The New Master List of BASS in Movies with Frequency Charts - Page 119

First, you're right, it is a pleasure and I truly want it to remain an enriching, and civil exchange of ideas.

-----


Interesting, is the frequency response standard intended to omit the bottom two or three octaves? That's the myopic element in my opinion. Does the theater spec, dub stage spec actually call for this?


-------------



Yes, and your industry is way ahead of the music industry with regard to a standardization spec. And that's a good thing,...it's the spec I take exception to.

"In the music biz, the "Circle of Confusion", is problematic. This is a term coined by Floyd Toole that describes the confusion that exists within the audio recording and reproduction chain due to the lack of a standardized, calibrated monitoring environment. Music recordings are made with microphones that are selected, processed, and mixed by listening through professional loudspeakers, which are designed by listening to recordings, which are made with microphones that are selected, processed, and mixed by listening through professional monitors.

Both the creation of the art (the recording) and its reproduction (the loudspeakers and room) are trapped in an interdependent circular relationship where the quality of one is dependent on the quality of the other. Since the playback chain and room through which recordings are monitored are not standardized, the quality of recordings remains highly variable."



-------------------


In no way was I disparaging your gear, or quality of your gear. I love Meyer's line, and I'm sure it sounds fantastic and yields outstanding work.

My use of "Pro" was merely intended to delineate the difference between the Internet Direct retailers, the DIY avenues of superbly constructed one off solutions for reproduction of the LF/ULF down to 5hz or so, and what I was referring to of the "Pro Audio" subwoofer offerings.

I didn't just throw Danley out there...

Maybe I'm wrong, but for you to say there's hundreds of choices to pursue the bottom octaves, I believe you may be mistaken. This is precisely why I stated Danley. For a fixed install ie., theater, dub stage, club, whatever, to pursue real LF/ULF, there are few choices when examining the pro audio loudspeaker manufacturers. Something like Bag-End, actually has promise, as a sealed 12dB/octave roll off combined with their "integrating" electronics LT circuit could get you deep response, if used in ample quantity.

Regardless, it's not tough to get the deep response,...merely a choice.



---------------------


In my opinion, and in no way do I intend to offend anyone in the industry....
It's very simple; the content is there for a reason,... the intended effect,...be it realism, suspension of dis-belief, whatever. You remove that acoustic energy, the effect diminishes. When one has that capability in their system, the intended effect is conveyed.

If it's permanently removed, it cannot be retrieved regardless of system capability. If it remains in the film, the end user has the choice of how to handle it. Currently, many movie houses high pass it. It's inclusion doesn't hinder any properly designed, properly operated theater sound system does it?


----------------

In my opinion, the myopic aspect is that sound system enthusiasts, and appreciation for deep bass is a growing segment of the population. The inclusion of the deep, deep effects like Randy Thom et al, feel make the experience more effective, is increasing, not decreasing. This ULF sound design trend, combined with aging of increased discretionary spending of these bass heads, renders a professional system with limited ULF/LF capability as inexplicable to me.

My 2 cents....


Thanks Marc

I for one value FilmMixer's contributions here more than probably those of anyone else. I do hope he will not leave the thread because of the inflammatory remarks of some of the other dudes here.

I'm not going anywhere.

Just going to disengage in conversations with some members.

FilmMixer, your contributions to this thread are one of the true joys of the AVSforum! Glad to hear you aren't going anywhere! It would be a very sad day.

There have been far too many good people chased away by bullies. Sometimes it takes years and 20,000+ posts, but they eventually go away.

Great stuff Marc! Look forward to meeting you sometime at a la hometheater group meet!

Well, all I know is that some movies have 3-20hz hz content and some don't, I will take what I can. As long as they don't filter every movie we will be fine because the trend is more movies have low end than not, the movies that matter anyways.

FilmMixer,

Glad you are staying with us - I enjoy your insight !!

Underworld Awakening, all of your speakers will get a workout from this one. Your walls will be flexing and hallways will be shaking. Should see lots of the color magenta on waterfall plots to come.

