutting edge compared to all phones being hard wired to the wall), I think the phone company would install a wall-mounted ringer to let you know you had an incoming call in case you had unplugged your phone and forgot to plug it back in again. Could that be what we were hearing in the Dick Van Dyke scene?
You missed a golden opportunity to say that the sounding designers of those shows/movies were just... phoning it in.
It's weird, but now that I'm paying attention to that fluctuation in pitch, I feel like most of the phone sound effects I've heard in movies/TV have always had that fluctuation. And I realized just now that for me, it actually evokes classic films and the cinematic experience. As a filmmaker myself, I may consciously choose to use a recording like that because there's something so familiar about it now.
You get it. Sound designers and directors love these sounds because they evoke the older films they were raised on. They have an almost subconscious richness to them that most people won't notice.
I love the film effect.
I got so many of those Western Electric 500 telephones ☎️, my pops worked for the phone company ,also got the 554 wall sets as well as the 1500 & 2500 as well as Trimlines & the loved princess phone....even had payphones
Only in the film industry do people view deliberately making the same mistakes as their predecessors instead of learning from them and doing better as a good thing! 🤦🙄
This is is why movies suck so much these days: instead of moving forward with new ideas and keeping to push the boundaries of realism with the new tech, they all just rehash the much more technologically restricted old stuff for no good reason!
@@LRM12o8
Wil he lm to you, scr ea m er.
The two bells weren't always quite in tune. This caused a beat frequency unrelated to recording problems. It bugged me so much as a child I took all six house phones apart and sorted the bells to get the best ring from each pair. A little known option on 500 sets were alternate bells pairs for use in offices with nearby phones, even on the same desk. AFAIK it was seldom requested.
You had SIX phones in your house? When I was little having more than one was a luxury. Kids who got their own phones were the cool rich kids.
Lease fees were pretty low in the 70's. I was so much of a phone nerd my parents leased two gadgets from the business office for me. A speakerphone and a card dialer, which used cards you punched out with your friends numbers to save you all that button pushing. It was great for calling into radio station contests. For three years with the exception of clothes the lease fees were my christmas and birthday presents. I think it saved my mom and dad money compared to the toys I would have got.
My dad worked for the phone company. We even had the clip-on phone that they used on the telephone poles.
Lucky, I always wanted a real butt set.
Shouldn't that cause more of a tremolo (fluctuating volume) effect than a vibrato (fluctuating pitch) effect?
Don't get me started on how some modern shows have British telephones making the same ringing pattern as American ones. Phones in the UK had an initial long ring, followed by ring pairs, but it seems that a distressing number of young sound designers are just searching for "telephone ring" on the Internet and using the first one that they find...
Swiss phones have another ring altogether.
Australian phones had the same ring as the British phones
Jonty Speaks Exactly.
@@davidewhite69 there was actually an Australian TV series from the late 60's where the phones were ringing with the U.S. cadence. Stuck out like the proverbial.
Phone guy for 45 years. Now retired. That sound is so dear to my heart!! Thanks!
As an aside, the voice quality of the 5xx series had a very distinctive sound to it. It's hard to explain but if you want to hear it, search for an old country music song. Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn singing
"As soon as I hang up the phone"
Conway had two PSTN lines ran into the studio to make this song happen instead of using two extensions off of the electronic system he had as (with him and Loretta being musicians) he knew the sound would not be perfect. The result is classic!
Good stuff!
I miss the job.
I used to work in the data center for a old computer company named data General, I remember in the early 90s they had a stock room FILLED with old phones, rotary to Touch tone, a museum of 70s and 80s office phones. They finally got rid of all of it 😢to a "recycler", they were all destroyed
I really miss calling for the exact time and hearing "at the tone the time will be ..."
those services are still available
You should really get a hobby.
@@johnd5398 nah you need to more
discontinued in australia a couple of years ago :(
@@johnd5398 do you subscribe to this channel just to shit talk and leave angry comments? Get a life or some friends or something dude goddamn
people who have only ever had a cell phone will never experience the satisfaction of slamming a receiver into the cradle
I'm almost sad for them
I remember the last time time I did that, when I was somehow caught in the middle of an argument between my husband and his brother. Husband had gone out, brother called wanting to talk to him and didn't believe me telling him he wasn't there and even cussing at me. "He's not here! Good-BYE!" Slam.
@@EverlastingHobnocker I had the ex boyfriend from hell who even after I told him I didn't want to see him anymore, kept calling and calling. finally I said, "Call me one more time and I'm getting a restraining order"
and slammed the phone down
it felt sooooooooooo good
Haw yeah poor relationships yee haw
@@mrmaniac3 emotional satisfaction at ending poor relationships
@@Bluebelle51 fair 🤷
Phone the telephone company is responsible for fixing: indestructible.
Phone the subscriber is responsible for fixing: shatters if looked at funny.
Oh, naturally. If you were paying for people's phones, you'd want them to last forever.
But if they're buying them from you.. why put all that engineering effort in? Just make 'em eviscerate if you toss it onto your bed too sternly, and have them buy another.
@@StrayGuitarist "... if you toss it onto your bed too sternly..." For some reason, the image of someone "sternly" tossing their phone onto a bed made me laugh.
@@goopah Hehe, guess it is a pretty odd phrasing. Glad to have made you laugh though, I was hoping I'd be able to pick vocabulary out-there enough to assemble something funny.
The phone company was not only responsible for fixing or replacing a broken phone; they also were responsible for sending a tech to your house to diagnose whatever problem you were having! They really didn't want to do that, so they made the phones reliable.
I grew up with one of the wall units. I miss that ring. However I don't miss the mile long, forever getting twisted into knots phone cord.
Now you've cursed us all to never be able to un-notice when this specific phone sound in a movie is badly sampled.
And if somebody pointed out interlaced television scanning, you will not un-see it until you get a flat panel TV.
Unless you watch an interlaced video on that flat panel TV, which will make it oh so much worse...
