Been leafing thru some old ACW's - number of interesting items, and a particularly rich haul for my Silent to Sound section. Many of these come from the immediate post-war period, when there seems to have been near-desperation among 8mm and 9.5mm users in particular to get sound somehow. At least the 16mm lot could get military surplus GBL516's. Please bear in mind these are scanned from elderly originals of limited original quality. Later, the race was on to get mag sound onto 8mm, eventually won by Eumig with the first integrated mag sound machine. Before then, there were various add-on devices.
Bolex users seemed to get more than their fair share of help.
The G3 soundhead unit appears, as far as one can tell from this picture, to be quite different from the model issued by Bolex themselves. (The Ampro one looks more like the 200B etc conversions, but shows there was strong interest in sound-on-the-cheap.)The Sonorizer was proprietary Bolex kit, but as with many such devices, had an idiosyncratic picture to sound separation (in this case sound to picture) and could only show successfully films made with that system.
All sorts of other devices were offered, quite apart from the various synch systems using a separate bit of equipment for the sound such as a tape recorder. Can't yet find the original of the Luch pic, so it won't work yet.
The Bolex Sonorizer idea looks very similar to the Cirse Vox system. Cirse took the inside front cover of ACW for consecutive months, adopting the spot colour of the particular issue.
I had always imagined that the Bolex Phonomatic was a separate model of the Bolex P8, but these ads show it as an add-on unit.
Incidentally, I don't know what it is, but I just do not warm to the P8. It is very well engineered and of a high standard but..... Is it the rather tinny gate, the plastic auto-thread and plastic sprocket film retainers? Perhaps it's the lack of chrome - I always think chrome gives a projector class. the Malex is a double-band machine in some ways, with separate pic and sprocketed tape mechs. (Argenteuil 2009).
Found a leaflet for the Dominus. It was over-stamped with "New Price £120", so presumably was originally even pricier.
These pages about the Dominus have defeated my photo-editing skills, but as I have one on the bench even as we speak, I thought them well worth including. They are hard to read so I've dome a pdf as well, which gives a bigger image. I'll do you some pix of the real thing. It's an amazingly well-engineered bit of tackle but, as you can see from the review, it has some fairly basic flaws.
When closed up, it's just an anonymous two-tone grey box. As required by the Regulations for the Storage of Projectors Not in Use, it has obviously been stored in a damp, unheated area, to maximise the chances of condensation, rust, mould growth and electrical dysfunction. Take the covers off the sides and you have a fairly conventional tape deck, but vertical, and a projector, which is most odd, with those drunken loops and a lens pointing straight out. To see any more, you have to dismantle, which involves taking off a cover that goes over 3 sides of the cube, with the handle at the top. The mains inlet is odd; you need to unscrew and disconnect it before removing the cover, and in reverse on re-assembly. I think I was lucky with this machine in that there was nothing much wrong; as you can see, further dismantling would be a job and a half. I did manage to make a brief recording and play it back, so it's clearly functional. The entire thing is run by the one induction motor, to give constant speed.
Interestingly, The Dominus is based on an original French design. The Danson was based on an Italian design. Was there something of a trend after the war for small British companies to find foreign designs to reproduce? I can't see it ever making much economic sense; the Danson ended up remaindered for a mere £60. The Dominus can't have sold widely - I don't know the date of the ACW but it can't have been long before 8mm mag sound blew such machines out of the water, and it had the P8 as a competitor As it is, I was the only bidder on eBay and got it for a mere £2, which is insane. I only bid cos it was local.
Noris produced kit for making sound films with a silent machine; some pix are in 8mm at Noris.
- << Prev
- Next