In this article Reid Caulfield shares the story of Rick Chace, a pivotal figure in the development of the techniques of upmixing to surround formats.

A few weeks ago, we published an article Is Dolby Stereo LtRt The Most Important Development In Surround? but what was published was half of what I had originally written. This article is the missing section, originally omitted due to the length of the article, this is the story of a man who pioneered the techniques which we now know as Upmixing. It’s the story of a bridge between the original Dolby®Stereo and what would eventually become Dolby ProLogic, and then ProLogic II through the 1990’s and 2000’s.

So here is most of the second half of that original Dolby Stereo article, but the focus has changed. Originally, I was connecting the dots with a view to how flexible Dolby Stereo was. I see now - a few weeks later, and just after the release of “Apple Spatial” and an increased focus on Dolby Atmos for Music - that this moment is a more appropriate and timely moment for that second half. This second half is mostly about the idea of “Upmixing”, a topic which is currently top-of-mind in our industry, and how I come honestly to the subject and am not just talking about things I don’t actually know about, and so this second half of the original article also serves a selfish purpose for me.

Finally, a great many audio mixers think of “Upmixing” as a plug-ins thing and, to be sure, there are many such plugins available. I have them all, and they are all certainly a kind of magic and very clever, but the story of upmixing is almost a half-century old at this point, long before plugins were and the platforms they run on were invented. I see discussions going in a lot of online forums regarding upmixing as it pertains to “Apple Spatial” technology and Dolby Atmos Music, and how we get from the beloved stereo mixes of our favorite albums and songs up to the new formats.

This article is about a person and a company you’ve probably never heard of, but whose influence was significant in our industry between 1981 and 2004 - and there is a significant Dolby Stereo and ‘upmix’ component to the story. As you’ll see, this is also a bit of a “Valentine” to a company that no longer exists, but to whom I owe a great deal of thanks.

Brief Backstory: “It was 1962 when I…”

Just kidding. In 1984, at the beginning of my career as a television post-production re-recording mixer in Montreal, Los Angeles as a place to live and work wasn’t yet on my radar. Of course, I had long since discovered magazines like “REP” and “dB” as early as 1974, and later on, “Mix” magazine; but in 1984-85, and now building my first real mix room with a professional budget and reading these magazines, I kept reading various PR pieces about a certain individual in Los Angeles. 

Rick Chace

Rick Chace was known for several things, primarily:

• His work ethic. He was a perfectionist and, apparently, a “difficult” personality to work with, even with clients, though I never experienced this (more on this later). Rick was fastidious when it came to paperwork and paper trails. If something were to go wrong on a job, Rick wanted to be able to look at the paper record to see exactly where things had gone awry. He also used this system of paperwork logs to pinpoint employee weakness. He was famous for this: he ran a very tight ship, although by the time I joined the company, he wasn’t running it day to day, so I never really saw this side of him.

• Rick Chace was known for his work with early electronic synchronization technology, specifically a system from Master’s Workshop, a Canadian recording studio in Toronto that actually had a manufacturing arm which made a commercially available audio/video transport synchronization system. These were the very expensive, multi-block systems and controllers that kept multitrack machines (16/24 track, analog, digital, whatever) in sync with each other as well as with various video decks. The system was called “Soundmaster” and consisted of a very colorful computer keyboard, a re-packaged IBM consumer-level PC using custom software, and various transport interface modules. If you had a Studer 24-track machine and a particular model of Sony ¾” video deck, a two-track mixdown machine (and whatever else you needed to synchronize), when your system arrived at your doorstep, each of the transport modules would have been pre-programmed for your specific machine combination, although each module could easily be set and calibrated by the end-user for any professional audio or video machine. Soundmaster had a vast library of machine-specific profiles for use in the field. I could write about the genius of Soundmaster (and other synchronization systems) all day long. They did lots of very cool tricks that are still quite difficult to carry off in Pro Tools, Nuendo, etc without a significant amount of effort.

• Rick Chace was an inventor and electrical engineer. He would build one-off systems to do exactly what he needed them to do, to his own specification. He was a master conformist, as well. A big part of his early business in the 1980’s was re-conforming and versioning sound-for-picture to match various network deliverables specs.

• FInally, Rick was a pioneer in “Upmixing.” He would take mono film & TV mixes and upmix them to stereo. Yes, I know, we all can do this now, either with various plugins or “manually”, but in 1982 it was groundbreaking. He got a lot of press in the sound industry trade magazines for this service, which is how I learned of him in the mid-1980’s. It didn’t take long before he started upmixing mono-to-stereo-to-LCRS, or stereo-to-LCRS, and once it was LCRS, he would use analog Dolby Stereo encoders and decoders to finish the job. The “Rick Chace Art of Upmixing” is another article entirely. He pioneered and invented processes that we all take for granted today. But for a long time - most of the 1980’s - he was the only game in town (Hollywood); if you were a film studio or other IP-owner and wanted your mono or stereo mixes “modernized”, it was RIck Chace who you went to. Rick and his company did very well in this era.

