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Topic: Dolby SLS Express Series

Mark Gulbrandsen
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From: Music City
Registered: Jun 99

posted 03-21-2017 04:42 PM

I disagree completely. It is a mix practice as well as a codec on the production end and a supposedly high end playback system on the exhibition end. I'm not in the least faulting it for being an entire system. Just for the bare bones systems that have gone in around here that people are paying a premium to hear. People I know that frequent the movies say they can't hear any improvement over a 5.1 or 7.1 system. And that sort of opinion hurts or industry and exhibition in general.

Mark

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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

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From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001

posted 03-22-2017 12:38 AM

quote: Mark Gulbrandsen
People I know that frequent the movies say they can't hear any improvement over a 5.1 or 7.1 system. And that sort of opinion hurts or industry and exhibition in general.

That's not really a fault of Atmos itself. It's far more the fault of movie productions going through the motions creating what they think passes for an Atmos mix. But going through the motions is Standard Operating Procedure for big movie studios. I mean we're drowning in sequels, remakes, re-boots, etc. Hell, if you can manage to see a movie with a good Atmos mix there's an excellent chance the movie itself is going to be the same Save The Cat paint by numbers stuff you feel like you've seen 1000 times before.

Going through the motions policies certainly bleed over into the exhibition side of things too.

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Marco Giustini
Film God

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From: Reading, UK
Registered: Nov 2007

posted 03-22-2017 12:21 PM

quote: Mark Gulbrandsen
It is a mix practice as well as a codec on the production end and a supposedly high end playback system on the exhibition end

As it is 5.1 and 7.1.
If you then decide to only use the centre channel (i.e. Woody Allen) who are going to blame for the unhappy customer walking out of the auditorium?

(not that a Woody Allen movie would cause that reaction BTW!)

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Mark Gulbrandsen
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From: Music City
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posted 03-23-2017 01:04 PM

Marco, Woody has gone stereo long ago, I think when analog SR became the norm.

quote: Bobby Henderson
That's not really a fault of Atmos itself.

In a way, yes it is for now specifying too lose a set of specs. Is it supposed to be special? Supposedly. Is it i all locations? No. That "No" is gonna cause it to kill itself off.
I don't have a single customer that has any interest in directional sound, because so far they too have been failed to be impressed.

Mark

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Marco Giustini
Film God

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From: Reading, UK
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posted 03-23-2017 06:44 PM

quote: Mark Gulbrandsen
Marco, Woody has gone stereo long ago, I think when analog SR became the norm.

That's not true. His movies were still Dolby Digital 1.0 back in 2006 I believe.

quote: Mark Gulbrandsen
yes it is for now specifying too lose a set of specs. Is it supposed to be special? Supposedly. Is it i all locations? No. That "No" is gonna cause it to kill itself off.

I know what you want to say: it would have been nice if Dolby had been more strict with the specs and not allow cinemas to install 'minimum spec' Atmos and to show the same "Dolby Atmos" logo on the marquee. It was the same with THX.

However, the same applies to Dolby Digital, DTS and SDDS. We all knew what the requirements for digital sound were. Were all the cinemas equipped with Digital Sound upgrading all their speakers and amplifiers to make sure they had proper power handling for the new format? No way.

Atmos has nothing to do with that. It comes with a proper set of specs. If you then want to install the cheap version, then blame the exhibitor.

It's called multidimensional/multidirectional sound BTW [Wink]

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Dave Macaulay
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From: Toronto, Canada
Registered: Apr 2001

posted 03-24-2017 09:24 PM

My understanding is that major release movies are mixed for 7.1 with a pass to check that 5.1 sounds OK. Then Atmos - or whatever flavour of extended mix - effects are added. Other than for branding snipes, tracks are not currently mixed specifically for any "multidimensional/multidirectional" sound system. It takes long enough, facing tight deadlines, to complete a 7.1 track.

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Marco Giustini
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From: Reading, UK
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posted 03-25-2017 05:45 AM

I guess it depends on the budget, studio and how brave the sound mixer feels.
After all it's a new way of mixing; if you've been mixing using channels for many years with excellent results, you may not be so eager to jump on something you don't really know.

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Mark Gulbrandsen
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From: Music City
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posted 03-25-2017 09:51 AM

I have a good friend that is an Oscar winning mixer who is now at Sony, so I shall ask him about that. He started out as a Dolby Consultant on films so he has been in this since Day 1 of Dolby. I would still tend to believe that most of the mixes are all done in 7.1 these days. However if they are just hitting the button for a 5.1 output of that 7.1 mix I guarantee you those are listened to quite carefully before being approved. If the budget is low they may only do a 5.1.

Mark

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Carsten Kurz
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posted 04-04-2017 02:47 AM

Dolby has a new price list out with their new amps/speakers included.
Well, as it seems, it doesn't actually help to bring down the cost of an ATMOS installation. Only to keep it all-Dolby if that's what you're after.

- Carsten

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Pietro Clarici
Expert Film Handler

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From: Foligno (PG) Italy
Registered: Sep 2008

posted 04-04-2017 07:14 AM

Pricing for IMS3000 is not terrible. You get the equivalent of a CP850 Base for $500 less than a CP750. Atmos licence is still crazy, but knowing Dolby I was expecting much worse.