I’ve worked sound for film, both pre and post production, and I will say, I simultaneously sympathize with the frustration of hearing subpar individual sound effects, and with the hard working folks who placed those sound effects. Production can absolutely bust their butts knocking it out of the park in terms of on set sound capture, and post production will still have their work cut out for them in terms of crafting a believable soundscape that serves the story. Sometimes you just grab whatever sound file you can find in the limited timeframe you have. Sometimes you switch to something that “sounds right” which is different from what is “historically accurate.” With something as particular as a phone ring, directors almost always have their hands in the cookie jar, which is completely valid, as it impacts scene pacing, but that throws another iron in the fire. At the end of the day, a phone ring matching the receiver model or even being clean (without flutter or warble) takes a back seat to the serving of the narrative. It’s entirely possible that a director or sound designer first tried a crisp new digital recording, and preferred a distorted recording for its “vintage” sound. WE notice of course, and are offput by that choice, but most folks just hear “old timey phone.” If I were in charge of, say, Wandavision... I’d be rushing out to sample that Dick Van Dyke ringtone for use on my show just for the esoteric reference, with zero regard for the accuracy of the ringtone to the onscreen handsets. Heck, it probably IS an alarm clock and not a phone at all... but that almost makes it interesting, and almost makes it a foible worth repeating for old times sake.
Are there truly no top quality recordings of these ringers? I have an extremely high quality 32bit float 196k digital recorder and some top notch microphones if that’s what needs to happen.
Exactly what came to my mind - that I would bet they had a mic on the set of the Terminator and then they realized/decided that the accurate sound just didn't feel right for some artistic reason.
How about "The Obviously Dubbed Children Laughing" sound effect. You know the one.
Every movie playground establishing shot sounds exactly the same.
Dennis Comella ah yeah the Diddy laugh...
Not to mention the same screech you hear every time you see a hawk fly across the screen.....or an eagle......or a falcon.....
All the owls sound the same, too.
@@theuglybiker You are ruining all of my favorite films!
Or the infamous WIlhelm screAAAAUHHHH-UHHHH-OOOH
GAHH THAT ONE BUGS THE CRAP OUTTA ME
9:09 You can also see that he starts turning before the ring actually starts. Whoever added it in post didn't time it very well.
I think I can hear a subtle cue ring a beat before the recorded ring.
All these years later and I finally find out we could have changed the volume so easily...
Have you now learnt to read instruction manuals ?
Omg, I totally forgot you could even do this!! 😂
I knew this because as a kid I disassembled the phone and put it back together.
@@millomweb the bt version did not come with a manual
@@dogwalker666 Pretty sure all BT phones came with a manual.
My first foray into telephone vandalism included: Swapping the bells in two 1500 so that one would ring with the high tone, the other ring with the low tone, Then removing the plastic dampers from the bells so that the ring had a much longer sustain. (My office had two lines so that I could call one phone from the other to hear the results of my tampering.) I also discovered that the electronics in the AT&T phones were highly potted so what was going on inside was even more mysterious. Thanks for the videos, brings back so many memories.
I bet that wow and flutter was actually sought after by the film audio crews... it made it more "cinematic"! ;)
@Pooh Xi and then there's me, buying ripped jeans on Amazon, feeling _incredibly_ called out.
RoJax_TheVoice TM *installs a broken windshield* later losers
I think a few movies do it that way
@@aterack833 homie over her living in 3020, try to keep up y'all
That’s so true. I thought that the wow was the true sound of an old phone.
Personally, i hate the metallic "shwanng" sound inserted when someone is supposedly drawing a sword.
A scabbard is padded for the protection of the blade, you know.
John T. DiFool Me too! I own many different blades and attend renaissance festivals so I'm very familiar with how quiet it is.
is it truly quiet? I understand it may be very well exaggerated for emphasis, but I feel like in the year 1,200 for example that it would be more of metal on metal, maybe lined with fur or leather but that would end up blood soaked and not rinse out very well.
@philip more like metal on wood/leather
I dislike that it, like the "Eagle Cry" is the *same* sound. I watched a movie where they actualy foleo'd different sliding sounds and at least it was different new sliding sounds. They might be wrong but they didn't pull me out of my suspension of disbelief.
Not to mention that it's not even an eagle. The sound that every movie uses for an eagle is actually a red-tailed hawk.
12:46 In episode 2F09, when Itchy plays Scratchy's skeleton like a xylophone he strikes the same rib twice in succession yet he produces two clearly different tones. I mean, what are we- to believe that this is some sort of a-a magic xylophone or something??? Boy I really hope someone got fired for that blunder!
Those coughs at the “hashtag” literally jumpscared me
"literally"
I never noticed this until now but at 2:31...that's the New Emergency Number from The IT Crowd hahaha
I cant believe you noticed that, i had to go back and look. He even had a pause before the last 3
This is my second watch though and I only noticed it now. I’m disappointed in myself.
Brilliant!
I noticed when watching the first time without seeing the comment
I noticed it within 4 digits
By now it's basically a staple like the Wilhelm scream (which also drives me bananas when I hear it).
I was tempted to title the video "The Wilhelm Ring", but I was worried not enough people would get it.
You severely underestimate the capacity for autism on the internet. lol.
The Wilhelm scream instantly kills my suspension of disbelief more than just about anything, perhaps only being rivaled by "clay pot shattering."
Coming to a Dwarf near you...
Tom5tom Entertainment I was going to say the same thing. The ring tone "mistake" in Terminator 2 was almost certainly an Easter egg, considering how obsessive the sound design was in that movie.
Lol I used to drive my wife mad by picking up on this on TV "hah! That phone's a statesman but the ring was from a viscount" for some inexplicable reason this got me labelled geek
next time, you can point out other inaccuracies, like, "the car sounds like it is increasing its engine speed forever" or "if they were really upside down, their clothes and hair would hang out" or "an electric shock does not make you jump away" etc
hi geek
Because a geek would know a phone ring by the sound
@@GeorgeTsiros well actually a high enough shock will cause your muscles to spasm and launch you
I really hope someone got fired for that blunder.
