The Jazz Singer, Warner Brothers' extremely successful film of 1927, began the era of talking films. Lights of New York, released the following year, was the first "totally sound" film. There had been experimentation with sound synchronization for film for many years. Only after Warner Brothers' purchase of Vitaphone from Western Electric in 1926 did the process become feasible. With the addition of sound to films came a lot of new problems for the industry: studios had to build soundproof stages, theaters had to obtain new equipment, film writers had to understand dialogue, and actors had to have voices that could carry the dialogue.