July 7th, 2004

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Movies
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The Audience Isn’t Listening Anymore

Can someone explain to me what the deal is with the THX and Dolby ads that run before movies? My quandaries are threefold:

  • At some point in the early nineties, when I was a teenager, marketers sold me on the difference between THX sound and regular. These days, either I don’t care and can’t hear the difference, or the sound quality of all first-run theatres has risen dramatically.
  • Who and what are they actually selling? Why are they bothering to generate mindshare in consumers through this kind of advertising? I guess they’re both home theatre vendors, but are these ads really worth it?
  • Why don’t we see ads for the film stock or projector bulb manufacturers before the film? Surely these are more important than whatever contribution THX or Dolby makes to the sound system. What do they make, by the way? Mixers? Speakers? Apparently THX mostly certifies cinemas and “Dolby cinema technologies add power and drama to your moviegoing experience”. They appear to add a whole lot of bollocks as well.

I suspect that THX and Dolby must have some long-term advertising contract with cinema chains. As they don’t appear to matter anymore to consumers, I can’t imagine why they continue to advertise.

Comments: 5 Responses so far

Mark
July 8th, 2004
12:25 am

I’m totally with you on this one - it’s like movies have to have a “boot sequence” of splash screens for things you don’t care about. Now with added anti-piracy messages…

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mike
July 8th, 2004
4:42 am

If you’re really bored sometime Google “Tomlinson Holman” - some of these boffins are occasionally interesting… If I remember correctly (which is doubtful, of course) he’s the one who defined and argued for the 5.1 surround standard, and ultimately developed THX for Lucasfilm.

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Johnny Nemo
July 8th, 2004
5:25 am

Don’t those systems both use magnetic soundtracks? Before the advent of those systems, the sound was actually optically printed on the side of the film, and a bulb shone through it; a photocell translated the image into electricity to the speakers. Not much fidelity there.

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Steve2
July 8th, 2004
2:50 pm

THX is not a sound system and there is no special hardware associated with it. It’s a certification that the theater meets certain benchmarks of sound reproduction and projection quality, as determined by periodic inspections. http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/thx.htm
I have no idea what their consumer stuff is.

Dolby sells hardware, originally for noise reduction in optical and magnetic soundtracks. The moviemakers had to buy a box to encode the soundtrack, and the theaters needed a corresponding box to decode it. These days, Dolby is one of 3 or 4 competing digital sound systems.

An interesting sidebar is the physical location of each track on the strip of film, since prints must be able to play back on whatever system in use by a theater. Dolby uses the spaces between the sprocket holes: http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/movie-sound4.htm
SDDS uses the edge: http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/movie-sound5.htm
and so on. Notice that in both of these images, the parallel white lines below the sprocket holes are the old-fashioned, optical soundtracks, still used in hundreds of theaters.

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bree
July 9th, 2004
8:40 am

Have you ever noticed that at some of the older theatres, those ads sound absolutely terrible? The Granville St. theatres are the worst - as the sound crescendos, the speakers start crackling and popping. I brace for explosion every time.

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