I remember as a kid asking myself, "why would they fake the ring?". I could hear that wow quite easily
Same reason a woman fakes it...
"the only audiophile (file) guarenteed not to start an argument“
I had to sit down I was laughing so hard!
i dont get it
@Thu Nell Ⓥ A music lover is somebody who uses audio equipment to listen to their music. An audiophile is somebody who uses music to listen to their audio equipment.
@@pineapplescatAudiophiles like arguing about sound quality. Audiofiles are files and are incapable of argument
2:30 Don’t think I wouldn’t notice you calling the Emergency Services. Did you know that they have faster response times and better looking drivers? It’s best not to email them though...I so wasn’t expecting to see that IT Crowd reference, especially since I didn’t notice it when I first watched this video when it came out, but I am so happy I did. Great video as always, and I love this channel!
He even went back for the 3 😂 can’t believe I missed that before
I'm so glad I wasn't the only one who caught this! At first I saw him just dialing numbers and thought it was random, but I started paying attention right around when he dial 911, and what really tipped me off was him coming back for the 3. Once I saw that I backed it up and watched to make sure my suspicion was correct. Brilliant.
I can't believe I missed that, to busy having memories of using these types of phones as a kid in the early 80's.
"better looking drivers"
this company is inferior, their drivers aren't sexy!
A car guy like me knows that a lot of cars in movies don’t actually sound like the soundtrack they use including the engine starter sound. Also a lot movies use the same generic car alarm sound when arming and disarming a car.
Great video. Thanks for posting.
Not to mention they all sound like they're revving to 8000 rpm, with squealing tires, when only going 15 mph :/
H Kr Squealing tire on dirt roads :D
Or the same car alarm chirp
I've never actually heard any car in real life make that particular "chirp-chirp" noise when the alarm is set. They all either make no sound (and just flash the lights) or make some other noise, usually a beep.
Or something on the History channel where they use a recording of a diesel-electric locomotive, with multi-chime air horn, to accompany silent footage of a steam locomotive. Ai-yi-yay!
Wow, nostalgia is amazing - I love that tone shift, I always thought it was just American phones, I actually thought there was something wrong with your phone because they sounded so bland. Even after you explained the travesty of what they’d done, I still preferred the slow warped ringing sound from the vinyl recording, like the whammy bar on a electric guitar
Someone added it to the IMDB page, even going as far as mentioning that it was a vinyl recording
probably the same dude as the uploade of this. AKA the only person who ever noticed in the first place, or cared enough to time it.
He was like "did you hear it, it's really noticeable isn't it?" and I'm like "sounds perfectly fine to me"
Not to mention that he didn't even mean the ring itself, but rather the chiming out. With someone talking over it!
OmikronWeapon I noticed it before he showed what part it was. It’s not hard to hear the pitch changing. But then again I’ve always had good ears, I can hear things others can’t all the time. Then a few seconds later they hear it, and go “wow, how’d you do that?”.
I amazed how you take some of the most boring technology and make it not only interesting, but I just watched nearly 15 mintues of phones ringing. Unfortunately, I will now notice the flutter and wow in those movies. Thanks buddy, thanks a lot.
Seriously though keep them coming, love your stuff.
My grandma used the same rotary phone from the 50s all the way up to 2001.
So did mine. At some point they put a new slip behind the dial with a fully numeric phone number on it, but it had a tear in it for some reason and you could see the old number with the named exchange (HEmlock) below.
It worked out to the same number, so I don't know why they bothered.
At what point did you go from nightcore uploads to /k/ memes?
Mine too. Until the day she left her home for the older living apartment… that same phone sat there year after year so dutifully working…. And I remember the pulse (ahem!) Rotary dial phone that it replaced. I use to like swirling that stupid dial to call numbers. Even though it would have been a terrible thing if you had to call 911.. Probably why they chose the number 911 because 9 means you mean it, it's not an accidental nudge but 1 1 makes it faster to dial on older phones rather than 9 9 9… lol.. Just a guess.
They lasted forever unlike today where everything is meant to wear out. I would kill to have my old wall rotary back.
hooking up these old phones can be hard to do these days.
as most "modern" phones only use 2 of the 4 wires, and many modern home phone systems no longer put current on the other 2 wires.
With these older phones that can cause issues as often they drew current for the bell ringing system from the other 2 wires.
So if you hook one of these old ringing phones up it might not ring properly.
I use TH-cam since age 12 and this channel is my favourite so far. I cant stress how good your videos are, Alec!
Definitely making me feel old
I uploaded the recording of the Model 500's ring to my Google Drive and made a shrareable link! Feel free to download it if you like:
drive.google.com/file/d/19XDbxMFrhL3ck53M4NCWJu58jW-X9xJ-/view?usp=sharing
The Model 500 phone certainly was a common sight (and sound!) in the US. But, the idea of a "standard issue telephone" is not unique to the American phone system. It's quite possible the problem I describe in this video made its way into other countries, as well!
And for anyone who isn't familiar with the term "Touch-Tone", this was the Bell system's trademark for DTMF push-button dialing. That's actually a pretty interesting technology, particularly with how early it was first deployed, and is worth a read!
And quite a big issue in VOIP phone systems, some admins select different options, rfc2833, inband,info,shortinfo are the ones I could pick from in my systems, most systems support rfc2833, ive not seen one that doesnt, perhaps thats in other countries (non UK)... but ive called some companies where DTMF hasnt worked, meaning it mustve been another type...
Or perhaps worth a video 😉 speaking of VOIP, I got an avocado green model 2500 and had to switch VOIP boxes because the one I had couldn't drive the ringer mechanism!
That's not entirely true about no one owning their phones. It was possible to buy one, but it cost way more than it should.
