[chiph]

Growing up, my Dad shot on Super 8. And it had no audio - the camera had C-sized cells that only ran the film motor. I see from Wikipedia that cameras with audio capability were added in 1973, so it may be that Dad's camera predated that.

At 24 fps, with each frame being 4.01mm tall, means 96.24mm (3.7 inches) per second of magnetic stripes (there are two, presumably for left + right channels). This is roughly twice the speed that cassette tapes used (1-7/8" per second). Their announcement doesn't say if there's any audio compression/encoding used, but I used to use a dbx compression/expansion box to lower the noise floor on cassettes with very good results.

One of the nice things about Super 8 was how easy it was to edit. You used a cutting station that had pegs to ensure your cuts were between frames, and glued them together after scraping off a little bit of emulsion. Adding audio complicates matters, as the audio track is offset from the matching frame by about 3 inches.