On the other hand, I think there's only so much growth we can expect there until someone comes up with a way to reproduce the really low stuff cheaply, both in theaters and in homes. Most people don't have a clue what they're missing until they hear (or feel) it

I'd imagine if there ever is a strong push from consumers to start going for the ULF stuff, the people in charge will start looking into delivering it more consistently for us and order up some TRW's for the dub stages.

This thread will get a lot less interesting though if all movies start showing up as five stars. Half the fun of this thread is just in looking for them.

Watching Underworld awakening awesome bass. Plus Kate :-D makes it a perfect movie for me!

That opening sequence had things all around my entire house shaking!

What a great story, heard good things about the Avengers. My neighbor went to the local IMAX premier and said he can't wait to hear it on my system.

Part of the 1/10 of 1% and loving it.

^^This. When I saw the 'hundreds of choices'... Maybe it would help to name one and include the measurements.

Bosso

For large spaces where PVG doesn't really begin until under 15 Hz, lots of displacement is needed, whether by LLT, sealed, or very large horns (mouth area proportional to displacement. Only sealed systems offer unlimited bandwidth based on total volume displaced.

Material costs v driver costs v amplification costs would dictate a new, higher efficiency, large Sd and large Xmax driver like the TC Pro 5100 (except without the enormous price tag) would need to be developed. Likely a 21" driver w/ 20+mm Xmax or so..... Arraying these in large enough quantities could lead to problems in polars higher up in the LFE band, though....no free lunch.

Then there's the fan subwoofer. An array of those could easily complement existing subs, but ULF would leak out into every auditorium in a cineplex. Best used for individual theaters.

JSS

No doubt! This one has a very high re-watch factor for me.

Just got if from Netflix.



Now, how do I get the wife out of the house?



Ian

pff, that is easy, hand her the credit card!

No way! She makes more money then I do!


Ian

This is such a good point. We are really quite spoiled with our movie soundtracks. Pushing the limits of the technology when it comes to dynamic range and frequency response. I sometimes just like watching the closing credits of a movie just to hear a song with a dynamic 5.1 mix that often times is not even commercially available otherwise.

I get that MP3 players and car audio competing with road noise is the more common listening environments... but I wish the dynamic compression happened inside the playback units, so when you pop the CD into your home system you can get the good mix. It's so sad. Ironically my best music mixes are usually from independent artists that produce their own stuff with their own equipment. They probably have studios that pale in potential quality to the ones used to mix top 40 artists that end up with enough compression to be indistinguishable on a VU meter from pink noise.

So that is my long-winded way to say: Thanks FilmMixer and the movie industry in general for providing us with beautifully masterful sonic content to test the limits of our systems and our ears.

Underworld awakening is an easy 5-star movie. Now, ive only watched it once, but, i could see that this is the first movie that actually deserves a 5.5 rating. From my memory it beats both cloverfield an wotw. Not an easy task, but, it is incredible.

Very much looking forward to the waterfall plots!

Saw underworld in theaters and didn't think the bass was that great lol. Was there for sure but not like cloverfield. But I'll have to wait and see when I can play it on my system

mie will be here tomrrow! cant wait!

Yes, I appreciate the kind and fatherly advice, as always, but it's my reading and comprehension skills that have resulted in the cleanest, widest bandwidth system I'm aware of.

FM says that it's obvious that he could build full bandwidth monitoring. He also mentioned that there are literally hundreds of choices in that regard. I'm sorry, but that's either condescension or naivete, but it's far from the reality.

He then mentions a standard that's in place. Apparently, he's never graphed any of the movies listed in this thread. They're literally all over the map in levels and bandwidth. And, as both he and I experienced, the theaters we viewed the end product of Avengers at had the subs shut off. Some standard.

He says that "we as an industry are working on redefining our standards, measuring techniques...". Excellent news. Apparently, sadly, that doesn't include proper monitoring capabilities.

