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Topic: when customers compare home with cinema

Michael Brown
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1522
From: Bradford, England
Registered: May 2001

posted 02-07-2003 01:00 PM

quote:
Mark J Marshall wrote on page 1:We had someone come up to our box office and ask "Do you have digital sound?" The box office person of course said "Yes" without thinking that some MOVIES are playing in digital sound, and some aren't.

Asking questions like that to box office staff is a dangerous business. [Roll Eyes]

I bet you could run a cinema with all mono sound and the box office would still say that the sound was 'Digital'.

One the phone once I was told (after listening in the background to about 3 staff members discussing what to tell me) "It's um.. erm.. CD quality sound". I didn't bother to go so I never found out what sound they were using.

EDIT: I often thought it would be a good idea to make some thing up and see if they say yes. Like ask them if they have 'Super 250% digital 3-D sound' or something. LOL

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Manny Knowles
"What are these things and WHY are they BLUE???"

Posts: 4247
From: Bloomington, IN, USA
Registered: Feb 2002

posted 02-07-2003 04:51 PM

Well I have also taken complaints about the surrounds not working. I remember when I first started out here I met one of the electricians who performed odd jobs around the theatre. He is a DJ and he also has some "experience" installing home theatre systems. Note "experience" does not necessarily equate to "skill", "knowledge" or "training." Anyway, this guy decided to lecture me about how every movie is supposedly different and, thus, requires a different EQ and volume setting.

Get this: He then told me about the time that he got so pissed off at the surrounds not being loud enough in one of these theatre. He explained to me about how he went into the booth and turned the amps up all by himself! He said that we needed to get our act together because he has had to get up out of the audience and do this every time.

Inside, I was freaking out but somehow I managed to maintain an outward sense of calm as he was talking.

I was new with the company and I had already made a lot of notes for things that needed to get sorted out. One of the things I jotted down after hearing that story was "put locks on booth doors." The other thing was "recalibrate sound systems" because people had obviously been monkeying around with the levels.

That electrician was not called for work that involved the booths and, eventually, he was completely replaced.

I also had a news reporter come up to me and inquire as to why we didn't get the letterboxed versions of every movie. He was doing a story on the rising popularity of DVD and home theatre and this was an area where he thought home viewers were getting more... I know, it's scary.

As for that alarming post that appears on page one of this thread...

quote:
I have been trying to improve our presentation from a quality picture standpoint by learning as much as I can and fixing problems with how we do things as I find them (and if I can), but since I started at the theater I have been "tweaking" the sound systems so that they sound better, much to the annoyance of the guy who was supposed to be training me who said "These systems are all calibrated by factory technicians - don't mess with the amps".

I don't know if we have the capability of measuring just how fast you would've been banned from the booth if this was my theatre. And in training, no less! Unbelievable!

And, strangely, nobody picked up on this. I'm thinking then that this has to be a joke. The kind of prank Joe R. might pull to get Brad or John P. to start pulling their hair out.

quote:
My response of course was that it might "sound" great to an oscilloscope, but to an ear it might sound like crap. I have all the "baseline" settings marked so I can easily go back there, but from time to time there is a movie where the music and effects are great but you just can't hear the dialog.

Proper EQ'ing is done with an oscilloscope and an RTA, yes. However a good technician will make a subjective evaluation of the EQ. I have never been satisfied (yet) by my first attempt at tuning a system. So it is ignorant to assume that professionals are relying solely on technical hardware to do the job. One of the most valuable tools we bring to a job is knowledge, an area in which this particular writer is evidently lacking.

Furthermore, marking the pots doesn't work. You'll never get them back in just the right place. You are causing more problems than you are solving.

I will give the benefit of the doubt for a minute -- maybe the sound system sucked when you got there and maybe your efforts brought about a better result. Just maybe. Subjectively, anyway. This is still not good practice. It is not professional and it should not stand uncontested on a forum of this nature.

No. The correct thing to do would be to get a trained professional to come in and recalibrate the system. Maybe your theatre is one of those that never has interest or money to spend on such things. (It is a common problem.) Well, that leaves you with another option: Learn the correct procedure and give it a shot before declaring essentially that you don't need no stinking 'scope.

This is wrong thinking and there are people reading these posts who don't know this and may think that their well-intentioned instincts to go 'tweaking' would be a step in the right direction.

I can't believe we got to page three without a smack-down!

Or am I wrong here? I'll gladly delete or retract or whatever if I'm out-of-line here. Somebody say something.

quote:
You can't just grab the master and turn up the juice a notch because then you will get complaints it is too loud, but just a little tweak to the gain of the center channel amp can leave the patrons with a good listening experience.

Then again, it could destroy the HF of the center channel speaker if "xXx" gets moved in there while you're off-duty.

quote:
Same thing goes for the surround channels, etc.... Die Another day was a good example (in our place) of a movie that had surround effects that would rip your head off combined with quiet dialog.... taking just a touch off the gain of the surround amp got rid of the customer complaints of it being too loud without turning the whole thing down so they couldn't hear the rest.

Then again, getting it calibrated properly eliminates all of this guesswork.

quote:
In my humble opinion...

I won't say anything

quote:
...if you have a person on hand that knows how the audio systems work, and cares enough to twiddle with them a bit it makes for a happier audience.

Are we allowed to say "bullshit" in this forum?

