The Ritz cinema in Wokingham had been closed a number of years and was then used for the dreaded Bingo. I met the owner, Ray Hipkins who told me he was converting the original foyer plus a new extension for a brand-new cinema. To cut a long story shorter. I ended up being the manager, projectionist and fitted out the cinema. At that time Dolby A was quite new and expensive so I used a QUAD 405 and a Quad 33 preamp for stereo sound. I changed the mag cartridge input, which had RIAA EQ for a flat frequency response and fed the stereo solar cell via a step-up transformer to that input. The sound was very good and a great improvement to many cinemas Mono sound. Slit loss compensation was made with treble lift on the tone controls. We ran the sound like this for the first 2 years until I put in a Dolby CP55. This was a better way using a HiFi amplifier that that described by the projectionist in this video. His method would give a very bass heavy and lack of high frequency but, as he said would get you by in an emergency. Sorry this story is a bit technical.
Hi Mike, Thank you very much for your amazing story. Love any technical stories like this, as it shows what a creative group of people projectionists used to be back in the good old days. Keep your techi -stories coming. All the very best.
Long may it live.
Hi Andrew, I totally agree with you. Thank you for your comment.
The Ritz cinema in Wokingham had been closed a number of years and was then used for the dreaded Bingo. I met the owner, Ray Hipkins who told me he was converting the original foyer plus a new extension for a brand-new cinema. To cut a long story shorter. I ended up being the manager, projectionist and fitted out the cinema. At that time Dolby A was quite new and expensive so I used a QUAD 405 and a Quad 33 preamp for stereo sound. I changed the mag cartridge input, which had RIAA EQ for a flat frequency response and fed the stereo solar cell via a step-up transformer to that input. The sound was very good and a great improvement to many cinemas Mono sound. Slit loss compensation was made with treble lift on the tone controls. We ran the sound like this for the first 2 years until I put in a Dolby CP55. This was a better way using a HiFi amplifier that that described by the projectionist in this video. His method would give a very bass heavy and lack of high frequency but, as he said would get you by in an emergency. Sorry this story is a bit technical.
Hi Mike, Thank you very much for your amazing story. Love any technical stories like this, as it shows what a creative group of people projectionists used to be back in the good old days. Keep your techi -stories coming. All the very best.