This is the standard issue rotary phone used in Norway: th-cam.com/video/6Za16KPS3is/w-d-xo.html
I don't get why they didn't just all use a ringer box to set it off they are not exactly hard to build. Ours in the UK are a little more tricky as it should be a 75V 25 Hz feed but you need to build in something to interrupt it for 0.2 seconds in every 0.6 second cycle as ours cycles 0.4s on, 0.2s off. Still easy enough to build just takes a couple of extra components but could knock one together in about 10 mins using components laying around the house probably here, make that 30 if you have to make a run to the store first.
I think this is my third time watching this video. And for the first time today, I realized two things that I’ve never picked up in this episode before. First, the audiophile/audio file joke. Wow. Second, the recording of that record as being the origin of the white zone/red zone joke in Airplane. Great video, man.
I always felt like they wanted us to notice those sounds.
There's tons of recycled sounds and every movie kinda becomes a "can you spot the recording"
It was definitely done out of budget cuts and simplicity at first but it then turned into tradition, and it's still done today just to maintain that connection to the movie medium heritage.
That's how I see it at least.
That is definitely the case with the willhelm scream, it's an homage to the first sound designers and foley artists
Those rotary dials where actually quite painful on the fingers after awhile- this is why people so often used pencils, pens, etc.
I used to play with one as a child and I am speaking of a real rotary phone. I can not remember it do that, but I remember trying to catch my finger on the hook/backstop. Haha!
What I do remember using a pencil on is a cassette tape, although you could squeeze your finger into it as well, those little spikes did hurt after twisting the cassette tape in a circle around your finger or you kept pulling and pushing your finger into the wheel grooves.
We need to bring the rotary dial back and force telemarketers to use it.
I had forgotten that, you are so right.
@@tilasole3252 same as you say all over the world.
Or a Tiffany's sterling silver telephone dialer... which Holly Golightly politely refused to buy in her movie with George Peppard.
@5:23 This shot is a famous error in the film, "he is talking on a handset which has an RJ (Registered Jack) style connector. These style jacks were not introduced until the mid 1970s as ordered by the FCC."
Shirley there is a missed opportunity at the end of this video to ask us to ‘ring the bell’. Fantastic work as always - your editing continues to inspire us smaller TH-camrs!
And don't call me Shirley.
It might be just because I'm old, but I remember a time when youtube didn't have a bell. You just subscribed, and got notified, none of this newfangled algorriphm stuff! Gosh-dang whippersnappers...
Anyway, maybe this video pre-dates the "bell of ensured notification"? I can't actually recall when they introduced that 😆
@sourcererseven3858 "actually"
"Ghostbusters, whaddya want!"
Best film line ever
Ghostbustahz
Right up there with "Picking up or dropping off?"
From one of the best films ever.
I think the phone ring in T2 is as iconic as the "Wilhelm Scream". Or the creaky door that is used in almost every video game and movie.
I think the use of these sounds is 3 fold. Paying homage to the source (even if that is lost to time). These are the sounds we are used to this object making. And finally... people are lazy. If someone has already created a sound you need, why recreate the wheel?
I think there is a fourth fold: This was the early era (relatively speaking) of both phones _and_ TV, so maybe they simply wanted to make sure that no viewers would get confused and try to answer their phone, maybe even shutting off the TV to do so.
Not sure about the timeline, but this may even be prior to every TV being shipped with a remote, and of course the phone would be out in the hall. A far cry from today's "mute TV and pull your phone from your pocket" 😆 Not that anyone still uses ring tones... Or TVs...
It's especially #3. I'd even say 100% #3 and the other two are just poor excuses for the laziness.
@sourcererseven3858 I don't think so. If you couldn't distinguish between the ringing coming from your landline vs out of your TV speakers back then, then you must have been really hard of hearing!
1. Most people could easily locate wether the ringing came from the TV right in front of them, or from the hallway further away.
2. Most old CRT TVs had a really echo-y and undetailed sound. The sound coming from your TV would sound nowhere near as crisp and clear, as the sound of the actual bells in your telephone
3. Also, every single unit had a somewhat different tone to its ring (The ones shown in the video are a half-step apart!), so the tone of the telephone in the movie wouldn't match anyway. Most people would (subconsciously) realize those slight differences in pitch to their own phone, which they've heard ring a thousand times and are very familiar with, even if they couldn't tell a half-tone difference in two unfamiliar sounds.
4. Finally, the volume of the rong from the TV would seldomly match the volume of your actual telephone.
So yeah, I don't believe this was much of an issue at all!
@@LRM12o8 not saying it was an actual issue, I'm saying it might have been a _concern_ the producers may have wanted to address preemptively. Your points are all valid.
I was pulling the old phone system out of a building so I could put a VoIP system and bossman threw the 5 line version of this phone across the room. When I heard the bells clang I asked if I could keep one. I now have 3 of them and the 1A2 key system that ran them in the original installation.
I had a five line system in my home until the mid-80s
Seriously; you have a great show going. You are knowledgeable and very precise in your delivery. You are turning into one of my favorite TH-cam channels, keep up the great work!
I still have our old black rotary phone. I keep it connected to our landline (yeah, we still have that too) because the real metal bell ringer is so much louder and easier to hear than the electronic "chirping" of my more modern phone.
did you see the black old rotary phone on eBay, this guy turned it into a wireless Bluetooth telephone.
In the description it tells about when a call comes in the ringer starts up. LOL no flutter or wow recording, it's the real thing! I found it while looking for western electric stuff, searching 'western electric bluetooth' will help find it faster
I do the same. They make a Bluetooth module you can hook any landline phone into.
@@bryanjk that module has wires going to the wall yes?
our old rotary phone is on our landline too!
Fun fact: Because these phones only use the landline, you are covered in case of emergency or blackout. (So long as your provider isn't totally out too, i guess)
10:47 i love the "Airplane!" reference there
When I hear that ringing sound, I always expect to it to be followed by "This is Jim Rockford. At the tone, leave your name and message. I'll get back to you."
