What the hell is "2.0 Surround" anyway?

[deleted user]

My guess is that this logo is simply the long form of "SR-D", which I think (initially?) referred to prints that had both SR (Spectral Recording Dolby Stereo) as the optical audio and Dolby Digital as the digital audio. Why some had it and others not despite fitting the description ... perhaps just some minor inconsistency, or maybe they just confused the two during production, or maybe they needed a special license to use the bigger logo and didn't want to spend the money? Or maybe they had already created the end titles before they knew that they would end up using Dolby Digital? Or maybe the artist designing the end credits was on a tight schedule and someone hadn't mailed him the proper logo yet? My guess is it comes down to something like that, where someone just didn't really care to be 100% consistent. Ultimately it's not like it really matters, I think it's safe to assume that any print with DD also has SR.

[pipefan413]

My guess is that this logo is simply the long form of "SR-D", which I think (initially?) referred to prints that had both SR (Spectral Recording Dolby Stereo) as the optical audio and Dolby Digital as the digital audio. Why some had it and others not despite fitting the description ... perhaps just some minor inconsistency, or maybe they just confused the two during production, or maybe they needed a special license to use the bigger logo and didn't want to spend the money? Or maybe they had already created the end titles before they knew that they would end up using Dolby Digital? Or maybe the artist designing the end credits was on a tight schedule and someone hadn't mailed him the proper logo yet? My guess is it comes down to something like that, where someone just didn't really care to be 100% consistent. Ultimately it's not like it really matters, I think it's safe to assume that any print with DD also has SR.

Aye. If you notice the dates though, it seems like at first they just kept using the old Dolby Stereo logo even when SR and Digital came in, but later on they must've decided they should advertise the tech so in 1995 they came up with that absolute Chaotic Evil abomination seen on A GOOFY MOVIE and TOY STORY.

It could just be that my experience of there being no home release of a 5.1 mix for A GOOFY MOVIE is an anomaly and they just couldn't find - or couldn't be arsed finding - a source for the 6-track Dolby Digital mix when they made the LaserDisc / DVD / Blu-ray releases. I've never seen a print, so I have no way to verify with 100% certainty whether there actually was a 6-track on the prints or not. Maybe they used the logo intending to make one but somebody messed up somewhere and it never actually got made, so there was only ever a Dolby MP Matrix 4:2 (Dolby Stereo) optical track and no digital even though it's stated in the credits to have Digital, but that feels less likely than them just half-arsing the home video releases, which they have observably done in a number of respects:

1. All the US home releases were cropped pan and scan apart from the LaserDisc and then the very recent Blu-ray
2. The UK DVD claims to have 5.1 but doesn't
3. The UK DVD is widescreen but extremely compressed to fit on a single-layer DVD so it still doesn't look very good due to an abundance of grain which ends up resolving poorly and mingling with compression noise
4. Sync is messed up on all of them at the opening credits and in a couple of other places on some versions (the DVD seems to be the most wrong but I'm unconvinced that it's amazing on the LD or Blu-ray either)

I did a video showing the screw-up in the opening titles here, incidentally:

pw = "hyuk"

[zoidberg]

IIRC at a certain point in time all SVA optical tracks went over to SR but for a while there would have been a mixed inventory of Dolby A and SR prints.

Dolby have always referred to surround in the theatrical environment as Stereo, the word salad Spectral Recording Dolby Stereo Digital was just their way of covering all the bases. Hence 'verify format'

[pipefan413]

IIRC at a certain point in time all SVA optical tracks went over to SR but for a while there would have been a mixed inventory of Dolby A and SR prints.

I wonder if that point may have been '95...

Dolby have always referred to surround in the theatrical environment as Stereo

Aye, as opposed to "Dolby Surround" parlance for home use.

(...) the word salad Spectral Recording Dolby Stereo Digital was just their way of covering all the bases. Hence 'verify format'

Aye, that's basically my assumption. But I guess part of it is wondering whether this covering of bases might mean some films that didn't even have some of those technologies (SR, Digital) might still use that logo. Like, potentially, A GOOFY MOVIE. Hmm...

Is there any particularly good resource for trying to verify what the actual original theatrical formats were around this time? The "Technical" bit on IMDb seems to be wrong or just overly nonspecific a lot of the time.

[deleted user]

Interesting about Goofy Movie. So they either lost the track or they added the wrong logo. I imagine when planning to do DD, you probably just do the 6 channel mix and then you do a downmix to 4 channels, run it through an SEU4 and SDU4 combo to make sure there are no major issues and then print that onto film. At least that would make sense to me. Maybe they did the 6-track mix but then only published the downmix.

Edit: There are some Russian HDTVRips on the internet with 5.1 Russian audio. But that doesn't mean much I guess, could be a fanmade or upmixed by the broadcaster.

[pipefan413]

Interesting about Goofy Movie. So they either lost the track or they added the wrong logo. I imagine when planning to do DD, you probably just do the 6 channel mix and then you do a downmix to 4 channels, run it through an SEU4 and SDU4 combo to make sure there are no major issues and then print that onto film. At least that would make sense to me. Maybe they did the 6-track mix but then only published the downmix.

Yeah, that's pretty much what I'm wondering. Maybe it either got made but not released or maybe it was on prints but they couldn't find the masters for home video later for some reason. It's confusing.

You're quite possibly correct about the workflow, it would certainly make sense. It might even have been a cost thing. A GOOFY MOVIE wasn't exactly a runaway success and it might have been that they didn't really expect it to do well so the additional expense of printing Digital on every print would have been a sunk cost, so they just cancelled that idea and stuck with simple old Dolby (either A or SR, who the hell knows).

[deleted user]

I did hear anecdotes that studios sometimes lose the DTS mixes and have to beg collectors to lend them DTS discs to recover them. Maybe a similar story here?

[zoidberg]

I just think at that point in time the Dolby SR-D logo was used to cover all possible configurations. I've seen it on a lot of movies but the one that always springs to mind is True Lies.

Some films I guess they couldn't justify the extra cost of the discrete mix/license fees in much the same way Terminator or Evil Dead 2 missed out on Stereo mixes.

[spoRv]

The whole Dolby logo "affaire" is a mess... just take a look at some laserdisc covers that had Dolby Digital audio track:

• first it was called "Dolby Surround AC-3 Digital"
  
• then it became "Dolby Digital"
  

add to this "Dolby Surround AC-3 Pro-Logic" found on some decoders, and think about the poor consumers at the time, who should guess if they mean all the same thing or not, without easy help from the web - we are talking about mid 90s here.

I did hear anecdotes that studios sometimes lose the DTS mixes and have to beg collectors to lend them DTS discs to recover them.

[zoidberg]

Dolby Digital was almost always referred to as AC-3 in the laserdisc years, I guess to distinguish it from the PCM stereo track which was merely 'presented' in Dolby Surround.