Why I'll Stay Home to Watch
Movies
Some time ago, a friend and colleague
who was at the pinnacle of a career in audio gave up his decades-old job in his hometown
and took a position in Los Angeles. He told me at the time that he was less than a decade
away from the usual retirement age, but that he had no intention of quitting working.
Instead, he wanted to hang out his shingle as an audio consultant, and by far the best
place to do that would be L.A., because of the film industry.
Movie sound technicians have often pioneered audio
techniques that eventually found their way into consumer systems. In fact, the first
generation of hi-fi buffs could only realize the fidelity contained in such new recording
media as magnetic tape and the LP record by buying the same speakers that were used in
cinemas. Some of the most prominent early speakers, such as the JBL Hartsfield and the
Electro-Voice Patrician, were large horn-loaded devices, prettied up but clearly showing
their theatrical roots. One, the famous A4 from Altec-Lansing, was even called the
"Voice of the Theater."
Hollywood was producing multichannel soundtracks 50 years
ago, and Dolby Pro Logic, the THX set of equipment standards, and the various forms of
digital surround were all developed first for movie theaters.
So home audio does owe a debt to movie sound. But domestic
equipment has progressed so far that a public theater is now rarely the best place to
listen to a film. It's true that few home audio/video systems can match the visual impact
of a theater's big screen, but what you hear at home will almost always be better
than what you experience in a theater. Even the newer-style theaters, with raked floors
and digital sound systems, often tend to sound loud rather than good.
On occasion I have checked out some of the more exotic
advances in film sound, of course, but these tend to be demonstrated in specially tweaked
theaters, and hardly represent the typical movie-going experience.
The state of many local theaters was brought home to me a
couple of years ago when my wife and I set out to see a movie that featured a lot of
flying. Several people suggested that the aerial sequences really ought to be seen on a
large screen, and since virtually all of the filming was done within a few miles of our
house, we wanted to have a clear view of the familiar scenery.
The closest place showing the film was a multi-screen
theater in a mall not too far away, so we went there. It had been a while since I'd
visited such a place, and the first thing that struck me was that the screen didn't fill
much more of my field of view than some of the home models I've reviewed, so image size
was no big advantage.
And the audio was terrible. For one thing, even though the
credits said the film was encoded in Dolby Digital, this theater chose to play it in mono.
Not even two-channel stereo.
It was obviously a well-worn print they were using -- you
could tell from the picture -- and that provided its share of noise and unpleasant pops.
But perhaps the worst part of it, especially when there was any background music, was that
the projector was inducing a large amount of wow into the sound: a not-subtle speed
variation that caused the sound to waver by what seemed to be almost a whole musical tone.
Even if everything had been working properly, and even if
they had taken advantage of the surround sound, it still probably wouldn't have sounded as
good as even a quite modest home-theater setup.
Most people who have spent a lot of time in movie theaters
will recognize that soundtracks tend to have a distinctive sonic character, particularly
when it comes to reproduction of the human voice. This character is partly a byproduct of
the narrow bandwidth of a film's optical soundtrack, if that's what's playing, and partly
of the general use in theaters of horn-loaded speakers, in which the actual reproducer
feeds into a sort of megaphone that focuses and directs the sound. In the early days, one
benefit of this was that such speakers were very efficient and could put out lots of sound
even when driven by the small amplifiers then available.
Another is that the horns can be made to be very
directional, so the sound can be aimed at the audience and away from the walls, to
minimize reverberations. There's nothing worse than seeing the hero whispering sweet
nothings into the heroine's ear, and having it sound like a papal address in St. Peters;
horns give that sort of control. But they also tend to add a form of coloration that
compromises overall fidelity.
There are those who would argue that, since the director
heard the sound through horns when he created the audio track, you should too, and some
home-theater systems do include horn-loaded drivers. But the majority use conventional
cones and domes, and these tend to produce sound quality much closer to what we generally
regard as high fidelity.
Add to that the absence of coughing fits and rattling of
candy bags by other viewers, the ability to pause the movie occasionally or repeat bits of
it, not to mention the opportunity to watch in your pajamas, and home theater wins out any
day.
...Ian G. Masters
ian@mastersonaudio.com
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