He and Max both mention "better reproduction systems". That's where he has missed my point in this discussion. I haven't ever advocated full bandwidth reproduction in theaters. Heck, they barely cover to 30 Hz now, and shut the damned subs of at that. What I'm saying is that they should be able to monitor the sound effects they're mixing.

FM says he mixes by ear, meters be damned. He says most mixers do likewise. When it comes to the subject of this thread, does that sound reasonable to anyone here? Is that the sort of insight everyone craves? Am I truly the only person who's left to tilt at that windmill?

The venue for him includes the AMC theater that shuts off the subs. The venue in this thread is Home Theater, in which every participant gets response to at least an octave below what he can monitor. Seriously, does anyone imagine my response being "Oh, OK then, never mind and thanks for the insight."?

I've put a lot of hours into this and many threads like it. Just set up and fine tune SpecLab and go through a hundred or so movies graphing a couple dozen scenes from each, capping the pertinent ones, uploading them to a hosting site, posting them here and then filing the scenes in folders on your hard drive. Spend a few hundred hours running loopback measurements to compare components and try to unravel the analog I/O vs digital, where the blocking caps are, what the differences, if any, are and how that translates to what we see in the graphs.

There have been countless threads over the years. One I recall was titled something like "Does anything below 18 Hz matter?" It was replete with "quotes from an industry insider" that purported to settle the matter once and for all that the answer was NO. How about the Geddes thread in which he declared "I'm not including you bass freaks" because "below 20 Hz doesn't matter".

I've been referred to as a bass 'freak', called a 'frequency response Nazi', chided for being on a 'quest for 3 Hz Nirvana', talking 'tweako-fast-bass', and one of my favorites came from you: "Bosso is missing the point that his vaunted objective measurements are really just subjectives of a different color guised as true science.".

We've been told that it's inaudible, a mistake, sloppy mixing, noise, distortion, artifact, we've been inundated with lectures about the Equal Loudness Curves, Perceptual Masking, Auditory Masking, Transmission Loss, Displacement, and many other really cool-sounding phenomena types, all aimed at helping us to see the error of our ways.

Yet, folks still bluster at my responses to some of this crapola. Good thing we tilted against those windmills, IMO. Long live Randy Thom!

I haven't seen Underworld yet. Is anyone gonna post graphs? lfeman, you still out there?

Bosso

Who mixed the Avengers?

I have not seen Underworld at home. I have some building to do first.

I believe it's Christopher Boyes, sound design and re-recording mixer.

He's got a nice LFE resume.

and long live Bossobass…

What I find frustrating (actually more of an amusement) is your pedantic pursuit of something that no one save you and a few others care about. These non-audible, nearly impossible to re-create effects whether they be naturally occurring recorded sounds or, synthesized by a computer simply have no mass appeal. The film business does not care about you and your cause. You are an outlier on this issue and no matter how hard you push, you will not be getting what you want from Hollywood until it is commercially viable. It’s all about the Benjamin’s and you and your cause don’t got em.

That said your efforts and opinions are interesting and appreciated by many here myself included. But, if it was a choice of my interest in what Filmmixer has to say about the movie business and his take on movie sound vs. you and your ULF quest, you my friend are out … way out!

Lora Hirschberg's also listed in the credits... she may be the one mixing the effects, as she did for the Dark Knight:

http://www.dolby.com/gb/en/about-us/...rk-knight.html

Ok, very good!

From reading this thread, you'd think it would be prohibitavely costly and time-consuming to put ULF into a soundtrack. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the whole process, but wouldn't it have to be taken out? If ULF is something that is naturally picked up in the foley recording process or that is in the recorded sound byte or whatever it is you use, why not just leave it there? As long as it doesn't make the subwoofer explode, we should be fine, right? I mean, who's to say that some of the movies with extreme LF (single hz like Black Hawk Down and, more notably, Hitchhiker's Guide) actually had that put in on purpose? It's not hurting anybody so just leave it in there. It's not like Bose bass modules explode when you put in one of these movies.

Great interview! Thanks.