and why ?

(take out the practical aspect, dolby being on the film, dts on a CD: just the sonic differences-advtanges, clarity, details, dynamics etc )

I hope I have not opened a can of worms......
 

I prefer both of them but in theor seperate processor form in conjunction with a stand alone analog processor like the Cp-65 or Panastereo CSP-1200.
Why? I have had too many problems with digital processors getting the hicckups or belching and looosing their settings, thus requireing a re-load of the data, and or locking up thus requireing a re-boot. Digital processors may be more convenient but they generally do not sound as good as the analog seperates do. I WAS caught up in the digital mania sect but fortunately I have been released by them and all their associated problems. Also, this way if your digital system won't play back cause the tracks are too worn or U don't get the disks, or dies, you can go right on with the highest quality analog SR playback.
Mark @ Home

No booth pics on that site but it's XL's with 5 Stars & Kelmar basement readers, CP500D, DTS, QSC's and a couple of Magna-Tech dubbers. The only really noteworthy thing in the booth is a CP100 frame kitbashed to hold 6 Cat.280T SR cards (& 6 meters) for running 6-track mag. The surrounds you see in the pix are JBL Control series and the idea was to use a larger number of smaller speakers for a more even soundfield. Screen curtain looks rather retro but hey, at least I gots one and I do use it.
 

Nice screening room!!

David: Roger usually sits in the last row nearest the door.
 

(Did ya catch that Karen? )
 

Personally, I have found that I like SDDS the best in terms of sound quality when I have done my own shoot out. Since I knew which was playing, that test is a bit flawed (preconceived notions and all). I'll say that when all three are playing well (no dropouts), there is one I can almost always pick off from the audience...especially if the EV DH1 driver is being used.

Steve

------------------
"Old projectionists never die, they just changeover!"
 

it sounds like "SACD" is coming to cinemas

and why not ? SACD crushes CD sound ( details, dynamics, bandwith etc....) however, we'll need high frequencies tweeters ! (SACD is filtered around 50khz, vs around 22khz for PCM on CD)

don't know if you guys followed the exchange of letters between Dolby and DTS some time ago...... (pretty much flawed tome, Dolby was running the test)

few audiences are "capable" to distinguish between formats. they either notice it's too low or too loud or drop outs but that's it.

if audiophiles or cinema experts as here were blind tested, that would be another story.

There was a high end shoot out a few years back betwen Dolby Digital and DTS. I think it was published either in Widescreen Journal, or Stereophile Mag.

One other thought. Its time now for manufacturers to include 5.1 Non-Sync inputs for the outputs from SACD and DVD audio players on all processors. Hello Ray.....what do you think?
Mark @ Home

As a practical matter, it's very difficult to tell any difference in a theater between good SRD and good DTS. They both can sound great. On paper though, DTS has clear advantages. The Dolby "bit-bucket" scheme where bits are "borrowed" from one channel to fill out another channel is just not conducive to achieving the best possible soundfield. DTS does not have this issue as all channels are fully discrete. DTS also has more bits to work with, less compression, as others have noted.

------------------
- dave
Look at this! His chin strap has been cut!
 

I did something like this with Photoshop once where I took three unrelated B&W images and plugged them into the individual red, blue, green color channels of a color image and then saved it in different formats with different degrees of compression (or none). Of course only the bitmapped formats preserved each image with no crosstalk but it was interesting to see how much of the other two images would show up in each using GIF, JPEG, etc. And I think the audio test above would be equally interesting.
 

sorry for being nit-picky... but at least I'm posting, eh?

On a side note, I'd love to see multi-channel (5.1 or more) non-sync inputs.

Kelsey Black
 

------------------
- dave
Look at this! His chin strap has been cut!
 

one film that impressed me recently with its DTS track was THE LAST CASTTLE. but there are many.

on dvd, dolby uses dialnorm (..... well...) and often times, the master is downcooked before being encoded in Dolby 5.1 to be able to be heard "better" in stereo on tv speakers or mini systems ( by the mass of consumers ). dts tracks are not. but this is out of discusion here

btw: how did you like the dts track of BLACK HAWK DOWN ?

Well, this isn't on ALL processors, but the latest Panastereo CSP2200 Digital Cinema Processor (which ain't digital at all, but rather a premium analog controller for the analog feeds from a Digital Cinema system) DOES offer multichannel non-sync inputs for doing exactly what Mark asks for.

------------------
Oscar Neundorfer
Chief Engineer
SMART Devices, Inc.

oscar@smartdev.com
 

It is amazing to consider what is possible for DTS using 4.7GB DVD-ROM or DVD-R discs. Using the 3:1 compression DTS CAC home theater algorithm, if you doubled the bitrate from 1536kb/s to 3072kb/s you could fit nearly 204 minutes of 12 channel audio onto one single disc! Pretty amazing. For uncompressed 20/48 12 track audio, you'll get nearly one hour of audio on a disc.