And so, Rick Chace’s company, Chase Productions (now defunct), grew throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s and 2000’s - “Chace Productions” was a powerhouse and very successful and not flashy at all, but in the very late 1980’s, Chace was hiring loads of people and expanding its service portfolio. Rick - and, by extension, Chace Productions, didn’t care much about high profile “creative” mixing or sound editorial - Chace Productions was about specialized services that nobody else in town offered, at scale.

My History With Chace Productions

I moved to Los Angeles in 1991. However, the conditions of my work visa stated that I had to get a job as quickly as possible for the one-year-at-a-time work permit. A couple of weeks after I landed in L.A., and on the advice of my immigration attorney to “get as job as soon as possible”, I cold-called two companies from my first apartment in Venice Beach, and two days later I had interviewed for, and received, two job offers. I took both full time jobs and three weeks later, moved over to Chace exclusively. I would go back to holding two full time jobs again in 1994, but at the end of 1991, I was at Chace Productions, working with… Rick Chace. This person who had pioneered so much throughout the 1980’s. He died exactly a year later - so, in October of 1992 - but by then he and I had become relatively close, professionally-speaking. That closeness developed around the idea - not its execution, mind you - of an audio restoration division for film and television sound.

Chace Productions’ “upmix” business was in a lull by 1991, but in 1992-1993, exactly a year after I arrived at the company, their primary business focus became audio restoration for film and television. I helped to build the Sonic Solutions DAW-based audio restoration department and its various restoration rooms, as well as the actual business model, from the ground up. Rick and I had been planning it all for about eight months, almost completely undercover from the rest of the company, but he never got to see the resulting success of the restoration side of the business. That always made me sad. No one even knew he was sick. He just kept on working and working as his company grew to proportions I’m sure even he never imagined it would. Everyone else at the company - the sound editors, mixers, film transfer engineers, Foley artists and recordists - all thought I was insane moving into the audio restoration side of the business.

Back To Dolby Stereo, With a “Chace Chaser”

Through the time I was at Chace Productions, however - from  1991 to 1997 - I had a front-row seat into their upmix methodologies, which were actually based around (analog, then later on, digital) Dolby Stereo encoders and decoders. It was a black art as far as I was concerned at the time, and although it was not my primary focus at the company, it was still impossible not to see behind the curtain at how they were doing what they were doing, and honestly, it was clever but fairly basic under the hood. However, the upmix division of the company was stagnant now, because Rick Chace had made his way through most of the various film and TV studios main catalogs by the early 1990’s. He had done very well for himself and his growing sound  company.

Rick and Chace did a great job at cloaking his original “upmix magic” for a long time - but by the late 1990’s, the methodology had become clear to the Hollywood sound community at large. Various employees involved with the process had moved on to other companies, etc, and secrets don’t stay secret for very long in Hollywood, as we all know. 

This is where Dolby Stereo comes in again

Through the 1980’s, Rick had developed a proprietary - and very “off-label” process - whereby he would manually “convert” mono program to stereo using very small delay times, and then feed that new “stereo” signal into a Dolby Stereo analog Decoder - and that decoder would artificially attempt to “unfold” the newly-created stereo signal into an additional two channels of audio, which would then be panned and processed - and “augmented.” But because he was trying to intentionally “trick” the Dolby Stereo Decoder into spitting out additional channels - and because, at its best, analog Dolby Stereo Encoding and Decoding didn’t always behave as planned - a big part of the Chace Upmix process was actually editorial and re-mixing; adding-in and then mixing, new material with the old; in other words, and subtly blending it all so that in the end, he would come out with a new four channel mix that was Dolby Stereo-compatible down to two channels, and then back up to four.

But, as you can see, it was also a little bit of “smoke & mirrors”, as they say. The additional sound editorial may have been fine for old 1950’s American TV Westerns (by the hundreds or thousands), but perhaps not for more upscale content, like The Wizard Of Oz - which was the first huge sound restoration project handed over to the new sound restoration division of Chace Productions in 1993. Along with that initial restoration, the client requested an upmix, and this was the way it was done. I can hear you gasp from here, but believe me when I say that the process was extremely judicious and tightly controlled. But yes, at least in the original, restored version of the LaserDisc (1994) and probably the DVD (1998?), there are extra BG SFX, footsteps, dialog panning, etc. in “The WIzard Of Oz.”. Chace even managed to get their “CDS logo - or “Chace Digital Stereo” on DVD packaging that contained upmixed sound, alongside various Dolby, DTS, etc. logos.

The new sound restoration division at Chace Productions helped to breathe new life into the ‘Upmixing’ division of the company as well, for years in fact, until at least the late 1990’s. By the time I left the company in 1997, they had many more employees than when I had started, and were on the cutting edge of mid-1990’s networked DAW systems (Sonic Solutions ‘MediaNet’), and they were upmixing everything in sight, but now with revised ‘digital’ methodologies and tools.

