Widescreen Formats Brought Multichannel Sound to Theaters Sound in Film
Television forced Hollywood into spectacle, and spectacle included sound
By 1950, weekly cinema attendance in the United States had dropped from its 1946 peak of 90 million to roughly 60 million, and the decline was accelerating. Television was the obvious cause. Hollywood's response was to offer what television could not: wide images and immersive sound. Every major widescreen format of the 1950s shipped with a multichannel sound specification, because the studios understood that enveloping audio was part of the spectacle that justified a theater ticket.
Cinerama used seven channels and a separate sound film
Cinerama, which premiered with This Is Cinerama on September 30, 1952, was the most ambitious and the least practical. Three synchronized 35mm projectors threw a curved image onto a deeply concave screen, and a fourth machine — a 35mm magnetic film running in synchronization — carried seven discrete audio channels: five behind the screen and two surround channels fed to speakers along the side and rear walls of the theater. Hazard Reeves, the sound engineer who designed the system, described it as a genuine first:
"The first multiple [track] magnetic sound recording equipment ever devised." — Hazard Reeves, Film Atlas (1953)
The effect on opening night was overwhelming. Bosley Crowther called it on the front page of the Times:
"The effect of Cinerama in this its initial display is frankly and exclusively 'sensational,' in the literal sense of that word." — Bosley Crowther, The New York Times (1952)
The sound's fidelity was part of the shock. Science editor Waldemar Kaempffert wrote:
"The fidelity of the sounds was irreproachable. Applause in La Scala sounded like the clapping of hands and not like pieces of wood slapped together." — Waldemar Kaempffert, The New York Times (1952)
Merian C. Cooper, the producer, saw the reaction as proof of concept:
"It was the biggest night I've ever seen in pictures. People stayed on the sidewalk by the hundreds till four or five in the morning talking about it. And I knew we had revolutionized the picture business." — Merian C. Cooper, Jim Lane's Cinedrome
The system was also staggeringly expensive, required purpose-built theaters, and could only be installed in a handful of venues worldwide. (wikipedia)
Reeves had previously worked on the multichannel sound for Disney's Fantasia (1940), which used a proprietary system called Fantasound. The Cinerama installation was Fantasound's commercial descendant — the same idea of immersive directional audio, scaled up and made slightly more practical. Getting it built had required fighting through what Reeves called "a terrifying inertia to their enthusiasm" among industry investors. (cinedrome)
CinemaScope put four magnetic tracks on standard 35mm film
Twentieth Century-Fox's CinemaScope, which premiered with The Robe on September 16, 1953, was designed to be deployable in existing theaters. It used a single 35mm projector with an anamorphic lens to produce a 2.55:1 image, and the release prints carried four magnetic stripes encoding left, center, right, and surround channels. The surround channel was mono and fed to speakers along the side and rear walls. (wikipedia)
The four-track CinemaScope magnetic format became the de facto multichannel sound standard for 35mm exhibition through the 1950s. Fox licensed the format aggressively, and other studios adopted compatible four-track magnetic prints for their own widescreen productions. The center channel was critical for dialogue — it anchored voices to the screen regardless of seating position, solving a problem that two-channel stereo could not.
Todd-AO delivered six-track sound on 70mm film
Producer Mike Todd, dissatisfied with Cinerama's impracticality, wanted the spectacle with less machinery. He described Todd-AO with characteristic bluntness:
"Cinerama outta one hole." — Mike Todd, Wikipedia (c. 1952)
Todd commissioned the American Optical Company to design a single-projector, single-film format that could match Cinerama's impact. The result was Todd-AO, which used 70mm film stock running at 30 frames per second (later reduced to 24fps for compatibility) with six magnetic tracks: five screen channels (left, left-center, center, right-center, right) and one surround channel. Oklahoma! premiered the format on October 10, 1955. (wikipedia)
The six-track 70mm magnetic format outlasted Todd-AO as a brand. Through the 1960s and 1970s, prestige 70mm "roadshow" presentations — Lawrence of Arabia, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Patton — all carried six-track magnetic sound. These were the best-sounding theatrical presentations available anywhere in the world, and they remained so until digital cinema sound arrived in 1992.
VistaVision and other formats had their own sound strategies
Paramount's VistaVision (1954) ran 35mm film horizontally through the camera and projector, producing a larger negative area. Prints could carry either optical mono or magnetic stereo, depending on the theater's equipment. In practice, most VistaVision prints shipped with optical mono because the install base for magnetic playback was still small outside first-run houses.
Other formats — Superscope, Techniscope, Ultra Panavision 70 — each had their own audio specifications, but the pattern was consistent: magnetic multichannel for premiere engagements, optical mono for general release. The bifurcation between premiere-quality sound and general-release sound would persist for decades.
The 1950s established the template: premium sound for premium venues
The lasting legacy of the 1950s widescreen era was not any single format but a business model. Multichannel sound was positioned as a premium feature — available in first-run roadshow theaters, unavailable everywhere else. A film like Ben-Hur (1959) played in six-track magnetic stereo at its premiere engagements and in optical mono at neighborhood theaters months later. The audience's experience of the same film varied enormously depending on where and when they saw it.
This gap between premium and standard theatrical sound is the direct ancestor of the gap between theatrical and home sound that would define the physical media era. The pattern was set in the 1950s: the best sound costs more, reaches fewer venues, and takes years to filter down.