Using something like Meridian Lossless Packing or some other lossless 2:1 audio compression format (perhaps DTS could develop one of their own) you would get 2 hours of 12 channel 20/48 audio on one disc.

One would have to go to multiple DVD-ROM/DVD-R discs if something like 24-bit/96kHz audio in 12 channel form was to be used. But most any DTS system sold these days features three CD-ROM drives. What's the difference in having three DVD-ROM drives?

For good data throughput, and guarding against possible playback errors due to the more fragile nature of DVD discs, it might be a good idea to include a built in hard disc to store audio data and have that used for playback. Hard drive capacities are really huge anymore and it would be no problem to offload data from one, two or even three DVDs. Have the machine download the audio from the discs while you are building up the film print.

At any rate, I think 10.2 Surround / 12-track Surround is the way to go for a next generation setup. DTS' dual system method would be the easiest way to deliver it. Even right now, one could put together a sort of experimental 10.2 Surround setup just using existing playback gear. Two DTS players, Two Dolby CP-65s and a bunch of amplifers could get the job done. Actually, I'm kind of surprised there hasn't been any kind of showcase effort to do this in a major "premiere-class" theater for an event picture's release. If I were a filmmaker of considerable clout, I would want a New York or Los Angeles show featuring 70mm projection and a 10.2 Surround setup just to be the first to do it.
 

And besides, do you see DTS desupporting their CD format anytime soon? Are these prints going to run around with a pair of DTS CDs, as well as a DTS DVD?

Perhaps DTS will pioneer digital distribution before we get real digital cinema, since they could really benefit from an out-of-band distribution mechanism for soundtracks.

--jhawk
 

I don't think mixing for 10.2 Surround should be anymore difficult than doing work for 5.1 presently. Professional computer driven sound mixing systems like Pro Tools offer visual metaphors for placing sounds in the listening environment and channel panning effects. The 10.2 format would simply be a more gradual format in which to output the sound mixdowns. 10.2 Surround would not create a big workflow change in how a lot of sound is aquired and prepared. Many film sound designers work with passages of audio containing literally hundreds of discrete tracks. The final mix could be "folded down" into 10.2 and 5.1 just about as easy as doing 5.1 alone (with the word "easy" being a relative thing).

As to DTS CDs becoming obsolete, there's little danger of that. The same time code applied to 35mm prints right now could be used to drive multiple formats. Only the media itself and type of hardware used for playback changes. The film print remains the same.

On the SDDS-8 thing, I think the problem in why so few SDDS-8 films were made is that there really are not very many SDDS-8 equipped theaters. The vast majority of all SDDS installations are 5.1. I don't know the exact numbers, but with most multiplex installations I would say SDDS-8 wired systems are outnumbered by SDDS-6 installations by at least a 6:1 or 8:1 margin. There may be fewer than 1000 SDDS-8 installations worldwide (and there are less than 10,000 total).

A 10.2 Surround format would be a specific format. But the speaker/amp setups for it would make it easy for the system to show virtually any kind of past sound format. You could run 70mm Format 42 shows there because of the twin LFE channels. SDDS-8 could work in it for the five-up-front design. 10.2 Surround calls for three discrete surround channels, with two more channels left over for either extra side wall or ceiling mounted surrounds.
 

#1 A very large hard drive that can store several (the more the better) dts sound files so that the cdrom drives only need to be used once to load up the new movie. This would extend the cdrom useful life immensely.

#2 I would hope they will start issuing a "C" disc. The "A" and "B" discs would carry the same 5.1 channels of audio to keep playback backwards compatible with the units in theaters currently, but the "C" disc could be DVD based and would carry a full 9 channel discrete mix (5 stage speakers, 3 surrounds...discrete, 1 subwoofer). If possible, perhaps even have uncompressed audio. Whatever they end up doing, of course I'm sure they will keep it backwards compatible.

I've been using Maxtor 7200RPM IDE drives for some time now and know of many other people who do as well. A couple of us use them for video editing and if they can handle that, they can certainly handle anything dts will throw at them. I've never had a glitch with them and know of noone that has had any problems either. Next time you buy a hard drive, give Maxtor a shot.
 

Steven Gorsky
 

Steven Gorsky
 

The Costco hard drives I referred to for $120 were in fact Maxtor 7200 RPM. I am not slamming Maxtor or any other particular brand. But in general, mass-marketed IDE hard drives are designed and manufactured to meet a very competitive market price point. I've been doing some contract work for a local startup software company, whose employees all have new Dell systems within the last 6 months. In that 6 months, they have had 4 IDE hard drives fail (Maxtor and Seagate). The failed drives ran perfectly fine for a couple months, then abruptly failed. I would categorize this as "infant mortality". In other words, if the drive gets past the 3-4 month period, it will probably last indefinitely. But if there is any weak or marginal component in it, expect to see the drive fail within a few months.