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Steve Guttag
We forgot the crackers Gromit!!!

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posted 04-04-2017 07:42 AM

I think if you look at what has just come out and/or integrated into the Dolby platform (e.g. SLS), it does, incrementally, bring down the price. It isn't going to slash it in half or anything. But a thousand here, a thousand there, and you are talking real money. How cheap can you get 24 or 32 channels of 300W/CH amps? How much space do they take up? The IMS3000 price over the IMS2000 is less costly than a CP750 and far less costly than a CP850Base, which is what it is targeting. That alone is going to save an exhibitor over $4K/system. The Rapid Rigging System, depending on what one is paying to install the ceiling speakers, particularly on retrofits may also save thousands by avoiding the amount of time moving a scaffold/lift all over the place.

So it is going to shave the price down some but not make it just a little more than a 7.1 system. It is still jumping into a very deep pool, cost wise.

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Bobby Henderson
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From: Lawton, OK, USA
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posted 04-04-2017 12:33 PM

Why does a Dolby CP-850 enabled with Atmos have to be so expensive? Is there something special inside a CP-850 that costs Dolby a great deal of money to include? From the way it looks to me (from my limited movie-goer perspective) it just seems like a giant sized premium price mark-up.

If a theater operator wants to install Atmos inside an auditorium and do it right he's already going to be spending a great deal of money just on speakers and power amplifiers. Add in the high price of a CP-850 and the equation becomes cost prohibitive for all but the highest profile movie theaters.

Dolby Atmos has been around for nearly 5 years. After all that time barely over 200 theaters in the United States and Canada have a screen equipped with it. Some theaters have Atmos on 2 or more screens but such locations are very rare. This reminds me a little of the early days of Dolby Digital. The original DA-10 system was priced around $20,000 -which would probably be well over $30,000 in today's dollars. Very few theaters were buying it. It took DTS coming along with a far less costly system, going into over 800 theaters on its first release, to radically change the situation. Unfortunately we don't have that happening today. Marketing for Auro and DTS-X is pretty pathetic. I can't even tell if there is a DTS-X equipped screen anywhere in my region of the country. For all the potential of next-generation surround sound it seems like most people couldn't care less.

It sure doesn't help an already bad situation when movies mixed in Atmos sound hardly any different than a conventional 5.1 or 7.1 mix. That makes the high sticker price of a CP-850 and all the other hardware needed to go with it even more pointless to buy.

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Steve Guttag
We forgot the crackers Gromit!!!

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From: Annapolis, MD
Registered: Dec 1999

posted 04-04-2017 04:06 PM

I cannot really speak to why they charge so much for the Atmos licensing/feature other than Dolby takes an active involvement in the design and commissioning of the system so those costs have to be factored in there somewhere (with the IMS3000, the Atmos upgrade price is the same as for CP850).

Note, the same could be said of the server companies that charge a hefty premium to activate 4K resolution on their IMBs. The hardware is already in there (as is the software)...it is truly just a matter of activating it. They want to recoup their engineering (and software) costs and the "premium" formats is where it is easiest to do that without seeming noncompetitive.

With respect to Dolby Digital on film, it was $15,000 for the DA10 and yes, DTS did help to drive the costs down but Dolby was only able to do that when the DA20 came out. They removed about 2/3rds of the cards in there too. It was cheaper to make and as the format took off and you have both DA20s and CP500s using the same cards, you get an economy of scale in production.

I think a problem Dolby is going to face is that Atmos is only going to find homes in "PLF" type auditoriums because the incremental cost to put one's toe in that water is always going to be immense due to all of the speakers, amps, wiring, rigging that come along with it. It isn't the processor that puts it over the top and Dolby just provided a means to knock your processor price down by almost 25%.

You could take the DTS/USL/GDC approach and promote a 16-channel "immersive" format that distinguishes itself even less from Surround 7.1 yet adds complexity to the installation with just about zero marquee value. I think the thing is you either go whole hog and try to make it as distinctive as possible or you go to a 5.1 or 7.1 system (we install almost all 7.1 systems now, they just don't cost any extra).

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Carsten Kurz
Film God

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From: Cologne, NRW, Germany
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posted 04-04-2017 05:59 PM

We'll see the cost coming down once the SMPTE standard for object based audio is finalized.

- Carsten

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Marcel Birgelen
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From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
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posted 04-04-2017 06:35 PM

Cinema operators demand smaller booths and theaters have, on average become smaller. So, in the end the racks with amps will be replaced by active speakers connected to some kind of data bus, which will probably be just Ethernet. While both setups have their advantages and disadvantages, I don’t see anything fundamentally wrong with those kind of setups.

quote: Marco Giustini
I know what you want to say: it would have been nice if Dolby had been more strict with the specs and not allow cinemas to install 'minimum spec' Atmos and to show the same "Dolby Atmos" logo on the marquee. It was the same with THX.

Atmos is no THX and since you can have Atmos on your phone nowadays, the name itself is almost as meaningful as THX has become.

I mentioned in the past, but there really is an opportunity for “THX Revisited”. [Wink]

quote: Carsten Kurz
We'll see the cost coming down once the SMPTE standard for object based audio is finalized.

Actually, I hope somebody else will come up with a reasonable, really OPEN MDA format before that. The need for MDA extends beyond cinema anyway.

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