That's the one that I thought he'd go with -- The Rockford Files phone ring was really distinctly "off". You could tell even on an old 1970s TV.
13:43. The bell you hear is actually an automatic Electric bell box from the late 50's. I have this in my collection and it LOUD
so phones being dubbed with even older phones was a thing even back then
Growing up we had a wall model and when my dad saw there was a $400 phone bill, between my mother calling my grandmother in Florida and my sister calling her boyfriend in Alabama, my dad ripped the phone off the wall and threw it across the room. The only damage was a small piece of plastic cracked off, but it still was in perfect condition.The floor on the other hand had a huge dent. Plus we had the "cordless" model. The 50' cord, stretched to 100'.
It seemed cords knew no bounds. As a kid, I figured I would just keep seeing longer ones throughout my lifetime and it would be perfectly normal.
Your father manages his anger very well.
It was quite a chore untangling the kinked cords, especially when it looped on itself somehow and needed the Leyland brothers to figure it out.
@@MetroPolo1 Did you really have a dad if he didn't rage out every so often?
@@raskalraidex Fair point!
The visual joke on the Pound key is so subtle and so perfect lmaooooooo. I absolutely love your sense of humor, from subtle jokes like that to your often deadpan delivery to your running joke about "the power of buying two of them" with its recent incredible payoff in your video following up on the dishwasher detergent thing (for anyone who hasn't seen it, go watch "I messed up. You're using too much detergent." right now, it is so worth it even tho the video is long).
"those with a very good ear for pitch... or the pedantic" That cracked me up
Now that you've pointed it out I'm going to hear this every time.
I must say - the sound of the wow actually adds something to the emotion. I wouldn't be surprised if the choice of using a slightly distorted sample is on purpose.
Yes it really does
2:30 "0118 999 881 999 119 725.... 3" I subbed for that reference
What phone number is that?
@@buddyclem7328 The new number for '999'! Search it in TH-cam for the clip it's referencing from 'The IT Crowd'.
He even done the pause, brilliant!
Now with better-looking ambulance drivers!
I only caught it because he came back for the "3".
I had forgotten how grating the sound of the landline ringing was.
Thanks for explaining how this works and how Hollywood uses the sounds in movies.
As I recall, it was mean to convey a sense of urgency. And, be distinct from your old wind-up alarm clock.
Leased phones? I guess that's like how people lease routers from the cable companies now.
Exactly. Along with cable/satellite boxes.
Yup I have read stories of old folks still paying to rent the phones but ended up getting refunds since they ended that long ago.
@Russ Gallagher Not entirely accurate. While the phone was included with your service, you were still paying to use it, and it still belonged to Ma Bell. Most of these phones still have stickers or stamps that read something to the effect of "Bell System Property - Not For Sale", and to tamper with these phones, steal them, or intentionally break them could land you with some hefty fines from your service provider. After the breakup in 1984, however, you could choose to own or lease your phone.
Cool! Now do one about how almost all helicopters in the movies sound like Bell H47s, or why computers are constantly making beeping noises. Sound cliches drive me crazy.
Please watch the car chase on Bullitt (1968) and tell me how the Mustang sounds like? For bonus points you can count the times you see the same VW beetle :D
Also in that Bullitt chase scene, count how many hub caps fly off of the Dodge Charger.
While i am not enough of a helicopter afficonado to be able to notice that phenomenon, i always notice the insane bipping from movie computers; it annoys me so much!
And the goofy laugh on some old sitcoms.
Norman Lorrain Most of the early laugh tracks were lifted from a televised Red Skelton mime skit.
I have three of these phones in my house and it’s 2019 and they’re all functional
In a way, i envy thee.
Pilot Paul me too.
A black one, a Brady Bunch™️ green one, and a clear one.
They don't make 'em like they used to!
I've 1 trad phone. It has a very nice ring AND never needs new batteries !
Yes the system is still backwards compatible with loop disconnect.
A long-time friend retired a few years from the Sound Editing profession (her pension comes from the MPSE) and I use the Wilhelm Scream as her ringtone on my phone. I'd say she is just as - what was the word - as you. Why? Well, if she's not perfect, we will notice when something is off even by just a little bit.
When she started in the business, it was still mag tape and having to slice & dice it all to ensure it was all synch'd up. I remember going to visit her in LA years and she was working on a film and one day I got to sit in the back while the crew was doing the actual dubbing of the sounds to the final reel (I'd don't know all the tech names, but I do know all the foley artists had recorded what was needed and now those bits were being inserted into their designated spots).
So there is a bunch of back and forths (play, rewind, play, repeat). When they kept doing it at a certain scene, I kinda groaned and the crew chief (sound engineer?) turned around and asked me, Are you trying to watch the movie?. Yeah. Well, don't, cause we're going be doing this all day long. That was good advice because yeah, they kept doing it like that.
Oh, footsteps are the toughest (well, they were back then) and they did them as a single pass through the movie reel.
She told me the story of Gregory Hines and the movie TAP. Normally footsteps are recreated by the foley artists usually putting their hands into the shoes and tapping the correct floor material. And for most footstep scenes that's fine. But, come on, how are you going to recreate the footsteps from Mr. Hines during his dancing routines? Well, he came back to the recording studio and recreated the scenes so they could actually record the sounds from his steps. By the way, my friend did not work on the movie.
I'm gonna share this video with my friend.
We had Princess phones in our house growing up. Mom really liked them. Sure made entering radio contests easier (the touch-tone aspect, not necessarily the Princess phone itself).
"Ghostbustas, whaddaya want?"
Yes, my father created a demon summoning portal inside our house, which his witchcraft books clearly said should only be made outside, and our house has been haunted ever since, even though he is no longer with us.