This infant mortality syndrome isn't limited to IDE drives either. SCSI drives are far more expensive than IDE, and what that money is supposed to be buying is better performance, engineering, and quality control. Where I used to work, we had 8 file servers with high-performance RAID-5 SCSI hard drive systems. The number of drives in each RAID array varied from a low of 3 to a high of 12, and they were running NT and NetWare. Individual drive capacity ranged from 4GB to 36GB (all drives in a given array are identical in size). Several popular SCSI drive manufacturers were represented: Quantum, IBM, and Seagate for the most part. Servers were HP, Dell, and Compaq.

Every single time I set up a new server for them, I would run it in "pilot mode" for a couple weeks before putting it on line. More often than not, at least 1 drive would fail during that test period. When the server went "live", it would typically lose 1 or more drives in the first few months (never all at once; spread out over weeks). Infant mortality at work again. At that point, things would usually settle down and there would be no more problems.

So what I'm saying is that in my experience, when hard drive reliability is viewed via a fairly large sample, they tend to be the most likely thing to fail in any computer system. It's true that if you buy yourself 1 drive, the odds are it will probably work fine and last a long time. Buy and install 50 of them, and your chances of running into problems are much greater.

------------------
- dave
Look at this! His chin strap has been cut!

That said, my main server at home is using dual 18gig Western Digital SCSI drives. I'm using software mirroring (Sun's Disksuite) and doing nightly backups to tape, so hopefully I should be relatively safe from data loss.

I agree that hard disks (and moving parts in general) represent additional points of failure, but hopefully DTS will be smart enough to make sure that the new unit will function as the current ones do (playing the sound directly off the CDs) in the event of hard drive failure.
 

I suppose it's OK if they're designed to be field replaceable (perhaps SCA drives removable from the front panel, with no code on them that the box needs to boot...)

Bobby, you responded to me with

quote:

---

As to DTS CDs becoming obsolete, there's little danger of that. The same time code applied to 35mm prints right now could be used to drive multiple formats. Only the media itself and type of hardware used for playback changes

---

--jhawk
 

Of course I agree that units should be thoroughly tested before being put into service, and yes even decent drives can fail prematurely. So, yes the new DTS player should always be able to play DTS discs in the event of hard drive failure, and I doubt DTS didn't think of this.

I have a number of Western Digital drives, and even though I've had some fail, WD was very easy to work with to get a replacement under warranty.

Steven Gorsky
 

As for Western Digital, avoid them like the plague.

IBM, first experience with them, 2 weeks after installation, it failed. It's replacement hasn't failed so I guess it was just a bad apple.

If DTS were to implement that, it would fix a lot of headaches:

(1) Auditoriums that only have DTS installed don't lose digital sound if the discs are not shipped or lost.

(2) All Trailers will ALWAYS be digital. (provided they have a time-code)

(3) Distribution/production costs are lowered. (No more overnighting discs to the theater that were damaged/lost)

Besides, DTS could sell the upgrade kit and make a bundle.

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.

As to how data should be transferred to theaters, its all a judgment call. Lots of people talk about satellite delivery. However, that bandwidth costs a lot of money. DSL, Cable and even Broadband are too slow at this time. Discs, be they CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, removable hard discs, etc., may be the best option for the time being.
 

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

Steven Gorsky

T1 requires a fiber optic cable.
 

Joe has a super deal with a fiber connection, but I think he only pays around $45/month and that's obviously not something that comes over the phone line. I'm stumped. Maybe Mark just worded it wrong and it's DSL.
 

Personally I don't think 512K up would be good enough for a web server. T1 has well more than twice that amount.
 

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!

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

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.

If you call the telco and have them put in T-1 service they *might* implement it with an actual T-1 circuit (pulses on the wires) but given the difficulties that entails (such as going out and getting rid of any bridged taps on that particular loop to eliminate echoes from unused and unterminated branches) it's very likely that what they'd install would actually be an xDSL line. Your equipment would see T-1 service at each end on *your* side of their equipment but on their side it's an analog modem signal going down the line. Thus T-1 service without a physical T-1 line. No reason it could not be implemented with fiber as well.
 

quote:

---

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.

---

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.

--jhawk

 

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.

