16-mm sound motion pictures : a manual for the professional and the amateur (1953)

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PEICE VS. PERFORMANCE IN RECORDING EQUIPMENT 259 tional bias current for noise-reduction recording with the class A-B sound track; no bias equipment is required with the class B equipment. Either type may be variable area or variable density ; variable density class B has not been used however. Figure 62 illustrates a number of types of sound tracks used commercially and gives their accepted names. Price vs. Performance in Recording Equipment The manufacture of 16-mm sound-recording equipment has not been a lucrative business in the past; the quality required for successful competition has been high and the market small. In a sense, the manufacture of such equipment has been a proposition more for a model shop than for a production line, and the prices charged and the sales policies have reflected it. New companies have not hurried to get into the business ; rather, those already in it have to a considerable degree been figuring ways and means of staying in it without sacrificing equipment quality. Small-quantity production of unrelated material results in such high unit costs that an item such as a recording machine may be priced out of the market. To avoid this dilemma to an extent, companies have been manufacturing sound-recording equipment with as many interchangeable parts as possible. As an example, to obtain low flutter, the recording drum of one sound-recording machine is of such large diameter that the eccentricity-introduced flutter rate is only 1 3/4 per second. This and numerous other parts are then used interchangeably in the film phonograph and in the optical one-to-one sound printer also manufactured. Such use of the same parts in several machines increases materially the size of the "production run" possible for individual parts and reduces the cost per part. The quality of modern sound-recording machines, film phonographs, and sound printers of such manufacture is high by competitive standards. When this equipment is used under the best laboratory-controlled conditions, reproduction of films upon a film phonograph with a good amplifier and loud-speaker show distortion of almost similar low order to that found in pre-war, well-controlled Hollywood studio recordings with one exception — there is a somewhat higher noise level. The theoretical limitation for such reproduction at present appears to be in the film. The slit image provided in one recording machine (as set for variablearea recording) is about 0.00012 in.; stray light in the optical system has been materially reduced by decreasing the number of optical surfaces that a ray must pass, and by utilizing anti-reflection coatings. All lenses