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Aaron Sisemore
Flaming Ribs beat Reeses Peanut Butter Cups any day!

Posts: 3061
From: Rockwall TX USA
Registered: Sep 1999

posted 02-07-2003 07:10 PM

quote:
Are we allowed to say "bullshit" in this forum?

Seeing that when the Northpark I and II were operating, Brad and Co. re-equalized and recalibrated the houses for EVERY new film that played there, I wouldn't discount everything that you quoted. The difference is the skill and experience of the technician doing the work.

-Aaron

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Michael Schaffer
"Where is the
Boardwalk Hotel?"

Posts: 4143
From: Boston, MA
Registered: Apr 2002

posted 02-07-2003 08:06 PM

quote:
I often thought it would be a good idea to make some thing up and see if they say yes. Like ask them if they have 'Super 250% digital 3-D sound' or something. LOL

I sometimes do things like that. It mostly works.

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Manny Knowles
"What are these things and WHY are they BLUE???"

Posts: 4247
From: Bloomington, IN, USA
Registered: Feb 2002

posted 02-07-2003 08:46 PM

quote:
Seeing that when the Northpark I and II were operating, Brad and Co. re-equalized and recalibrated the houses for EVERY new film that played there, I wouldn't discount everything that you quoted. The difference is the skill and experience of the technician doing the work.

But Brad is not in training and, as far as I know, he does not buy into the "golden ears" approach.

And just because someone we know and respect EQ's a particular system on a near-weekly basis does not make the practice "normal."

Brad -- Was that theatre a special case? Or do you EQ all screens for all new movies?

Aaron -- you've helped me out in the past with good advice and so I trust you and respect you and I take your point. But now I am curious as to how far you would go in terms of being in agreement/disagreement with the quoted post. At this point, it sounds like maybe you think there's something to that argument.

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Brad Miller
Administrator

Posts: 17775
From: Plano, TX (36.2 miles NW of Rockwall)
Registered: May 99

posted 02-07-2003 09:06 PM

That was a very special case theater Manny. Nowhere else does anyone do this, nor do I recommend it. We always started with a baseline standard EQing that I derived after spending a few nights setting up the multiplexer all over the auditorium and making "average" adjustments based upon all of my notes on paper. From then we used outboard EQs for minor tweeks and adjustments in frequency response as well as occasional level modifications. What most people misunderstand here is that the room was not tuned solely by ear and any modifications that were done by ear was minor. Because the controls were outside of the CP200, we could always start with a perfectly clean slate by setting the controls on the outboard EQs to "zero", at which point the internal room cailbration was still preserved in the CP200. It worked very well for us and people would drive from as far as neighboring states every week to screen movies there because of the extreme attention to sound and picture presentation.

Bear in mind that was a 2 screen with a professional and qualified staff. Can you imagine even attempting to do something as small as a 6 plex with prints moving around all the time? [Eek!]

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Aaron Sisemore
Flaming Ribs beat Reeses Peanut Butter Cups any day!

Posts: 3061
From: Rockwall TX USA
Registered: Sep 1999

posted 02-08-2003 01:44 AM

quote:
But now I am curious as to how far you would go in terms of being in agreement/disagreement with the quoted post. At this point, it sounds like maybe you think there's something to that argument.

Perhaps I am either misreading the quoted items or taking them out of context. Of course a trainee shouldn't be even thinking of messing with the audio systems. I have had to recalibrate a number of systems because someone (I have seen the finger-pointing toward everyone from the theatre manager to the janitorial staff) decided that either they wanted to play their CD's really loud while cleaning (and crank all the amp levels to max), or they thought something didn't sound up to their expectations and decided to perform some of their own 'tweeks'. [Eek!]

-Aaron

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Ray Derrick
Master Film Handler

Posts: 310
From: Sydney, Australia
Registered: Sep 2001

posted 02-09-2003 07:22 AM

I am with you Manny, 100%. Our service division has a customer down the coast South of Sydney who pays us a lot of money to send a skilled technician all the way down there to tune his cinema. No sooner has the tech left the building than the customer is in there tweaking the amp levels. His first move (always) is to turn up the surrounds by about 6-8dB. A few days later he decides he can't hear the dialogue (because the surrounds are drowning it out) so he winds up the centre channel amp. Of course then he can't hear any left and right so we get a call to go back down there and the whole process starts over. Despite the veritable gold mine for our service division, our field tech just hates going back. He is very good at his craft and is well respected in the industry and spends a lot of time getting the sound absolutely perfect, only to have his work screwed up by the mere twisting of a dial! Sometimes, no matter what you say or do, you just cannot win.

And on the subject of frequent re-eqing, many years ago I attended an SMPTE meeting at the Crystal Palace, which at that time was the premium film mixing facility in Sydney. Some of the senior mixing engineers were on hand to play us some footage of Mad Max 3 (which was at that time a new movie that had been mixed there) and they mentioned that their technical people re-eq'ed the theatre EVERY morning. Of course this statement was greeted by a chorus of gasps from the audience of seasoned audio professionals and the explanation was then offered that the equalisers in the Dolby processor "drifted" that much that a daily eq was necessary. Well, you can imagine that a hundred or so audio professionals walked away from that meeting thinking either Dolby were pathetic or that these film guys were completely out of their tree (or both). In my case, I chose the latter.

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