Part-2 http://www.dtsonline.com/dolbyrvu.pdf

Mark @ New GTS

The building where I currently work is set up as John describes: there is one OC-48 to the building which is fed to a demux and from which POTS lines, T1 lines, etc. are run to individual offices. As a side note, this creates an interesting single-point-of-failure issue: my employer's network is multihomed with two ISPs using two T1s, but that doesn't help if some backhoe cuts the fiber to the building (which would take out voice telephones as well).

vis-a-vis T1 vs. DS1, DS1 is ANSI nomenclature, and T1 is Bellcore nomenclature, and as a practical matter, they are used 100% interchangeably by the telco community, though there's certainly a bias in the vernacular towards saying "T1." (On the flipside, at least in the IP world, DS3 is a lot more prevalent than T3.)

If you consult ANSI T1.106 (my copy is at home...; yes, it's T1.106 despite the fact that DS1 is the thing it defines), I believe you will find that it explicitly specifies the electrical (i.e. copper) interface for a DS1, specifically implying copper, and it's not until DS3s (hmm, or possibly some sub-DS3 -speed specification that is not generally used) that optical interfaces are discussed.

--jhawk

2ndly:
I agree that its time for a DVD/HD based DTS unit. I think that this unit should have n option allowing the user to playback from the HD or the DVD, that way if the HD fails, you have a backup to use while you wait for your theater circuit to send out an engineer.
I do not think that a central server is a good idea, servers can esily fail, and when they do you would loose all digital sound in your dts theatres. The only server i would trust with such a task would be a MacOSX Server or another UNIX based system.

My two cents: MAXTOR all the way.
 

DTS has adopted a pretty good strategy of not requiring the user to have to configure the box or make decisions very often. Probably it would be best for them to stick with that, with the box figuring out if the HD had failed by itself, but of course allowing you to override this. It's a fine line between "technician configuring the box knows best," "projectionist running the box knows best," "manufacturer of the box knows best," and "nobody on earth knows best!"

--jhawk
 

Here are some pertinent quotes:

"Most T1 service installed today is delivered via HDSL technology, which provides a T1 connection between the ILEC or CLEC and the customer."

"A well-known technology, HDSL has been in use for more than a decade as the generally accepted means for delivering T1 service."

"High bit-rate DSL (HDSL)...is used as the signaling technology in approximately 80% of T1 connections."

In any case, it's definitely not what most people mean colloquially when they say "DSL" or even "xDSL." Off to go scratch my head...

--jhawk
 

DOLBY DIGITAL is my personal favorite. It's a data-on-film format (very important, imho) and there are at least five versions of the Dolby Digital logo trailer. Dolby provides free trailers every year to every Dolby-equipped theatre (but this offer may not apply, or may vary, for those of you in North America). Moviegoers are also very familiar with the Dolby name and logo, so my hunch is that's what influences my clients most.

SDDS is also a data-on-film format. It costs about the same as Dolby Digital and it is the only one with a digital backup. It also offers up to 8 (discreet) channels, but such movies are rare. Most SDDS screens I've seen are only set up for 6 channels. AFIAK, there is only one version of the SDDS logo trailer and – way back when I worked for AMC – Sony was charging about $55 for trailers.

DTS is the cheapest to buy/install, but the discs often arrive late - I'm in The Bahamas, so we get our prints sometimes a week ahead of release (due to our separate ratings system). The DTS discs are never ready, and I always have to call to order them. Almost a decade after its introduction, there are only two versions of the DTS logo trailer. The newer "Sonic Landscape" trailer is good for use on quiet, intimate movies but I have to say I'm not that impressed with it. Also, DTS used to make you pay $90 for a set of 4 trailers (2 flat, 2 scope). However, I think they have recently stopped charging for them.

------------------
And, hey! Let's be careful out there.

~Manny.

I've never been completely thrilled with the sound from a DFP-2000 processor, but I've got to tell ya, hook up a DFP-3000 (or a DFP-2500) THROUGH a Dolby processor (bypassing the Sony EQing) and it is DAMNED impressive! This is currently my favorite and preferred setup, at least until someone comes along with something better or I am introduced to a better existing product that I have not used. Then again I don't care for the sound of a Dolby CP-500 either.

For general cinema use though, SRD is still my number one choice because of price and availability of prints with SRD tracks, plus top notch customer service. A CP500 or CP650 simply cannot be beat as a package with those two very important points taken into account. If money was no object, I would install DFP-2500s through Dolby CP65s or CP200s, as these are extremely good and reliable, plus you've got great customer service from the Sony guys too. Unfortunately those aren't too cheap and very few theaters are willing to spend that kind of money. Dts has been my last choice for awhile now, not in terms of quality (which is very good and very reliable), but I got screwed about a year ago from dts customer service because Film-Tech is not a huge theater chain or dealer who sells hundreds of their systems and apparently us small guys are not important to dts to make good on defective equipment. I have a hard time supporting a manufacturer who works like that.