So much New York
6:00 Saskatchewan's telephone company is SaskTel, which is a Crown Corporation, which is a corporation which is technically owned by Her Majesty the Queen but is in practice a government entity. Until the advent of cellphones, SaskTel was the only phone company in the province (and still heavily regulates third-party cellphone and landline service providers). This may explain the slow adoption of modern technologies since different companies are not competing in a free market. In fact, even to this day large swaths of rural Saskatchewan are still without cellphone service, something the current Government is working to address. Just thought I would provide this tidbit.
Even in free-market Alberta, cell service is spotty in some rural areas.
SaskTel has better rural service than private telecom companies since they will actually run lines to secluded areas even if it's not profitable. It's also cheaper service since in publicly subsidised. Good luck getting Verizon to hook up phone and internet in northern Sask lol
I agree, government is a monopoly.
@@IowaKim and AT&T isn't?? Lmao
@@user-tg4hi6bj3j I agree that AT&T was a monopoly, but government can break up private enterprise monopolies but private enterprise monopolies cannot break up government monopolies.
Anchorage Telephone Utility allowed purchase of phones from the mid 70's; we had purchased phones, including a pay phone, in home from 1978. The lease charge was made up for after the first year. They also offered alternate bell sets; one replacement bell was a 3rd lower (forming a p5), the other a 3rd higher than the high bell. This was specifically for PBX uses. Also note that modular was available from abut 1974, but it was not the rj-11... it was a 4 pronged block plug. ATU predated (and postdated) the AT&T monopoly, as a city-owned utility... but for long distance, you had to have an AT&T/Alascom account. It was possible to have local-only phone service.
William Hostman Fascinating! But why did your family have a pay phone in your home? I'm assuming that by pay phone you mean a phone that takes quarters. Why wouldn't you just have a normal telephone instead?
Leroset to keep friends from asking to use it. And it was 10 cents, not a quarter, for a local call. It wasn't actually on a payphone line, but my friends didn't know that...
I knew a few people that bought payphones for the house after the bell breakup as a way to restrict the usage of the phone and long phone calls to friends.
"The telephone belonged to the company." Sounds like what Apple assumes with their phones right now with Right-ToRepair.
I remember my parents talking about "renting another phone" so my father could have one in his office back in the late 70's. The telephone industry was a captive market. Still is in some ways, most cable and telephone providers will supply cable boxes and internet modems to the customer that require to be returned at termination of service.
@@abpsd73 At the very least they are required to allow you to buy your own even if the standard for a lot of people is renting it.
I kinda looked at that remark through the other end of the telescope. Today we laugh uproariously at the audacious concept of Apple or whoever owning “our” product, but we accepted it unthinkingly back then. I remember a telephone technician swapping out my old phone for a newer one, and I thought “thank god it’s not mine, or I’d have to pay for that. One less thing to worry about”. So maybe if Apple had vast warehouses of phones and freely swapped out broken ones for new ones, they could win over our sympathies.
Main difference is Apple doesn't own any mobile phone network. The rationale for the telephone companies owning the phones where that apparatuses not fully compliant to the phone companies specifications actually could take down the network (not so much burning it out physically as by causing interference).
Apple say they want "a consistent user experience", but that does not work the same way, as one user doing funky stuff with their own phone will NOT cause *other* costumers to have *their* experience altered to any significant degree.
I remember about 2003 some older friends of mine realized they had been paying a rental fee on their avocado green phone since the 70's. The cost seemed astronomical to me at the time. Something like $10/mo or maybe even more. That was when landlines were still common and you could buy a wired phone outright for probably $10. They probably payed thousands for that one, and had to give it back in the end.
(Edited to fix a typo since, of course, proofreading is so much more effective *after* publication.) Heh, I still have a model 2500 that I use every day. They really do last forever. Also, being an old AT&T guy, I call the "#" sign an "octothorpe."
It just occurred to me that you cannot judge the ringing sound used on the Dick Van Dyke show by what the 1957 red 500 phone you heard on youtube sounds like because even though the base plate might say it is from 1957 the ringer may have a later date of manufacture. The reason for that is because back in the day, before you could buy your own phones, when phones were turned back in to the phone company, they would be dismantled down to their individual pieces and the pieces put in bins of like components. For example all the ringers would go in the ringer bin, rotary dials in the rotary dial bin etc. Receivers, ear and mouth caps, cords etc. were not only sorted by what item they were but also by color, i.e. white cords in the white cord bin, red handsets in the red handset bin. Then, when a new subscriber ordered a phone to be installed, the parts were plucked out of their respective bins and put together according to what type and what color the subscriber ordered and that is why I have a WE 500 with a base plate from 1961 and a mouth & ear cap from 1968 and a network from 1971. What you need to listen to is a 500 with matching dates on all the components which means the phone was put into service and not taken out of where it was originally installed until after the break up of Ma Bell. While all date matching vintage phones are not real common they do exist and I have 2 from 1956 (both working) and one from 1957 (untested and awaiting restoration). I will be glad to plug in of the 1956's and see how the ringer sounds and let you know what I find out.
Did you ever get around to checking the ringers?
Even further, the phone in the show looks like it could just as easily be a model 302 (the precursor to the 500 which looked almost identical). And the 302 had a one-bell ring.
... Why? Surely the labor cost of disassembling the phones, reassembling the phones, and testing the phones was more expensive than just sticking them in a box and shoving it in a warehouse.
@@angolin9352 they had to fix or replace them whenever they failed, because they were just being leased to you. Much cheaper to make sure it works than to send out a technician whenever a faulty phone kicks it
THIS is the type of content that will stand the test of time. Thank you for posting this.
The Matrix series used Model 500s in various places.
Some shows purposely use wrong sounds for various reasons: licensing, copyright, reality immersion, or just to dig at people like you and me for noticing it.
Model 500s are so resilient that they're the only phone guaranteed to outlast a Nokia cuz they're still in use today, unlike Nokia phones.
Side note: Cable MTAs will not accept pulse-tone dialing. I work for a cable ISP and had to tell a customer their kitchen phone can only receive calls, not make them. They were cool with it.
