Home Contents 9.5 16 Multi-gauge 17.5 28 Pix Miscellany
9.5mm Sound
Click Here for The Lost Chord - my history of trying to improve 9.5 sound.
Click Here for Silent to Sound - about conversion of silent machines to sound. Some sound-on-disc material.
Click Here for Pathé Vox - about my long history with the Vox and Super Vox.
Click Here for Cinegel Royale, an interestingly different approach to 9.5/16 sound.
One problem with 9.5 sound was that the soundtrack stole some of the picture area. Obsessed as they were with claiming that 9.5 used the maximum possible
percentage of the total film area, and that its picture size compared well with 16mm, Pathescope carried this approach thru onto sound films (see pic).
The result was a very square format for 9.5 sound, yet it was not to be that long before the professional cinema was rapidly disappearing over the horizon in
quite the opposite, letterbox, direction. The French arm of 9.5, however, went for a more rectangular picture, no doubt as being aesthetically more pleasing,
even if it did "waste" some of the film area above and below the image - an early form of "black bars"? Interestingly, the proposed but never realised Standard
8mm optical sound system also involved stealing a bit of the picture area.
TQ1 Conversion
This is a Bell and Howell converted to 9.5, reportedly by Burgess Lane, many moons ago. It ran, but with poor volume
and all sorts of extraneous noise from the amp and controls. The job was in some ways well done - the sound reader lens
had been moved across so the film was the right way round for projection. However, the gate is decidedly dodgy with
the sprung portion comprising a lower and an upper section, joined by a piece set back from them to give clearance. I'll
do you a pic. And while the sound reader had been moved across, the exciter had not! A peculiar little mirror-cum-lens
had been bolted to the inside of the exciter lamp cover to direct the light across. I suppose it must have worked to
deliver any sound at all, which it did. It was not helped, however, by the fitting of a 6v exciter lamp when there was
only 3.9v going into it, giving a very orange light. I decided to move the lamp across, and doing this kept me
happily occupied for many hours over a number of days. I'll do you some pix. What it does not have (yet) is any
tracking adjustment for the sound.
Comète
The Comète, as I understand it, is a French conversion of a Chinese 16mm. This appeared at the Group 9.5 auction,
where I bid on behalf of Patrick Moules and got it very cheap as it had mechanical and amp problems. The
mechanical problems were easy to fix, but I had to pass it to a radio repair man for the amp. I also had to improve
the exciter lamp set-up. There is some provision for moving the film in relation to the sound reader, but it's a bit
crude and tricky and could do with a major re-think. That said, the conversion is a quality job and the results I
can only call superb, with plenty of "top" and great clarity from the sound.
Here is a superb pic of the sound film dimensions from McKee's "Home Cinema".
Some dimensions for other gauges can be found near the end of Big Brother 1 and now in Film Standards.
Here for those interested in such things is a circuit diagram for a Vox amplifier, plus an even more technical thing about valve voltages.
Ugh!
