As Joe can tell you, we worked in a couple of theatres that all the sound formats. While we enjoyed SDDS and DTS, Dolby is just simply play and forget.

Based on our expirience, I would say, Dolby won! I would only buy Dolby Digital.

1st, the room should sound good. It helps to be able to design the room with a good acoustical designer.

2nd, the equipment should sound good. Buy the best that you can afford and have it installed and set up by a good technician. Never pass up free advice from the kind people at Dolby labs.

I have found Smart to be reliable mostly but have had one unit that was troublesome. The Panastereo improves with each model. We run three at a drive-in and several others elsewhere, happy with results, have had average amount of board failures over the years.

In my opinion neither have proved as reliable as Eprad or as versatile and user friendly as a CP65. I always rate a piece of projection equipment on results, usability and reliability as found by the projectionist, not the tech! Results to the paying customer and ease of operation and reliability for projectionists are the key.

I love the CP200, but would admit they are far from user friendly in today's multiple booths.

As to usage, we go with SR-D almost exclusively. The SDDS is avoided for obvious reasons (just see any previous topic about the quality of this sound format). The DTS use is spotty due to the fact that we have the older, defective drives. At any given time, half of the drives in the complex refuse to read any discs and we have only had the upgrade kit installed in 2 houses. The "home office" just keeps sending us more defective drives to replace the ones that have gone Tango Uniform.

Finally there is the EQ: in a theater I saw 007: the world is not enought. EQ was so wrong that DTS sounds horrible. Theaters manager told me that "they prefer DD"!!

A negative note: in Italy not more distributors has DTS available. If you are not showing UIP movies, you'll use your DTS rarely... Also, EVERY time have the disks is like asking for a miracle...

Compatability with film prints prevailed over corporate synergy -- at least in this case.

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I like DTS for the sound. I think it sounds a touch better than Dolby's SR*D theatrical system. If SR*D were running at 448kb/s like it does on DVD the differences would be much harder to tell. Every theater screen equipped for digital sound where I live has DTS. Implementation is certainly not equal however. My friend's Carmike theater is just downright the best complex in this part of Oklahoma, and its sound quality is often better than what I can hear at any digital sounded theater in Oklahoma City for that matter. These days, if a movie I want to see is not playing at the Carmike 8, I'll usually wait for the DVD.

Our analog CP55s date back to 1986 and except for one power supply card and a piece of wire shorting out the test jack on the back panel we have not had any problems. Our theaters are not antiseptic by any means with all sorts of HVAC and salt air gremlins to play against so this is saying alot for Dolby's durability. They hold up well.

With the newer digital units there have been no problems.

Almost all our films come in with Dolby digital tracks and we don't even consider the other formats. For us it's a challenge just getting the films around on the circuit. We don't need to worry about lost and misshipped CDs and the like.

Off the track just a little:
I would like to see what the talk is concerning speakers. In our older systems we always specified JBL but in our new digital systems we have installed EAW (Eastern Acoustic Works) I have to say EAW makes a great sounding system. Just wondering since I've only heard JBL mentioned here in the forums. You guys always have so many interesting experiences/viewpoints.

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