Vitaphone was a sound film process used on features and nearly 2,000 short subjects produced by Warner Brothers and its sister studio First National from 1926 to 1930. Many early talkies, such as The Jazz Singer (1927), used the Vitaphone process. Vitaphone was the last, but most successful, of the so-called sound-on-disc processes. With improvements in competing sound-on-film processes, Vitaphone's technical imperfections led to its retirement early in the sound era. (The name "Vitaphone" derives from the Latin and Greek words, respectively, for "living" and "sound.")

The business was established in the Vitagraph Studios in Brooklyn, New York, and acquired by Warners Bros. in 1925. Warner Bros. introduced Vitaphone on August 6, 1926, with the release of the silent feature Don Juan with music score and sound effects, accompanied by several short subjects featuring comedians and singers, and a greeting from motion picture industry spokesman Will Hays.

A Vitaphone-equipped theater used special projectors, an amplifier, and speakers. The projectors operated as normal motorized silent projectors would, but also provided a mechanical interlock with an attached phonograph turntable. When the projector was threaded, the projectionist would align a start mark on the film with the picture gate, and would at the same time place a phonograph record on the turntable, being careful to align the phonograph needle with an arrow scribed on the record's label.

When the projector rolled, the phonograph turned at a fixed rate, and (theoretically) played sound in sync with the film passing the picture gate simultaneously. Unlike the prevailing speed of 78 revolutions per minute for phonograph discs, Vitaphone discs were played at 33-1/3 r.p.m. to increase the playing time to match the 11-minute running time of a reel of film. Also unlike most phonograph discs, the needle on Vitaphone records moved from the inside of the disc to the outside.

The Vitaphone process made several improvements over previous systems:

• Amplification - The Vitaphone system was one of the first to use electronic amplification, using Lee De Forest's Audion tube. This allowed the sound of the phonograph to be played to a large audience at a comfortable volume.
• Fidelity - In the early days, Vitaphone had superior fidelity to sound-on-film processes, particularly at low frequencies. Phonographs also had superior dynamic range, on the first few playings.

These innovations notwithstanding, the Vitaphone process lost the early format war with sound-on-film processes for many reasons:

• Distribution Issues - Vitaphone records had to be distributed along with film prints, and shipping records required a whole infrastructure apart from the already-existing film distribution system. Additionally, records would wear out after several screenings, and had to be replaced. This consumed even more distribution overhead.
• Synchronization - Vitaphone had severe and notorious synchronization problems. If a record skipped, it would fall out of sync with the picture, and the projectionist would have to manually restore sync. Additionally, if the film print became damaged and was not precisely repaired, the length relationship between the record and the print could be lost, also causing a loss of sync. The Vitaphone projectors had special levers and linkages to advance and retard sync, but it required the continual attention of the operator, and this was impractical. The system for aligning start marks on film and start marks on records was far from exact.
• Editing - A phonograph record cannot be edited directly, and this significantly limited the creative potential of Vitaphone films. Warner Brothers went to great expense to develop a highly complex phonograph-based dubbing system, using synchronization phonographs and Strowger switch-triggered playback phonographs (working very much like a modern sampler.)
• Fidelity versus Sound-on-Film - The fidelity of sound-on-film processes improved considerably after its introduction by the Fox Film Corporation as Fox Movietone in 1927, and particularly after the adoption of RCA's variable-area recording technique, RCA Photophone in 1928.

Around March 1930, Warner Bros. and First National stopped recording directly to disc, and switched to sound-on-film recording. To make new film titles backward-compatible with Vitaphone equipped theaters, films produced with sound-on-film processes were released by Warner Bros. and the other Hollywood studios simultaneously in Vitaphone versions as late as 1937. Warner Bros. kept the "Vitaphone" name alive as the name of its short subjects division, The Vitaphone Corporation, most famous for releasing Leon Schlesinger's Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, later produced by Warners in-house from 1944 on.

Though operating on principles so different as to make it unrecognizable to a Vitaphone engineer, Digital Theater Sound is a sound-on-disc system, the first to gain wide adoption since the abandonment of Vitaphone.

Further reading

• Bradley, Edwin M. (2005). The First Hollywood Sound Shorts, 1926-1931, McFarland & Company. ISBN 0786410302

• Crafton, Donald (1997). The Talkies: American Cinema's Transition to Sound, 1926-1931, Charles Scribner's Sons. ISBN 0684195852

• Liebman, Roy (2003). Vitaphone Films: A Catalogue of the Features and Shorts, McFarland & Company. ISBN 0786412798

Film sound production | Film and video technology | Defunct companies of the United States