That sounds like a very cool place for a field trip.
I would most definitely love to visit a Dolby Cinema.
I guess in contrast to the Dolby Cinema, all the commercial Atmos theaters I've been to kind of sucked.
This was one of the biggest reasons it has taken me so long to jump on board with Atmos - I was never impressed at the commercial theaters I went to in Dallas, LA, and OKC. I thought Atmos just sounded louder. I didn't get that 3D soundstage- not even any significant Overhead "Voice of God" sound.
So again, as
@Drunkpenguin pointed out, the Home Atmos experience has been 100% better than the commercial Atmos experience.
But I imagine a true Atmos Cinema where Atmos is optimized would be 100% different than all these commercial Atmos theaters many of us have been to.
I don't think the problem lies with the speakers or even the room. Obviously people who are really into HT will buy and use pro cinema speakers, since short of the likes of JTR, Procella, PSA, Klipsch etc etc, nothing comes close to being able to reproduce that kind of dynamic range. Heck, I don't even think it's the sweet spot, because the theater is optimized at a point 2/3rds back, where a good amount of people sit near.
I blame the outdated xcurve and lousy implementation of it. While I personally don't like room eq outside of the Schroder range, the xcurve and the use of pink noise to approximate a flat response with an rta is far from ideal and will likely result in a wildly inaccurate response. Steady state pink noise causes midrange reverberation to build up, but the amount of reverb and level of high and low frequency roll off is different based on the directivity control of the speaker, quality of acoustic treatment, proximity of speakers and the listener to room boundaries, and the size of the room. There's no one size fits all.
Modern home theaters utilize things like Audyssey, which uses an impulse response of a very short burst. This allows audyssey to see both the speakers direct response, and the variation to that response introduced by the room, allowing it sort out and correct both the speaker and rooms response. Audyssey also uses FIR filters, which allow it to correct problems in the time domain independently from the frequency domain. One example of where this is useful is when a listener or speaker is near a boundary. If you're seated along the back wall for example, the problem bass frequencies are likely to be 180 degrees out of phase with the rest of the frequencies. This is why people describe bass as slow and sloppy in a bad room. Audyssey can flip the phase back at a single problem frequency and almost entirely eliminate the ringing, a standard Peq used in the cinema cannot.
In addition, audyssey uses multiple points of measurement to sort out the speaker from the room. A single measurement point may display a random peak or dip that disappears an inch to the left or the right. This isn't audible, and shouldn't be corrected, and audyssey ignores stuff like this, and only corrects problems that occur across multiple measurement points.
A cinema eqed at a single point with pink noise may be correcting something that only appears in one seat that shouldn't be corrected. In addition, many cinemas rush through this process, and don't even take the time to stop and listen to it to see if it sounds good or not. Don't know about you, but Everytime I've run audyssey, I sat down and listened to it on and off, if it sounded bad, I redid it.
I believe IMAX has started using audyssey, so they're likely to have less problems. IMAX also continuously monitors their system to make sure its calibrated properly. So many theaters I've been to are running wildly out of spec, a few even had blown out speakers or subs.
http://sound.whsites.net/articles/cinema-sound.htm has a great article explaining the failures of the xcurve and why so many cinemas fail to perform as well as home theaters. There is no reason that a cinema consisting of massive horn loaded speakers, designed and engineered to be much better than many consumer offerings, in a room of ideal size and dimensions, should not in every way at least match the home theater experience.
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