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The New York theatre is the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center in Westhampton Beach. It's about two hours out of the city on Long Island. The theatre is only used for film at certain times of the year, so I can't predict what would be going on at any particular time.

Presently, I am only using Dolby CP-65's and CP-500's as the base processor in the HPS-4000® sound systems. I have also been using the DTS 6 and 6D as well as the Sony DFP-2000. I am in the final phase of evaluating another processor that looks very good. When these tests are complete, I will make an announcement, as this would be the first time I have will have recommended a stereo processor to my customers not made by Dolby.

I should say that the process for acceptance of a component for my systems is quite different from the practices of others. Rather than inviting manufacturers to send me their product(s) and accept money for evaluating them and so on, I select those products that I believe are the best for my systems and my customers. No one pays me anything. The current processor evaluation is being done at my request with the cooperation of the manufacturer. I have been in discussions with them for many months and offered several suggestions that have, along with others, been implemented. Even so, I am still doing and have been doing a thorough evaluation of the sound quality and reliability in all formats before I make a final decision. The unit is currently in operation at Framingham where we are able to live with it for a while. I might add that no other processor has made it this far before and gone into daily operation. It's been kind of fun to see one do it.

I will be in Booth 939 at Showest.

Here is a bit of a gray area....

Once upon a time in Washington DC....there was, and is the Avalon theatre, formerly HPS-4000¨ certified theatre...it's initial HPS-4000¨ performance was Disney's reissue of Fantasia in Digital sound....I distinctly remember the PCM VCR feeding a Kintek KT-700 processor with a KT-750 decoder for the 2:4 decoding. Unlike most KT-700s, this one had a complement of equalizers hidden behind blank panels so as not to attract attention (rather than for security reasons). Kintek had a presence at the Avalon's HPS-4000¨ debut too.

Mr. Allen, was the Kintek KT-700 ever "approved?" If not, why was it used for the Fantasia shows? (the "first in digital" shows).

For the record, that theatre did have H.F. component failure as well as numerous fuse blowings, prior to anyone tampering with the system and its subsequent removal from the HPS-4000¨ list.

One last tidbit about this theatre, the screen frame was made by Standard Theatre Supply and they had a bad habit of using an odd number of legs...in this case, 5. As such, the center speaker either had to be placed directly behind the leg (and destroy the direct coupling aspects of the HPS-4000¨ speaker, or be shifted to one side (which was done)...as such, Center was never really center.

Steve

The Kintek KT-700 was never recommended by me as a stereo processor. I did think it did a very good job at synthesizing stereo from mono. In those days, it was not uncommon to use a Dolby processor for stereo and Kintek for mono in HPS-4000® theatres. The 1/3 rd octave equalizers at the Avalon were installed at my insistence. They were placed behind the special security panels for security.

The primary processor for the theatre was a CP-200. The Kintek was used in stereo for FANTASIA over my objection as its steering was defective and remained so through out the engagement of the film. The Kintek unit did have a very clean sound. That was its best feature. All in all, I thought the steering problems detracted and the use of the Kintek surround steering module was not well advised. Clean sound yes, but I felt better about the digital presentation of FANTASIA that we had done at the Plitt Century Plaza theatre in Los Angeles.

The Avalon theatre has not been an HPS-4000® listed theatre for about 13 or 14 years (I'm guessing.) I had forgotten about the center strut of the screen frame. It was one of the many stupid things that one runs into in this business.

Dear Mr. Allen:

I am surprised you would rate "clean sound" as one of the KT-700's hallmarks...when in fact, it's VCAs had a rather harsh sound. Did you ever try and play somthing through the unit and switch the VCA card in and out of "bypass" and then compare that sound to not using the KT-700 at all? I found that while in "bypass" the sound is just about indistinguishable from not using the KT-700 whereas using the VCAs created a rather harsh quality to the sound.

BTW...since I go with theory that the final result is no better than the weakest link...and since Fantasia used an analog 2:4 matrix decoder how can it be claimed to have been a "digital" performance? Just because there was a digital recording somewhere in the chain? One can hardly claim it had the dynamics that are on today's digital films or magnetic films in the era it was released.

