There would be an obvious economic benefit to having one central server playing back the audio data for all screens at one. With it just being one computer, that particular server could be beefed up with all the goodies needed for robust fault tolerant operation. Multiple processors, perhaps a UNIX based OS, RAID disc arrays, lots of RAM etc could be included in one unit that plays sound to anywhere from 8 to as many as 24 or more screens. That might sound like a bit much, but you have to consider a good Mac-based Avid video editing setup crunches a lot more data than that. So I don't think it is a big hardship for it to be made into a reality.

A central server? Eww. "Single point of failure." It seems like a really bad idea. What's the benefit? Avoiding having multiple distributed individual DTS players? That doesn't seem like a useful thing to eliminate. Is the goal to be able to reduce the instances of media? If so, then:
a) I don't think it's a good idea to encourage prints to ship without media.
b) You can acheive that by building a LAN between the individual
DTS players.

It seems to me this is in the cart-before-the-horse department. What do you hope to gain?

--jhawk

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Steven Gorsky

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All three systems sounded very simlar whilst only the centre channel had information, although Dolby digital did seem to lack some fine detail - things like an explosion would lack the little "tinkels" fading off into nothing, that both DTS and SR reproduced quite clearly.

But the real differences came when all channels started to fire at once. The DD seemed to become quite "brittle" at times which neither DTS nor SR suffered from. We also noticed an occasional strange effect on some dialogue with DD, a kind of "furiness" which made it a little hard to understand. We tried switching off some channels and just listening to say the left and right without centre. Or just the surrounds. Here you could hear big differences between DD and DTS. With heavy dialogue over effects or music there was a kind of inverse modulation effect going on, not so much in amplitude but more in the frequency spectrum. However DTS sounded normal and unaffected. I remember Bill Mead (ex-Dolby and now ex-SDDS) once described this effect to me as a "shadow of one channel in another", something he put down to Dolby's bit sharing and something that he claimed SDDS does not suffer from, (even though SDDS also uses a licenced Dolby compression scheme, but with no bit sharing arrangement).

We ran a reel (from I forget what film) in which there is a brief scene in a heavy thunder/rain storm with dialogue mixed over the heavy rain and you could really hear the rain in the left, right and surrounds being "modulated" by the dialog in the missing centre channel. But turn on all channels back on and this effect would be masked to a certain extent by the more dominant sound in the centre channel, which is why DD works so well most of the time.

IMHO the primary consideration in terms of sound quality is that the APTX compression system used by DTS is just like computer compression - what goes in is what comes out, with almost zero data loss. Whereas the AC3 system used for Dolby Digital is a very lossy system which literally discards large chunks of audio when it thinks you are not paying attention. My company does not support one cinema digital system over any other (we don't make or sell digital cinema processors so I have no reason to be biased) but from what my ears tell me, I'll take the lossless system any day!

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But as it became a service offering as well as an internal method of multiplexing multiple phone calls on the same wires the term has evolved to usually referring to the 1.544 mbps connection.

quote:

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If you call the telco and ahve them put in T-1 service [...] it's very likely that what they'd install would actually be an xDSL line.

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That's just not true. A DS1 (aka T1) is a spec for bits over copper pairs (actually two pair), and there are a number of envelopes within which it can be delivered, and I suspect there's a specification for DS1 over fiber, though no one in their right mind would use it (because if you have fiber, you'll carry a DS3 (28 T1s) or an OC{whatever}). There are certainly many specs for how you carry T1s over fiber within large bundles (e.g. VT1.5).

But that's beside the point. You'll never get a T1 delivered over DSL. It's just not possible to guarantee the bit rates and timing that are the definition of T1. It might be true that if you call up a seedy clueless Internet provider and ask for a "T1", they'll interpret your request as asking for a "1.5mbps connection" and then give you a DSL connection instead. But a telephone company would never do that. A T1 has a very clear meaning, and plenty of time it is used for voice and not data anyway (a T1 holds 24 DS0s, or regular voice channels).

Anyhow, in my experience, I've never seen anyone get delivered a T1 directly over fiber. Sure, fiber from the CO to the building to a mux, possibly a mux right next to your T1 handoff, but still, the T1 handoff is generally copper. Nothing else makes sense from a price standpoint.

John is right that a T-1 line is not at all similar to a DSL line. In fact it is not treated at all like a DSL service and is about 10 times more expensive. The modem is also drastically different. Briefly, we used the T-1's that we had installed for a special radio communications system for the Olympics. Instead of installing countless radio type repeaters on mountain tops to communicate between Park City, Snow Bain(Near Ogden) and Salt Lake City we ran these "Psudo" repeaters over the internet via these T-1 lines. In the long haul it was alot cheaper to go this route and alot better audio quality. Qwest provided our T-1 lines and with them 24/7 technical support and guaranteed 4 hour service if the lines went down 7 days a week.

The other problem we would have had with an all radio system is that if a mountain top system went down we would have had to take a secret service agent along with us for the repair. No one was allowed on a roof top or mountain top starting the Thursday before the Opening Ceremony. There was about a 2 day waiting list for Agents to do this.

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