sorry to disagree on the SACD and the human ears "incapable" to hear the advantages of extended bandwith (SACD goes down to 5hz too).
First, an audiophile ear becomes much more accurate over time, even if it looses some of its sonic ability with age.
Second, the "filtering" of PCM on CD induces distorsion much sooner, or much lower should I say, than 22khz. By extending the higher bandwith, SACD ( and DVDAUDIO )pushes further that distortioned zone, allowing almost digital distorsion-free zone up to say 50khz or so.
I don't know if you have heard SACD, but it's quite a whole new world.
The authenticity of the sound is stunning, providing the room, amplifiers and speakers are able to produce these extended frequencies. And third, the humain brain-skull and body are very receptive too, not just the ears. http://interprod5.imgusa.com/son-403/technology.asp

back to dts vs dd : those two hate eachother, especially Dolby who really didn't like DTS to try to take a share on dvd: hence, this flawed "blind" test, as DTS was cutting in half ( which is just a bit lower than the cinema dts btw ) its data rate...

btw, do you guys know if the cinema DTS will feature somehow the new 96Khz-24bit frequencies-resolution ?

 

Actually I think you would need all new HF drivers, more power, etc due to the greatly increased dynamic range of both SACD and DVD Audio. The main benefit of having a 50khz response is to move the filters out into the supersonic realm and out of the audible range. You also will get all the harmonics, overtones, etc that you don't get with a lopped off 20khz bandwidth.
Mark @ New GTS
 

I used to think that the three digital formats were pretty much indistinguishable, but now I would give a slight edge to DTS over SR-D. It just sounds nicer to me, especially with music.

I tend to think of SDDS (old-style readers and processors) as being roughly equivalent to SR-D as far as sound quality, but substantially inferior as far as reliability.

Overall, SR-D is the nicest "system" for most theatres: it sounds good, it's simple, it doesn't have disks to get lost (or not be shipped), it has more titles than either SDDS or DTS (esp. many arthouse films), and, most importantly, it "just works."

DTS has some nice features (separate language disks, for example, and non-audio data like subtitles, etc., as well as 16mm and 70mm compatability), but it's primarily useful for first-run houses that play mainstream films. It would be mostly useless in an art-house (where many prints are SR-D only) or in a second-run house (where disks may not arrive with prints).

SDDS is just overpriced and the first generation of equipment was less reliable than DTS or SR-D.

If I were a theatre owner, I'd first put money into a top-notch analog system (processor, amps, speakers, acoustical treatment) and maintenance and then, if I still had cash left over, I would consider SR-D. DTS would be a good second choice, but only for a first-run non-art-house. I'd only consider SDDS as a secondary digital system and only in an 8-channel-capable house.

There are too many crappy sounding digital houses that should have invested in stuff other than digital processors...
 

Having said that, I recall reading somewhere about a test that will very much discredit SR-D. What you do is encode 2 screen channels, the surrounds, and the LFE with normal cinema sound like would be found in a shoot-em-up action movie. In other words, lots going on in those 4.1 channels. But in the remaining screen channel, you encode a musical instrument, something like a sustained chord or single note from a piano. Turn off all the amps except for the channel playing the musical note and listen. You will get something pretty shockingly bad. The bit-bucket won't have anywhere close to enough bits to support the lone musical note. It will be full of artifacts. DTS and SDDS do not have this "issue".

------------------
- dave
Look at this! His chin strap has been cut!

Oh, and as for DTS in the second-run, at MIT here we have DTS and no other digital formats (thanks to a generous donation from DTS), and in general we get discs for 95% of all the DTS prints we get. Not perfect, but definitely pretty good. Sometimes we have to go the extra mile to get the discs in time, but that still counts as getting them.

--jhawk

...or so I am told.
 

--jhawk
 

Talking flame, Gordon? That sounds vaguely familiar but I don't recall why. Not to be confused, of course, with the infamous Bic talking cigarette lighters.
 

For art house and second run (we too only have DTS because of price and not exactly coincidently, because of the sonic quality.

But here's a question that I have wondered about. Given that fact that the longer a print is kicked around the second run circuit, the more of a chance there is that the disks will get lost or stolen or eaten for breakfast, or whatever else the idiots do with them who don't return them. What is the legal implications of making copies of them? As an art/rep house, unlike commercial theatres, we run titles over and over, sometimes years apart, but if it is a title we program, it is because we think it is important and at least 50% of the time it will play our theatre again in the future. Problem is, there is no guarantee that two years from now when we play, say MY FAIR LADY, that the print will come with DTS disks. It would make sense for houses like us to protect our future presentation values by librarying copies of every title that there is even the remote possibility of rerunning.

I was just thinking of the copyright implications -- obviously this kind of duplication is not for any purpose other than being able to play the digital track in the future and ONLY in conjuntion with the booking and licensing of that motion picture. Other than that, they sit on a shelf, waiting to CD rot to occur eek! And for all practical purposes, there would be no way to know that such a duplication had taken place in the first place -- my question is in theory, "strickly speaking" as it were.