While obviously the sound must be converted to analog at somepoint (at least with present technology), a format that used analog "processing" that inhearently limited the dynamics of the whole system shouldn't be given the credit of a digital presentation. These are my opinions, naturally.

Good day,

Steve

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The choice to use the KT-700 at the Avalon was taken out of my hands or it would not have happened. There was a blind listening test. The opinion was that one of the processors sounded cleaner. That one turned out to be the KT-700. The test was done with THE SORCERER'S APPRENTICE. This had been my suggestion because I guessed that the kind of orchestration used in that piece might not provoke the problems of the KT-700 and Kintek had asked for more time to fix it. It turned out to be a good guess on my part but it hid the problems, and I was never able to convince anyone that the CP-200 would be a better choice after that. There may have been one or two others, but I can only recall the using the KT-700 at that one theatre. I certainly did not hear any harshness. I would suspect that such a thing might occur if the VCA's were being over driven somehow. Again, this was 15 years ago. My memory is that the KT-700 sounded pretty clean when I dealt with it.

The FANTASIA presentations were indeed the first times a feature film was presented with a digital soundtrack. Two track or 20 track, is was digital. In fact it was a copy of the digital master. In Los Angeles, we actually opened with the one inch reel-to-reel digital print master, in the theatre, because the VHS version had not been fully completed. The 1982 Irwin Kostal recording of FANTASIA was the first film ever to be recorded, dubbed and presented in digital sound. Earlier films were done digitally by Disney for the theme parks, but this was the first digital feature film as far as any of us knew. Moroder's METROPOLIS and many others came later.

As to the 2:4 decoder, Dolby supplied us with a special CAT-150 card. In the Los Angeles presentation, the same CAT-150 card was used in the studio and the theatre. Not many know this, but a new print master was mixed for these presentations. To say that it wasn't digital because it was converted to analog at some point makes me wonder if any digital presentation is digital if it passes through a CP-65 or CP-55 or CP-200 or any analog processor after conversion in a DA-10 or DA-20 or a DTS unit? It's the digital soundtrack source that was and is digital in movie theatres. Nor would I think the use of a purely analog SA-10 with its 2:4 matrix, means that a film is no longer presented in digital.

Thanks for asking. It gives me a chance to write about FANTASIA a little. It was a great honor to work on that project and meet the people I did. Irwin Kostal became a close and dear friend. I miss him terribly. Disney's Nelson Meacham and I still stay in touch to this day. We had a great time -- just fabulous.

I am not aware of driver failures. We have had defective drivers that have acted up after leaving the factory, but they have not failed in the classic sense of being over driven or burned out. I have a stock of replacement drivers here just in case someone needs something on a weekend or some other time when the factory is closed. I have always had them here and all they do is gather dust. The only time I ship them anywhere is when they go back to the factory to be replaced by fresher stock. We do not have driver failures and, to my knowledge, have never lost a show due to a speaker problem in an HPS-4000® theatre.

The vast majority of defects we see in drivers are buzzes. A few exhibit adhesive problems. Some of these have escaped the factory, but I don't think there have been more than five to ten such units in twenty years and thousands of drivers. I remember finding an open voice coil in a midrange that had obviously been shipped that way as the lead was never properly attached to the diaphragm. It happens to all speaker makers. We have some duds sitting at the factory now waiting to go back to the vendors. The best news is that we haven't had a driver defect show up in any speaker produced in the last five years.

The speakers at the Avalon Theatre each had four midrange and four tweeter drivers. If only one of four units develops a problem, you can be pretty certain that it's a manufacturing problem in that specific driver. Otherwise more than one driver would show damage, since they all play the same thing at the same time. If you overheat one, you must overheat them all. Calling the Avalon theatre "un-tampered" is optimistic to say the least. Since I never received an order for a replacement driver for the Avalon, any such replacements were done after it was no longer a listed HPS-4000® theatre. As I said, it was not listed for very long. It's too bad too. I thought it was a wonderful sounding room at the time.

