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Gee whiz Mark, I could jump on this nit picking bandwagon and say "no it's not, B- is a terminal with available electrons, B+ is a terminal with a depletion of electrons". But no, I wouldn't be another nit picker and say that!

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Ray Derrick
President/Chief Engineer
Panalogic Corporation Sydney, Australia
Phone: 61 (0)2 9894 6655 Fax: 61 (0)2 9894 6935

Dave,
Set Dolby level with the CAT 22's in place then put in the CAT 280T's and run. This is the way Dolby reccommended it should be done years ago when these things came out.
Mark @ GTS

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Also I don't FULLY subscribe to the "it must be played the way the director intended" line... I am getting really sick of hearing that from people who have never been involved on the creative side of sound (or vision) production. The truth is half the directors in Hollywood wouldn't know good sound if it stood up and slapped them in the face! Just ask some of the audio fraternity. So often it is the sound team who create great soundtracks and the director just gives the nod and takes the credit for it (or just says "make it louder"!!). If you can make a mediocre mono soundtrack sound better, then why the hell not? Most sound professionals that I know would be grateful for the assistance.

Also with reference to Steve G's comparison about the practice of playing Dolby B encoded cassette tapes back with the NR switched off because it "sounds better".. the problem here was that high speed duplication (which is used for all general release pre-recorded cassettes) completely screws the Dolby B process because it results in lower high frequency levels than the master. So people HAD to turn the NR off to get decent highs. Also because of the considerable variation in record and reproduce levels from one cassette player to another, the only time Dolby B is guaranteed to work correctly is when a cassette is recorded and played back on the same properly aligned deck.

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Ray Derrick
President/Chief Engineer
Panalogic Corporation Sydney, Australia
Phone: 61 (0)2 9894 6655 Fax: 61 (0)2 9894 6935

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Steve G, you are right about consumers and Dolby B -- I started out as a audio recording engineer and no matter how much I explained that using the NR to boost high end was counter productive, no one paid any attention. The same with Dolby SVA tracks in the early days when they originally double inventoried Dolby and non-Dolby prints, Dolby quietly backed away from the double inventory concept (bad marketing fly in the Dolby ointment) and seemed to imply that Dolby prints with A type noise reduction were "compatible." Seemed to me, if you have type A noise reduction, there is no way you can play that back without decoding it, unless you like the sound of swooshing high end what sounds like someone constantly turning a treble control up and down. In the recording studio any engineer worth his salt would laugh if anyone suggested a tape recorded with Dolby A was compatable with decks not equipped with an A decoder. How Dolby got away with suggesting that it was possible to play Dolby A prints without decoding was a mystery to me.

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Frank Angel opined:
>How Dolby got away with suggesting that it was possible to play
>Dolby A prints without decoding was a mystery to me.

The Dolby A system works akin to a set of compandors working independently in 4 frequency bands. Encoding with no decoding ought to just have the effect of bringing up the low level sounds. That shouldn't be too deleterious to the sound. With the presumption that the non-Dolby theatres might have poorer listening conditions (background noise, bleed through, etc.) it hypothetically could even help.