I'd like to get a
 

Obviously Karen can speak better to c), of course.

--jhawk

 

Bottom line, if you are going to dupe them for your own theater's potential use down the road, I don't see any real problem with it so long as you aren't making dupes to auction off of Ebay. This happens all the time with first run prints when damaged discs arrive (mostly due to these current "super-thin" plastic cases the discs are being shipped in lately).

Near the end of that timeframe where single disc movies were being released without the THX sound files on them, I figured out a way to burn a disc with that THX sound file on it. To this day, they are still residing permanently in the B drives and work fine and dandy. Is Lucasfilm going to come after me for it? Well if they want to then fine, I'll surrender the discs to them, but it is those homemade discs that kept their logo playing in digital!

------------------
And, hey! Let's be careful out there.

~Manny.
 

DTS vs DD WIDESCREEN listening test - that happened years ago and there has not been one since. As far as us "fudging" levels, that never happened. We match the *master* mix, PERIOD.

DTS 16mm is available and is used by mostly student film makers.

The DTS (5.1) sub is not a discrete channel in that it is put into the surrounds and then is filtered out (80Hz and below) by the DTS player. At that point the sub channel is delivered to a separate output channel. That is why you will hear a small amount of sub info (above 80Hz) in the surrounds.

We realized not getting discs is a continuing problem for "second run" theaters. Whenever possible and the studio agrees, we send discs to theaters that tell us no discs arrived with the print. Most times, we can over-night discs.

Karen at DTS
khultgren@dtsonline.com
 

We will NEVER stop supporting customers with CD-ROM drives.

The type of hard drive that will be used on our new player has not been finalized. When I am permitted to give you guys more info, I will (I know it's hard to wait).

Copying discs? The offical DTS company line is = do not do that.

Karen at DTS
 

Yes, you can copy DTS discs on the Mac and sell them on EBay for one million dollars each. Oh wait, I doubt you could get ANYTHING for 'em on EBay, but people ARE pretty stupid when it comes to that site.

Of course I am only thinking in terms of private amusement but I guess it's not hard to extrapolate to the next step which would be to implement the entire box on an ordinary PC with no extra cards (feed the timecode into an audio input). DTS on every screen for $700 a pop.

Jump ahead a few years: Disk distribution strictly limited to owners of real boxes. Underground distribution via Morpheus. hehehe It will get interesting.
 

------------------
And, hey! Let's be careful out there.

~Manny.
 

Note my comments, I fully agree with you. That test was flawed and made in panic, imho, by Dobly who saw a threat coming from the 1/2 rate DTS.
Too me, the Dolby codec and its principles applied to the dvd market pose 2 serious, often recurring, problems:
1. its inherent caracteristics (bit sharing, low data rate, causing 93% of losses from the master , at 15:1 compression ratio etc)
2. unfaithfull to the original master (overall level, dialogue normalisation, which indeed DOES affect the work of the D/A converters in the reproducing chain, and downmixing, which KILLS dynamics imho ).

This is an opinion more focusing on the dvd software but still, most of it can be seen in the cinema world too.
Dolby is a convenient compromise (on the film print or for taking a small space on dvd). I would say DTS is to sound what Panavision-70mm is to film
 

Karen at DTS
 

------------------
- dave
Look at this! His chin strap has been cut!
 

Hey, don't worry about it! I knew you weren't trying imply anything. I am happy to see that you are happy with us (DTS)!

Karen at DTS
 

hi

I was a bit stunned when I read your comment on dolby-dts test as what you said was exactly the opposite of what REALLY occured. (except that the full rate dts was ultimately prefered during this "blind" test run by dolby ).

cheers
 

if you want to read another example of flawed opinions against dts, read this: CLICK HERE

it's shocking to see the denial of the evidence (superiority of DTS) one can find over the internet.

best
David

------------------
- dave
Look at this! His chin strap has been cut!
 

hi

you're definitely more knowledgeable than me. I was just surprised of your rememberance but indeed, our memories can play tricks

cheers

 

Single point of failure? Hardly. First, at least give me some kind of credit. I'm am not talking about picking up some cheapo Hewlett Packard Pavillion PC and trying to make it into a server. I seem to recall mentioning stuff like Sun and UNIX, etc. Y'know, enterprise level server stuff. Not amateur crap.

If you put a good fault tolerant server in place with full RAID capability or better yet a rack mount server cluster you will have something far more reliable and even more simple in operation from an organizational standpoing than a multitude of DTS players strewn across an entire multiplex.

Just look at what you have to spend per screen to outfit DTS. You're at nearly $7,000 alone for a DTS-6D unit sans integrated cinema processor. I'm pretty sure that, for under $20,000, I could put together a parallel server cluster that would be powerful enough and reliable enough to do the same duty as 24 or even 36 DTS-6D units.
 