As far as moving the speaker off center is concerned; the high frequency units were moved to one side of the woofer horn rather than being placed right in the middle. It was hardly a major displacement and was never detected by a listener who didn't know about it. Today, I have those center struts removed and have the frame supported by some other means. One stature I do not have is that I do not own the theatres. When an owner installs screen frames with center struts, the best thing you can do is get them removed. If that is refused, you move the center HF unit 16 inches. On a 40 foot screen, it doesn't destroy the presentation. I agree with you, however, the struts do not belong in the center.

The choice of processor was not mine. It turned into a political mess and there was nothing one could do. I was surprised as well. But, the sound was clean despite the shortcomings of the KT-700 you and Mr. Guttag report. We must have had a good one.

As far as moving the speaker off center is concerned; the high frequency units were moved to one side of the woofer horn rather than being placed right in the middle. It was hardly a major displacement and was never detected by a listener who didn't know about it.
"<<

Dear Mr. Allen

Not to harp...

The way I found out about the center speaker was by watching a film...Center always seemed to be right of center...it wasn't untill some time after that I was able to go behind the screen and see for myself.

The mode of failre on the HF unit was indeed buzzing...most people would call that driver failure since it is something that should be replaced. But I suppose this may be a semantics thing. Why a replacement was never ordered makes no sense to me.

Back to the digital thing...

Special Cat. 150 (SB, I think was its designator)...The flaw I find in the thinking is that the "digital" recording is immediately sent into an analog 2:4 decoder that had inferior noise and dynamic range as it's digital recording. Fantasia had a serious weak link in it's chain...inferior dynamics, inferior channel separation...all attributed to an analog process used as part of the final presentation.

The current systems use their own discrete channels (or mostly discrete in DTS' sense with the subwoofer track living on the surrounds. If one could say the the VCAs of the analog processors is the limiting factor of the digital process, then there is some validity discounting the digital presentation through them but at least, the actual processing of the performance (ie 2:4 decoding) is not being done in the analog domain.

To draw an analogy...I have many Telarc digitally mastered records...I would not classify them as digital since they are played on an analog medium (records. Heck, they would have been classified as DDA in many cases. As opposed to DDD if they were on CDs.

As far as the SA-10 detracting from the digitalness...you bet it does...in fact, it has been the subject of some ridicule as to what it does to the surrounds.

My opinions...

Cheers,

Steve

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Let's talk dollars here. Assuming you were happy with the auditorium and sound processor, how much would it cost to bring in HPS approved speakers and amps for a medium to large size auditorium? If there are variables, please give a price range.

Next one, are there any special requirements such as screen size, viewing angle, a competent projection staff (don't we all wish), etc. that must be met before it is certified?

Thanks

When we did the actual world premiere of digital sound in a commercial movie theatre, we used the five-track digital print master of Giorgio Moroder's version of Fritz Lang's METROPOLIS. We fed the output of a Sony 3324 24-track digital recorder directly into the discrete inputs of a CP-200. The source of the presentation was a digital recording. We played only the third reel of the film as that was the limit of the technology at that time. But the sound quality was so stunning to everyone there, including Moroder's engineers, that Edward Plitt asked me what we could do for a feature film.

FANTASIA followed a few months later. I needed to come up with a practical way to do a full length feature film without having to rent hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment. We also needed to avoid changeovers as no technology was available to reliably perform such a maneuver. Keep in mind that in those days it took a minute or two just to establish synchronization with the digital recorder. The only choice I had was a two hour VHS cassette, used to store a PCM recording, that would be locked up to the projector. The film would be on a platter. No frames would be cut from the heads or tails. I suggested this to Nelson Meacham and his team at Disney made it work.

Though it was indeed a matrixed two track storage, it was in every way a digital presentation. You may argue the merits of the various analog stages that we must pass signals through in motion picture sound systems, and you will find much agreement from myself and many others, but the digital source makes it digital.

