Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater my nightmare,

Glad to hear that all is well, and yes it is time to kick back, watch those movies, and enjoy your system. Panic Room and LOTR I have, and both are good movies, LOTR is a great one to watch on your system. I do not have The Scorpion King. Let me know how it is, and if it is worth buying.

well the reason I bought Scorpion King is because it's onsale in Walmart (14.98)...Circuit City (15.something) and BJs warehouse club i believe it's around (17 something). anyway will let you know if it's worth buying....

In reply to:

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Well with regards to the 75 vs 85 db standards, I have made a call to a friend of mine in LA this morning who is the recording business, and he has confirmed that the reference level for audio is 85db and that The THX technician, (The guy I spoke to was actually a certified tech, not a marketer)was correct that theater is 75db.

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The THX technicial may be referring to using the test tones in a THX receiver, or the THX Optimode on some discs. Maybe those are encoded for 75db, I don't know. But the point you seem to be missing is that there's not a universal standard for all test tones, they can vary in loudness depending on how they are encoded. In the case of the Avia test tones, reference level = 85. It says so right in the disc's documentation.

As for audio/music, was your friend maybe referring to SACD or DVD-A? Because there is no "reference" for CD-Audio as part of the redbook specification like there is with Dolby Digital.

seanandredj,

The most important thing is that all the speakers are evenly calibrated and that you're comfortable with the volume level. You don't have to play back at reference level, so enjoy your movies. Besides, many systems are unable to play cleanly at full reference level on a loud movie like Lord of the Rings, without bottoming out the subwoofer or driving the amp to clipping.

Jeff,

You are correct that there is no universal standard but there seems to be some implied standards that have set by the industry, and the point was not missed. Now as you state in the next topic that the most important thing is to have even speaker calibrations, which I do believe was the message that I clearly stated to you in my PM (although you neglected to include that part in your cut and paste of the topic) even to the point that I said that it did not matter if you calibrated at 75, 85,65 or even 70db. That once you had these levels set that the value you use to calibrate was not really important.

I quoted the message I was replying to, I'm not sure why you would expect me to quote from a PM, especially since I don't think I had read it yet at that point.

I think we can all agree that the volume level should be set to whatever makes you happy, but at least a couple of posts in this thread were discussing how to calibrate for the standard/reference level, and my point was that in that case you would use 85 for Avia, not 75.

Jeff,

I apologize for my last response. I was perhaps a little hasty then in my reply. What you have said in your next reply to Sean is basically exactly what was posted on page 4 and was what was said to you in the PM. i had made the mistake in naming Johnk and not jkohn when i replied.