"SUN Microsystems is providing the server storage and networking platform for the cinema operating system and digital projector. The operating system will support the loading, scheduling, and playback of features, trailers and other pre-show content on multiple digital screens."

http://www.kodak.com/US/en/motion/digital/prototype.shtml
http://www.kodak.com/US/en/motion/digital/cineOpSys.shtml

------------------
John P. Pytlak, Senior Technical Specialist
Worldwide Technical Services, Entertainment Imaging
Research Labs, Building 69, Room 7525A
Rochester, New York, 14650-1922 USA
Tel: +1 585 477 5325 Cell: +1 585 781 4036 Fax: +1 585 722 7243
E-Mail: john.pytlak@kodak.com
Web site: http://www.kodak.com/go/motion

"do you prefer DTS or Dolby?"

The answer is easy....

THX

Steve

------------------
"Old projectionists never die, they just changeover!"
 

--jhawk
 

But I think Bobby was trying to attain some cost savings, which aren't in that picture anymore.

In the down-to-earth realm, I have a suspicion that adding network support would involve serious software changes on the DTS side, since they would have to be a lot more interrupt-driven than they are right now. I don't think they'd have to convert to a realtime OS, but maybe...

As for trailers in digital...over here, at the beginning of each academic term (the unit by which we set our schedules), I go through all of our DTS trailer discs and pull down the term's trailers and burn them onto a CDR. I will admit that a few times I have considered replacing the C drive of the DTS-6D with a SCSI drive, perhaps a SCSI drive connected to two different SCSI busses so I could just update the set of trailers remotely. I don't see why the DTS-6D would notice the difference between a CDROM and a hard drive...and even if it did, it could probably be whacked into behaving. Still, the annoyance of burning trailer CDs hasn't really become high enough. Anyhow, if anyone cares to look, feel free to play with my software; of course it only runs under Unix...

--jhawk

But...I'm a Mac person...is there some way to make a trailer disc on a Mac?

For instance, could I do it with Toast?

I realize that might be an incredibly stupid question, but please don't laugh...I'd really like to get into this, but I'm just clueless when it comes to any other operating system.

Do you (or does anybody) know if I could run Unix on my Mac?

------------------
And, hey! Let's be careful out there.

~Manny.

Certainly DTS would have to rewrite their software. And I mean all of it right down to the encoding scheme. DTS will certainly have to do it if they intend to improve their cinema system past the old APT-X100 encoding format to something that could handle 10.2 Surround or 24/96 audio. The standard DTS-6/6D/6AD model design would not integrate into a networked scheme involving an audio server. About the only thing that would remain at all is the time code readers. And there are better ways than RS-232 serial cables for feeding time code data. In rewriting software, DTS would have to configure a server for straightforward, simple operation.

Now you might say that simple operation is impossible for any UNIX driven computer system. My opinion is that computer systems get much more difficult to maintain when they are trying to serve more than one purpose. It is just like the poor Windows user that loads every piece of software he ever saw onto the machine and then wonders why it crashes all the time. If the computer is given only one simple job, it will hardly fail unless there is a hardware failure involved. For instance, I've been configuring computers to run outdoor electronic message centers. They're just running plain old Windoze98, but since the user is unable to load any other software onto the machine other than the OS and the sign controller software the machines don't crap out. Hardware failures are always a threat, but that situation is not really different with a theater setup of many DTS players all hooked into one power junction box. Nothing is 100% foolproof but I think the audio server idea would save a lot of money, at least for large multiplexes.

To respond to Manny's question about making a DTS trailers disc on a Mac, would that be just making a binary dub of an existing disc or mastering a completely new one? I haven't played around with Toast on a Mac, but I would be shocked if it did not have a way to make bit for bit binary copies of CDs. The matter of mastering your own audio for a DTS trailers CD would require an APT-X100 encoder among other things, and I think DTS is the only game in town for that.
 

I haven't used Toast, but I'm pretty sure that, by itself, it is insufficient. The deal here is that all the trailers are stored in one monolithic file along with an index file, and you need to consult the index file to get the offsets within the monolithic file to pull out an individual trailer. And then to make a disc, you construct a new monolithic file and index file with only the trailers you want. So while I'm sure Toast can burn the new disc, it's not going to help you with the construction and maintenance of the monolithic file and the index file, which are DTS custom. The index file is plain ASCII though, and totally decypherable. The monolithic file isn't, but you don't need to decode it -- just honor the offsets from the index.

