First time in a Klipsch theater $8.50

[greg928gts]

I spoke with the manager at the Waterville Flagship Theaters this morning. This building was built about five years ago and it has stadium seating and is a modern facility. She told me that two of the theaters have Klipsch Pro systems and the others have JBL. She said two of the theaters are set up with digital projectors, but she didn't know which ones or if the Klipsch systems were in those.

She is going to check throughout the day and give me a call tomorrow morning to let me know which two theaters have the Klipsch systems.

I go to this movie house regularly so I'll be able to check out the Klipsch theaters and report back.

I saw Public Enemy there yesterday and the sound was not very good. I didn't hear any sound coming from the side speakers or from behind, everything was from the front. There was an edginess to the midrange, not much low end, and I had a hard time hearing dialogue sometimes. This was theater #3.

Greg

[Brac]

Well, I need to call Janet tomorow, but I was told by the other mgr. that 1-3-4-7-8 are JBL #5 Klipsch Pro., they are not sure of the others at the moment.

This means I was in the Klipsch Theater: to be cont.

[DrWho]

"I believe that was measured in 1/2 space."

Which is the way they are used in a theater.

Well that's gonna depend on the theater....it's not uncommon to see effectively 1/4 space at the lower frequencies. You might be able to see some 1/8 space too in the right situations.

"The port is tuned to 18Hz too "

The spec sheet you linked to says 23hz, it's 10dB down at 18hz.

The box doesn't have to be tuned to the F3...I'll have to check my notes again, but I coulda sworn I heard the 18Hz comment straight from Roy.

[greg928gts]

Theaters #5 and #6 in Waterville have the Klipsch sound systems. I'll pay attention to the sound next time I'm there and report back.

The manager told me that when they build the theater, someone installs and sets up the equipment, but I got the impression nobody is check them on a regular basis.

Greg

[greg928gts]

The manager called me back to say that theaters 1,2,5,6,and 7 all have digital sound, while 3,4 and 8 have stereo SR I think she said.

Theaters 1 and 2 have digital projectors also.

Brac, we should get together and go see a movie in 5 or 6 sometime. Something with a really good soundtrack.

Greg

[garyrc]

RE: IMAX sound, thinness, harshness, & lack of bass impact.

Upper midrange loudness and impact without bass impact makes the sound seem inappropriately loud and thin, rather than fittingly and excitingly loud, IMO.

Even though most of today's cinemas have improved response from 40 Hz down to below 20 Hz, in many cases they -- perhaps especially IMAX theaters -- don't have the overwhelming impact that the typical 70 mm theater sound system used to have between about 40 Hz and about 300 Hz. The IMAX theaters I have been to on the West coast (LA, San Francisco, Seattle) all presented a before-the-movie demo in which they bragged about the sound, among other aspects of the process. They turned on the lights behind the screen so the audience could see the speakers ... there were no "wings" -- big baffle boards like the ones Altec was famous for installing -- next to the speakers. The baffle boards installed in most or all 70 mm, &/or Cinerama theaters that were equipped in the 1950s and '60s helped reinforce bass response, and IMO, impact. The cabinets in the IMAX were small (looked like JBLs), and just hanging out there in space. True, the wall wasn't very far behind them, but the speakers were not anywhere near flush mounted either! Flush mounting can add as much as 5 or 6 dB at 40 Hz, which is an appreciable, even dramatic, amount, and the huge stud reinforced plywood "wings" in some theaters simulate flush mounting. I understand that the nowadays the subs are thought to do the job, but I can't see how they can move as much air above 40Hz as a big horn coupled to a big baffle board.

In those days, an alternative set up with JBL speakers installed by Ampex for 70 mm Todd-AO, was to have the speaker cabinets themselves extend solidly far to the sides, the middle part being a bass horn, and the outer part serving as a baffle and reflex chamber... even some of these had additional baffle boards to the side, if there was available space between these oversize cabinets (in those days 70 mm had 5 channels behind a huge curved screen, plus surround in the theater).

We have all learned to be suspicious of "improvements" like digital over analog, and solid state over tubes ... there are both advantages and disadvantages to these changes, and some valuable characteristics are lost. I think the movie industry may have made a mistake in relying on the now available subwoofers to do the job -- above 40 Hz -- that big horns with baffle augmentation used to do. The clean, effortless, sheer and utter impact of the sound in the old 70 mm theaters -- at least some of the time -- is hard to simulate today. Here are examples of when this impact was and was not present. The thunderstorm and earth tremors during the crucifixion scene in Ben-Hur shook the concrete floor, created gusts of wind in the theater, and to my ears these effects were much louder than anything I've heard in IMAX, yet undistorted (there is distortion on the DVD, and it's dynamically compressed to boot -- hope they do better on the Blu-ray). The ramming of one galley ship into another earlier in the same movie, with wood splintering, caused many in the audience to sway away from the impact, and the bass and lower midrange sounded "fast," as audiophiles say. The musical score sometimes got extraordinarily loud, but was always rich and clean. On the other hand, Lawrence of Arabia, as great as that movie was, had comparatively little impactive sound, so 70 mm in a theater equipped for that medium was not a guarantee of impactive sound.

The Altec variety of the wings I am talking about are clearly visible in the thread on theater sound CONVERGENCE either started, or was the main contributor to, about a year ago.