Then you have the issue of home theater one-upping the commercial cinemas with its DVD and HD tape formats. Dolby Digital theatrical runs at only 320kb/s. On DVD, the 5.1 format runs at 384kb/s or 448kb/s. On D-VHS tapes it runs at an even better 576kb/s. Yet a commercial theater operator has to pay a lot more for his DD processor than any home user. And then we know all about DTS-ES having a 6.1 discrete home system, but no 6.1 discrete format for commercial cinemas. If I were running a movie theater circuit, I'd be fairly pissed off about the situation. Shouldn't commerical cinema have the lead on sound format sophistication?

Problem is, no matter how much money DVDs eventually bring in, and the video market certainly is a major cash cow for the industry, there IS no after-theatrical market if the theatrical run does not reach that critical mass that excites the public. If there is no "magic" at the theatre, there is no video market. That probably will not change for the long term -- it is a social thing. After all, any film that would be marketed directly to video would be nothing more than a "made for tv movie." And we know the studios are not going to make their 50 to 100 million in one weekend with a made for DVD movie.

When the studio honchos talk about "movie magic," they are talking about the film's opening weekend multiple millions, because they know that besides the money, those kinds of big openings drive all after-theatrical sales. Bottom line....they still need the theatres.

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This idea has been bandied around ever since the introduction of EX. Can't you just imagine the conversations down at the Dolby marketing department: We've got this extra channel (sort of) just sitting there doing nothing, we must be able to use it for something. Hey, what about ceiling speakers? Then we can bill it as another "exciting new format".

Trouble is, this idea raises some disturbing compatibility issues for normal non-ceiling-speaker-equipped (NCSE) cinemas (every cinema in the world that is, except for apparently one TODD-AO soundstage). Now to use the surround output from the EX matrix requires a 180 degree phase shifted (out-of-phase) signal to be encoded into the digital stereo surround channels (as per Dolby Stereo analog).

Now consider those unfortunate audients (deliberate mis-spelling folks) sitting down the centre line of the auditorium. They probably went to some trouble to get a seat down the middle because they like good, evenly balanced sound. Now whenever a sound comes along that is supposed to go to the (exciting new) ceiling system, in a normal (NCSE) cinema the sound will either be played out-of-phase through the left and right wall channels (and thus make all the audients down the centre line feel like their heads are being turned inside out), or (depending on their brand of EX processor if they have one), it may not be played at all because the logic steering is steering it to a dead end.

Great idea, don't you think? Sorry don't mean to be sarcastic, but I just can't help myself.

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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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Tom Holman's 10.2 layout is a little bit different to what was discussed in this thread.

To my knowledge the specs are:
C on center line
L,R at +/- 30° from center line
wide L,R at +/- 60°
high L,R at +/- 45° with vertical 45° angle
LS,RS at +/- 110°
BS at 180°

This is an enhancement of the ITU standard for home and DVD use which does not directly translate into the cinema setup.

10.2 does not use the five SDDS-8/70 mm screen speaker setup. The aditional wide L,R are located for outside the screen which has (or should have) a +/- 22.5° angle for the prime seats. The idea is to reproduce sidewall reflection for increased envelopment. In the cinema these speakers would be somewhere in the front part of the sidewalls.
The two elevated speakers are located in the front. In the cinema these speakers would be located above the screen. Whereas the new ceiling channel of the EX format is enhancing the surround with speakers above the audience.
There are two discrete LFE channels to increase low frequency envelopment especially for small rooms. For large rooms like cinemas LFE envelopment with one channel works much better.

Re: EX ceiling speaker

I do not share the criticism about lack of compatibilty of the matrixed EX ceiling channel.
We have the same situation with the matrixed Dolby A/SR and the compatibilty issue to mono playback. I think the ceiling channel will be used as an enhancement not mixing the sound entirely into the ceiling channel.
Strong localization from above is anyway limited as the voice of God does apply for too many movies.

I would agree that the issues would be similar if the overhead channel is not reproduced at all, which would probably occur in any cinema equipped with an SA10. However for all those other zillions of cinemas that do not have an SA10, the out-of-phase surround playback could be very annoying. Ok so it's not a big deal, but it is something that should be taken into consideration none the less. Out of phase signals are not so bad when coming from the front speakers, but locate the speakers either side of your head and tell me it doesn't bother you.

My biggest problem is with this "exciting new format" hype. Now really!

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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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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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Now I have an excuse, it is still before midnight in the underworld, eh sorry, "downunder" and I haven't turned into a pumpkin yet.

Of course my post above may seem a little silly (it was written with tongue in cheek) but the fact is this is something we can do right now with existing technology.

Of course we wouldn't consider trying to store 256 individual channels of audio, that would be wasteful of resources, but what we could easily do is store say 5 or 6 channels of audio information and also store some megadata that tells the the replay system which combination of speakers each channel of audio should be sent to at each moment in time.

This way, we could easily re-create a wave of sound that travels up, down, across, diagonally, you name it, around the theatre. Or you could get an screen character to talk to just a selected number of specially selected seats, so the rest of the audience are all the wondering what secrets the selected participants have been told and what they have missed out on.

Impossible? Nothing is impossible with DIGITAL. Remember, if you have DIGITAL you are invincible! (I love that line from whatever James Bond movie it was). When this happens and it will eventually, (or something like it) you heard it here first folks..

Now I am going to bed. Goodnight all.

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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