But don't despair, Manny -- do you have Mac OS X? It's unix on the inside, so you should just be able to download my software (just shell and awk scripts) and use it from a Terminal window. Why don't you give it a try? I suspect it might need a little bit of adjustment, but nothing serious. If you can't make it work, I'll go and sit down in front of a Mac and see what I can do. I suspect you can just replace the "cdrecord" step in my instructions with Toast (it'll burn iso9660 CDs, right?).

Bobby, about your Big DTS Box, really all I can say is "complex systems fail." Architect the system in the simplest way possible if you can get away with it. I don't know what you propose instead RS-232 for timecode data. Probably not RS-422, though it might be a better choice. 10mbps ethernet? Well, suddenly the world just got a lot more complicated and the timecode reader did too. DHCP for timecode readers? IP address conflicts? Eww. Yes, it's probably easier to extend to longer distances if you know how to build an ethernet network, which is more and more commonplace, but still probably not par for the course for today's theatre tech (but for tomorrow's, sure). And then you need to move the audio signals back from the BDB to your cinema processor (unless that's included in this box) and to your amplifiers. That could be problematic if its a long run. But I guess you can go optical...

I'm still not buying the money-saving factor though (I hear the coolness factor, it's true). I suppose they could do a lot in terms of saving board space and using fancier logic and FPGAs and so-on to get a lot better density on their codec, even if it stays in hardware, but it still needs to be able to supply the raw bit density per unit time that the standalone DTS unit does, and I suspect that the hardware cost savings for that centralization is just that high. But again, we don't really understand the internal economics of the DTS-6D (at least, I don't).
Also, if DTS redesigns their codecs, they're going to need to have a single-screen box anyway, since not everyone is going to be a huge multiplex. If so, they're still stuck maintaining two parallel kinds of systems (not to mention their support commitment of never desupporting CDROM users...).

--jhawk
 

I am using Mac OS X and I downloaded your software. The code opens as a text file. Maybe I'm doing this wrong, but I can't just copy it over to the Terminal window...well, I can copy it over, but nothing happens,

What am I supposed to do to run the program?

Do I need to know a whole lot about UNIX to make this work? Should I buy a book? Or can I make this work by just learning a few codes/keystroke sequences?

------------------
And, hey! Let's be careful out there.

~Manny.

Sorry I should probably have given you a few more details. You certainly don't need to be familiar with Unix, but it would certainly help to figure some stuff out. It's probably a good idea to get a book. I'm afraid I can't recommend one, I've been a Unix user for the past 10 years and didn't learn with a book... Anyhow, once you figure out how to do it, it should be straightforward.
I sat down with a G3 with MacOS X, and it was behaving extremely strangely with a DTS disc in the drive. Sometimes I could ls -l /Volumes/cd9660 and see the contents, and sometimes I couldn't. I suspect there's omething wrong with that G3.
In any case, I made some slight edits to my script so it is more likely to work correctly under MacOS X. Anyhow, how to use:
Download the script (dtsgrab) to a file.
In the Terminal window, cd to the directory you saved it in. If you saved it on the desktop, that would be "cd ~/Desktop."
Make it executable. "chmod a+x dtsgrab".
Stick a DTS disc in the drive. Type "mount" to make sure it is mounted, probably on /Volumes/cd9660. If it's elsewhere, you'll need to edit "dtsgrab" before running it.
Execute the script: "./dtsgrab"
It will prompt you, hopefully it will be sufficiently self-explanatory. If you still can't get anywhere, I'll hunt around and find a MacOS X machine that actually works and/or a MacOS X expert to tell me what stupid thing I'm doing wrong....

--jhawk

 

At least I got the program running...but I think there is a glitch somewhere. An error message involved the expression "*.cat" or something like that.

The list of trailers showed up, but I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to do in terms of editing the list. For instance, my "delete" key gets an error message and Ctrl-X (aka "Cut") doesn't work either.

Also...there was no prompt following the list. Is that normal for this?

While it certainly would be neat to use this app, I have no idea what you'd have to do to make it work on a Mac. Just let me know if it's going to put you out of your way at all and I'll find something else to fixate on.

------------------
And, hey! Let's be careful out there.

~Manny.
 

--jhawk
 

--jhawk
 

Oh, POOP! The printer jammed.

Add on top of that, our company's policy trailer is only encoded in DD.

For sound sake and promotional support, I prefer DTS (nothing is worse than hearing a changeover go through the projector) though.
 

Use clear splicing tape and SR-D will be fine. SDDS should be, too, but I've heard a number of lab-new prints fault at good splices made with clear tape when played in SDDS.

I agree, though, that DTS will hold up better over time as prints deteriorate due to poor handling, as long as the late-run houses get the disks with the prints (or can obtain them later).
 

David in which way? 1 Convenience (it is that)
2 Or better sound (it's not that)

 

Would it be possible for people to refrain from "Foo is the BEST!" and stick with "Foo is better because of bar!"?

--jhawk