"The hasht--*COUGH COUGH COUGH* excuse me. Pound key (British Pound sign)" hahaha
If you listen more closely he never says the t. Because the key itself is just called the hash key. Hence a social media tag marked with a hash being named a hash tag.
Actually, that's not the British Pound sign. This is the British Pound sign "£".
Carbage Man -
Watch the video at 1:30 - the # changes to £ - it is symbolic of his dry sense of humour, if you'll excuse the pun, and comments on this misnomer of many Americans. It comes so quickly after the (also very droll) "hash cough cough cough" that was probably missed by many.
@The Sixto Show Rewired Yeah. I have to say that I don't actually get why this is funny.
Yeah, that was an odd way to pronounce "grid".
Its hilarious when thy use this ring tone when its supposed to be in the UK as we used a different ring frequency.
Better looking phones in UK too.
G Leggett true
In fact I think probably 90% of all telephones ringing in TV shows have a wrong ring frequency. In the bell system, phones ring with a precise frequency the shows get it wrong.
@@gleggett3817 Really? I always thought european phones of the era looked funny.
@@jamesbattista1466 Party lines used different ring frequencies for different phone numbers on the same line. The ringer is a resonant circuit, with 20 Hz being the base frequency. 1A2 Office phones used a small DC powered buzzer, a mechanical interrupter and a subcycle power supply to provide their ring signal when bells were used in muti-line phones. They were interfaced with the 400 series KTU cards.
this is peak nerd
what
It only hits peak nerd every 1.8 seconds.
what the fuck's a peak nerd
xtremeguy2256 yes
...what?
Funny story from working at radio shack back in the day when they sold phones. They had two that looked almost identical to a 500. One was $19.99 the other was either 29 or $39 I can't remember which.
Everybody would walk in and pick up the handset on the $19 one and feel how cheesy and cheap it felt. Then they would pick up the expensive one and it felt good had a nice heft, it was just clearly a better handset so 9 out of 10 people would buy the expensive one as soon as they felt the difference. What they didn't know was that radio shack was using the same handset. There was a small iron bar glued inside the expensive one to make it feel heavier and better made.
We also had a list of things that we were required to try and upsell. Everything from phone amplifiers to longer cords to detanglers. There were normally seven things that you could add to a phone with a single sale if you could talk them into it. The only thing I ever really offered was the longer cords if they needed it and the detangler because I hate Tangled handset cords.
If I'm not mistaken, the audio at 10:23 comes from (or was at least used in) the 1957 movie "Zero Hour", which is what "Airplane" is based on.
I felt the need to sucker punch a Moonie the second I heard that...
Airplane was a parody of Airport.
Or so I thought.
And was spoofed in airplane
I think it was in Gremlins also with Robby the Robot.
@@sgillman16 it's an almost scene for scene parody of Zero Hour with some Airport references thrown in for good measure.
Speaking of pet-peeves. Could you do a video on adjusting ASPECT RATIO of widescreen TV's?
Just about every widescreen TV that I see in a restaurant or bar has it's aspect-ratio mis-adjusted. There seems to be NO standard to this nomenclature. Most remotes have a button labeled "PICTURE SIZE", "ASPECT RATIO (what's that?), or "WIDTH" :(
My Roku TV seems to auto adjust it fine. Vizio never seems to work. Vizio TVs are not very impressive in that respect. No setting on my Vizio of the WIDE button seems to work period. Analog stations are the 4:3 ratio. There are no standards.
That is the main reason I completely stopped watching TV live when we switched to Digital. I can not stand the aspect ratio being wrong at every commercial, and even changing from one commercial to the next! stupid! It is another case where the standard was not fully thought out before implementation, so there IS NO standard to automatically work correctly all the time. There is a place for a "flag" in the data stream for the tv to change aspect ratio modes, but many tvs do not monitor it, and it seems to rarely be used on broadcasts.
Motel room TVs are awful, too.
Most TVs in the past 20 years or so have a 1:1 pixel ratio mode but every manufacturer calls it something different.
Saying there is no standard is not really true either, it can only be 16:9 or 4:3. If neither of those seems to work then its a problem in the broadcast not the TV/STB. Content in other ratios should have hard-coded black bars.
Hard-coding black bars is a total waste of bandwidth! Widescreen TV's DO have controls to correct AP, but they're RARELY set correctly!
The hackles stand up on my neck every time a pinball machine appears on screen and the sound editor sticks in a Gottlieb chime unit sound. Williams, Stern, and Bally chimes all sound different, and it's especially annoying when they play the electromechanical Gottlieb chimes over solid state games that had digital sound and no bells at all.
How about someone using a cell phone or other digital camera but the audio expert adds a motor drive and shutter sound?
Kind of like the time period when it seemed any representation of a video game had to be accompanied by Atari 2600 Pac-Man sound effects.
Many years ago I worked lights & sound in a small community theatre. We had two ways of ringing a phone. One was a generic ringer located behind a teaser above stage left. This was all well and good if the phone on stage was located on that side. But if in center or stage right, it was obviously fake. I was one of the few people who knew we could actually make the phone on set ring, though it would require a lengthy wire to the terminal box be the stage manager.
I still recall with a great chuckle a show where we had the actual phone on set wired to ring (controlled by a pushbutton in the light booth). During a rehearsal break one evening, I started "ringing" the phone, and eventually an actor came over, and thinking it was the actual theatre's phone, answered it saying "Good evening, ---------- Playhouse." I already had the PA system turned on and the over-stage speakers turned on and responded, "Oh, hi, this is the light booth. Why are you answering a prop phone?" The look on the actor's face was priceless, as he proceeded to call me a crude epithet for a particular excretory orifice. lol!
Now in 2020, it would be fun to repeat this, but with the ability to actually call the prop phone, and when some poor victim answers it, say "Hi, this is the light control room. We've been trying to reach you about your car's extended warranty." (Yes, I would totally do that!)
I wish I hadn't known about flutter/wow. This reminds me of kerning... It's not a problem until you're made aware of it, at which point it becomes infuriating whenever encountered.