1995-1997: DVD & 5.1

DVD and 5.1 gave new life to all of the Chace Productions’ various divisions for another several years. By the early 2000’s, with DVD in the rearview mirror and much of the studios’ catalogs already restored and/or upmixed, Blu-Ray had arrived and companies all over Hollywood had made a bet that most of Hollywood’s legacy ‘A-List’ films and TV shows would once again come around for the full treatment from scratch, as had happened when DVD came along between 1995-1999 - full (billable) elements research, film and videos elements wet or dry cleaning, splice checking (for film), full analog film soundtrack transfer to DAW, ‘de-wowing’, full (re-) restoration using new techniques and brand new deliverables - and of course a full redo of the upmix but using a now-updated, bespoke and very expensive, Chace-branded, DSP-based digital upmix system. The Blu-Ray work, however, never materialized.

The point is that through all of this, and for all of its earlier challenges, Dolby Stereo (analog and then digital) Encoding and Decoding could be incredibly flexible, especially now that the encoders and decoders were fully digital hardware, as well as software tools which were more consistent than the old analog hardware, although this also meant that it was trickier to fool the systems into upconverting 2 channels to (now) 6 channel surround sound.

Dolby Pro Logic Arrives in Consumer Homes

As I have already discussed, in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, analog Laserdisc - and the arrival in consumers’ homes of Dolby ProLogic “receivers” (essentially Dolby Stereo Decoders) - gave the upmix business at Chace a big “shot in the arm”, and just when that was dying down, sound restoration was in full swing, with DVD and Dolby AC3 in development, and with it, new opportunities for continued business for Chace Productions.

Dolby AC3 Arrives And Converges

At a private meeting in 1995, which I attended at an undisclosed location (not really, but it was a very closed meeting), there was something new on the table:

A new consumer format called “DVD” and Dolby’s solution to the extremely limited audio “Bit-Budget” on any given disc, which meant that the sound data on the disc needed to be extremely compressed. I can’t remember if they had a name for the format, yet, but it would end up being “Dolby®AC3.” 

Dolby wanted feedback from the people in the room about the professional AC3 encoders and decoders that facilities would need to purchase in order to create sound that could go on a DVD with as little a data footprint as possible. What should the boxes look like, how many rackspaces would facilities put up with, what price points would facilities accept, etc. Finally, it was clear that the hardware AC3 encoder and decoder - but especially the encoder - would need computer assistance. If you purchased the Dolby AC3 hardware encoder, you would need to dedicate a PC to actually set up each encode (IBM, Dell, etc - not Apple). If you have ever dealt with AC3 encoding software, then you might remember the various options that were available. Back when it was hardware only, that’s the part you needed the PC for; to input multi-channel signal and to set those options for the AC3 Encode.

Chace Productions: Poised To Pioneer Once Again

At this point, Chace Productions was perfectly positioned to dominate a new business sector - the renewed, combined, massive effort to restore, upmix and AC3-Encode sound as it made its way to DVD. Remember, they had already figured out how to do all of this at scale, and they had an upmix history stretching back more than 15 years at that point - a process that was trusted by content owners - and now, an established and incredibly successful sound restoration pipeline.

Everything was a crossfeed into everything else. At Chace, we discovered very early on (1993) that Dolby Stereo two channel fold-downs could not be reliably “De-Clicked” or “De-Crackled” en masse - tools that all of us use today in software like it’s candy. The problem was that these processes could introduce severe, anomalous and very random steering issues into the Dolby Stereo matrix, and, when decoded, could have even further severe, unintended consequences to the de-matrixed four, five or six-channel discrete mix playing out in people’s homes. And so, if all the client had was a two-channel Dolby-matrixed product for the DVD, or for some reason the original, discrete multi-channel mix was unusable - then we had to De-Matrix the two-channel Dolby Stereo product before sound restoration anyway. $$$.

For those clients who simply wanted to move their ageing, four-channel LCRS TV and film mixes up to full 5.1 for DVD release, we would derive, or outright editorially invent the LFE and turn the mono surround into stereo; but as this process would get underway, we would find that the elements we were using did need full restoration. We would have the client into the facility to listen to their materials, so they knew we weren't bluffing. Sometimes, we would wait months for those budget authorizations, but they would almost always come. No one wanted to put out an inferior product, obviously, especially the big Hollywood studios; they just had to find the budget (note: these were the days when a full sound restoration could easily cost $50,000-$80,000). It was a golden age.

I could go on. But the point is that Dolby Stereo - though now largely deprecated and superfluous, and as flawed as it can be - this technology spawned a very profitable industry that would endure for decades before software tools democratized the entire process for everybody. And as for upmixing, well… Rick Chace and his company pioneered that before a great many of us were even out of high school, or perhaps, before some of you were actually born.

So, here we are again, at a time when the idea of “Upmixing” has once again come to the fore because of “Apple Spatial” and “Dolby Atmos Music.” As we get into these discussions, I just wanted to set the record straight.