The special CAT-150 may have had a designator. I'm not sure. There were only two of them at the time and we had one. It came in at the last minute. I was asked to try it and see what I thought. Well, it sounded so much smoother and cleaner, I never had to reinstall the older card for comparison.

I would agree that the digital presentations of FANTASIA would have been better with a discrete master, but it sounded so good as it was that I actually found certain moments more satisfying to my ears than Boston Symphony Hall. I should explain that I don't mean that the theatre sounded better than the concert hall. I do mean that I personally felt more satisfied at certain moments. This was because we had come so close to recreating the concert hall experience that I could even think of making a comparison, and the sound we delivered in the theatre compared very well. The dynamics were quite good, considering that it was a room of 160 feet in length and 92 feet wide. Beethoven never saw a hall that big in Vienna. There isn't one that big in Vienna today either.

As to the driver: A buzzing driver is often repairable on site. It's usually just a small piece of debris that has become caught in the gap. Sometimes the buzzes disappear on their own, but I wouldn't depend on that. I would have been happy to fix it if I had been asked. However, I was not, as you now know.

I would have expected someone like yourself to hear the displacement of the center HF horns at the Avalon. I certainly didn't like it either, but there was no alternative for us at the time. I can tell you that I have never tolerated such a thing since. Of all the stupid things. We play talkies. One of the speakers goes in the center of the screen. Don't the frame folks know that? (I hope they read this so we never have to see a center support again.)

A small HPS-4000® B-class system with 10 surrounds and amplifiers would run about $15,000.00 for the speakers and amplifiers. A large XL-class system with our 4-way screen speakers would run about $26,000.00. These figures are negotiable with the dealer and do not include the installation, done by the dealer, or my trip to the theatre for final setup and calibration. These figures also do not factor in the approximately 33 percent savings in acoustic treatment realized when our speakers systems are used.

One should also keep in mind that a conventional subwoofer package built to equal the output of the one included in the large system quoted above, would cost around $20,000.00, just for the subwoofers.

I do not require theatre owners to build theatres with screens that can only be viewed within certain viewing angles. I have always found it quite satisfying that I have been able to "fit" and HPS-4000® system into any theatre. I do not believe a company like mine should be in the business of depriving an exhibitor of a superior sound system simply because the picture viewing angle falls outside a number by a few degrees. Think of all the older, sometimes historic, theatres that cannot install the ideal 50 foot screen without demolishing the front of the theatre. Some of these theatres have given me my favorite challenges.

Dear Mr. Allen:

Thank you for this information, it does make your point of being first in digital clearer.

>>"Though it was indeed a matrixed two track storage, it was in every way a digital presentation. You may argue the merits of the various analog stages that we must pass signals through in motion picture sound systems, and you will find much agreement from myself and many others, but the digital source makes it digital."<<

On this we must disagree. A band limited system (the surrounds are subjected to a 100Hz - 7KHz band pass filter), with substantially reduced dynamic range and a purely analog channel matrixing doesn't, in my mind, constitute a digital presentation, just sourced with digital material.

>>"We also needed to avoid changeovers"<< though off subject, this alone is enough for _ME_ to discount the process!

>>"I would have expected someone like yourself to hear the displacement of the center HF horns at the Avalon. I certainly didn't like it either, but there was no alternative for us at the time. I can tell you that I have never tolerated such a thing since. Of all the stupid things. We play talkies. One of the speakers goes in the center of the screen. Don't the frame folks know that? (I hope they read this so we never have to see a center support again.)"<<

I NEVER intended to imply this was by your design. Standard Theatre Supply screen frames were nortorious for this serious flaw. I feel you did the best with what you had to work with.

One last question, if you truely did not want the KT-700 used for the presentations, and you were have to choose which material was to be used in the "shoot off", why would you choose a piece that, in your opinion would give the KT-700 the best chance? Wouldn't have been better for all to let the KT-700 (and the CP-200) succeed or fail based on it's own merits or weaknesses? During a shoot off, normally, it is expected that flaws in a system are fleshed out (unless the shoot off is done by one of the parties and is biased).

Regards,

Steve

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