Leam to kem.
Bad keming dnves me totdly nuts.
Bad kerning can never be justified...
Good one!
type.method.ac
Thank me later.
This video is informative, but also there's a lot of "picking up the phone and hanging the phone up" sounds in this video that are really soothing.
That 200Hz sine wave sounded like you're about to dial into the internet
Dude, slamming down that handset hard enough to make the bells ring was SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO SATISFYING! God, I miss that.
“if you hear flutter in the sound of a phone, then you know you’re listening to an analog tape recording.”
*phone rings*
sounds like someone rattling a spoon in a ceramic bowl....
It is funny, been studying AT&T/Bell Systems, and they put a ton of videos out on AT&T's Tech Channel as archives, I would imagine since AT&T, having the technology to force a phone to ring... Still has the pitch dip you mentioned, now I can't stop hearing it!!! Only came back to just complain you got me noticing the ringers of a phone being faked.
Funny thing is, pre-divestiture, Bell charged not only extra for Touch-Tone service, but also a higher lease fee for the (largely-similar) phone. That service fee continued long after; when I got my own phone, 25-odd years ago, there was still an itemized 98-cent charge on my bill. And funny stories about people ringing up the telco to cancel it & save the roughly $12/year. However, I've heard that they usually wouldn't even bother to remove the service from the line (although, it has happened!)
Madness832 - in our market it was also that way. They charged extra for touch tone service, even though it cist them less. If you cancelled the touch tone add-on depending on which exchange you were on, it would remove the ability or not. it all depended on the updates and available circuits on the exchange you were physically wired to, and what was easier for them.
Phone companies still charge extra for touch-tone dialing in some places, including mine. Since my mom is a cheapskate, my household is one of like 3 that still has only pulse dialing. VWestlife is one of the others.
Yep, happened to me, too. My first apartment out of college was in Downey, CA, in 1985, with GTE as the local provider. They tried to charge me $1 a month for touch tone. I told them to get lost. I had a new phone that only had a keypad, but it had a switch that enabled it to send pulse instead of DTMF. They actually DID disable DTMF -- I tried it. So they had to support extra hardware to service cheapskates like me who refused to pay them extra to not use it. Monopolies (even second rate ones) do weird things.
Sound designers sometimes use certain classic sfx as a a sort of Easter egg/inside joke. The old slightly warbly Universal Studios telephone ring is one of them. "Hello, this is Jim Rockford. At the tone, leave your name and message and I'll get back to you."
I expect the phone sound in Terminator WAS digitized. They just digitized the existing sound instead of recording a new one. That's the fastest, easiest, cheapest thing to do and they figured hardly anyone would notice... or care. People like us are weird.
I would probably have thought the Terminator phone was old, if I didn't watch this video.
#wierdosunite
1:00 clean ring
9:00 inaccurately dubbed ring
1:00 a jaunty little tinkling
9:00 a disjointed, stilted mockery
Thank you for the time stamp
The Trading Places 2554 Wall phone also has the incorrect ring. The 2554 wall phone had the same single steel bell ringer that the Trimline series had. Not the dual brass bells of the 500 / 554 / 2500 series sets.
So that's what it is! I've definitely heard that flaw before. Always thought it might have just been a microphone moving that caused the change in sound. Since the ring is usually accompanied by a panning shot to the phone and figured a microphone might be part of the camera to pick up sound from where the scene is being played. Now I know it's sloppy sound effects, that's gonna bug me now. Thanks.
Oh damn, there was a 554 in the basement of the house i basically grew up in. I used it because i could even though there were newer phones in the house since i thought it was super neat. Rotary phones were neat as hell too.
I grew up with a Rotary dial in my basement. Even though I was born in 90, it was the only phone that worked when the power went out.
Bring back the land line and rotary dial. If you have the old pre 50's you can dial the numbers by hitting the hang up button. My friend taught me how to do it. The buttons were flat on top and was easier and the finger didn't slip off. The newer ones were hard to click the pulses.
Also I used to play Yankee doodle on the DTMF buttons. Cell phones are boring. Ok guess I could have my own phone system at home by using a phone line simulator. Makes a good intercom and can program my own numbers to dial. I could make a TH-cam video. Oh the last thing I missed is when you made a long distance phone call like from Pittsburgh to Lakeland Florida you could hear the computer sounds before the call was connected. 73
We had a Bakelite phone. Felt solid and heavy. The cords were covered in woven black cotton.
"How hard can it be to make a new, digital recording?"
How much of the population are disturbed by a phone giving off the wrong ring?
I actually find the movie ring sound more right somehow. Ive never had one of these dial phones, so my entire perception of how they should ring relies on these old movies
For half a century now...
www.hollywoodlostandfound.net/sound/uniphone.html
There are dozens of us!
You’d be surprised. Once you learn the difference between a trimline ring and a standard 500 ring, well you always hear it when it’s wrong.
"which added the star key" aight an asterisk
"and the hash-" *aggressive coughing* "pound key" ...octothorpe!
@Nicole King ...or actually did. ;)
Is it an inside joke or what? I don't get it
Help please
Anglophobia ?
@@javo.illanes it's just different names for the same symbols. I know the "star key" as an asterisk, and the "hashtag" aka "pound key" as an octothorpe! I'm just poking fun
@@johnpotter4750 ...huh??
10:40 - Obviously used in 'Airplane!" ("The White Zone is for loading and unloading")
David Perkins Surely we all got the joke.
Glad you actually said the name of the movie because I wasn't sure because I haven't seen that movie in a while (but also many other people watching this might not have gotten that reference)
FWIW, the commentary track on the DVD confirms that the announcements in Airplane! were specially recorded for the movie. However, they ARE the same two voices. The directors made a point of tracking down the man and woman who recorded the original announcements.
Now THAT'S dedication.
PuffyRainbowCloud And insanity, lol. Can't decide if it was brilliant or deranged. Both possibly?