Quote:

I find that I am disappointed with most movies. At first I thought that it was related to my acoustically bright room and my lack of experience with a diffuse speaker design. But now I am starting to believe that the sound quality of most movie soundtracks is like most music CDs...flat and uninvolving. Just because something was recorded in DDD or 5.1 does not mean it's good.

A bunch of us watched U-571 (DTS) and The Matrix (Dolby 5.1) the other night. We were so engaged in U-571 (largely due to the soundtrack) that if the house started to burn down, I am sure we wouldn't have noticed. After a half hour of the Matrix, some of my guests were wondering if something got damaged while we were watching U-571; the difference in engagement was that great! And it wasn't the difference between DTS and Dolby 5.1 either. Or the fact that all of us had seen these shows before. The surround channels simply weren't that pronounced in the Matrix and that really took away from the entertainment experience. The audio still sounded full but it was a blah kind of full.

After everyone left, I boosted the surrounds by 7 dB and that made a huge difference to The Matrix. But I really don't believe that what I was hearing is what the sound engineer intended. The sound planes shifted so much that they didn't really mesh with the action on the screen.

What's really interesting about all of this psychologically and physiologically is that I am now drawn to music and movies that have incredible SQ even if I am not a big fan of the music or the video content itself.



I'm always playing with the surrounds during a movie.

Lots of movies are just different. I, for one, really enjoyed the matrix sound...the lobby scene sounded amazing.

I would highly recommend running a DSP program when you show a movie. Yamaha's programs add so much to the dynamics, it really is amazing.


M22s|VP100|QS4s|HSU STF2