Stopping Pirates in Movie Theaters

[drfsupercenter]

I like the local theater called the Palladium... that is the best theater ever. (IMO of course!)

[toomanycats]

With a little careful planning you can make an awsome home theatre for not too much money. A good Sanyo ZV-90 HD LCD projector is around $1600.00. I just made a pair of tapered quarter wave tube speakers that sound as good as any $2000.00 speakers out there and is cost me about $250. For around $2500.00 you could have a Home theatre that would rival anything. There is a Excel program for making cabinets that is free at the Single Speaker forum that will tell you how to make your cabinets (dimensions). With minor woodworking skills you could figure out the rest.

[Chewy]

A buddy that does event speakers was building some for a friend's home theater, they were in a 20ft room, they kept turning them up trying to get more sound out of them, finally the neighbor from accross the street started banging on the door, the sound was developing better in the middle of the road than in the room, back to the design board.

[toomanycats]

A speaker with a Fs of 29Hz should be aboout 6.5 feet high 14 inches wide, 12 inches deep tapering to 2 inches at the top. The speaker should be at about the midpoint, use a Piezo electric tweeter as it generates its own impedance and a crossover network is not necessary, so no phase shifting. I would recomend a Pioneer BF20 full range speaker, their only 25$ or . Dampening is done with the speaker box being stuffed loosely on the top to about 6 inches above the full range driver. Line the box with acousta-stuff on the back and sides till it "sounds" right, not too much though. Leave a rectangular port on the bottom 2.5 inchesw wide accross the width at the bottom from of the cabinet. The rear wave will come out "in" phase thru here and the speaker will resonate at 29 Hz. The side view of the speaker will look like a right sided triangle. The Pioneer speaker is availoable at Parts Express. This design produces a 3 dimensional pressure bubble that is so clear and uncolored you will hear things you never heard before. The only real problem is that will will soon find out how poorly many recordings are mastered, especially U2. The full range driver website and the Single driver website have a wealth of advice. Here are their links.http://fullrangedriver.com and /http://melhuish.org/audio/

[floresdave]

back to theatres

there are about 12 theatres in my area that serve beer most of them are owned by a local brewery. not the greatest theatres but can be fun. especially with beer pizza burgers and no kids present. but other than when the wife wants to go to the theatre or on the very rare occasion something catches my eye and i just have to see it i stay home and watch on my 46" dlp with my regular old 5.1 channel system. may not be theatre quality but it sure is cozy

[smkymntgrl]

Actually there is a drive-in 20 mins from my house and they still play moives there. Kinda cool.

There are a few drive-ins still around this area. One about 20 min away, one about an hour away. It's nice to go every now and then. They died out years ago but have started making a comeback in these parts. Now they charge by the carload, like $5, but back when I was a kid they charged per person. We'd hide a few people in the back of a pick up so we didn't have to pay so much! lol
Bring along some lawnchairs some "beverages". It was a blast! The only problem back then was the sound sucked from those little speakers you hung on your window. Now you just tune it in on the radio and if you have a nice sound system in your car it's great!

[RFBurns]

The only real problem is that will will soon find out how poorly many recordings are mastered, especially U2.

Alot of U2 recordings were done on analog gear, as with many other artists. Some still record on analog gear then master over to digital (AAD or ADD).

One could be very surprised at how the weakest link in an audio system can reveal noise and junk in an audio signal!

[toomanycats]

There are good analog masters and there are bad ones. I wouldn't knock high quality analog as it is a "real" recording versus one that samples live sound and may not give an accurate interpretaion of that sound if the sampling rate is not high enough.

[RFBurns]

No doubt. Dont get me wrong, I love the warm sound of analog. My wife wonders why I still use my turntable and vinyl albums instead of the CD's.



I have always wondered why would anyone want a copy of a movie that was captured by camcorder in a crowded noisy theatre with the occaisional head popping up into scene instead of waiting for the real thing when released on vhs or dvd.

[sonic_emperor]

No doubt. Dont get me wrong, I love the warm sound of analog. My wife wonders why I still use my turntable and vinyl albums instead of the CD's.

there is no doubt also that the sound quality of a cd will ever be good as the one from the vinyl

[drfsupercenter]

Hmm, never heard of 5.1 vinyls before, is it just me?

[toomanycats]

It is you and a lot of other people who have been robbed.. True stereo on a upscale system will give you a three dimensional experience that cannot be done with surround sound. The problem with surround sound lies in the out of phase signals. Surround sound cannot be beat for special effects, but for music (especially live) a system that has no phase problems cannot be beat, i.e: crossoverless design speakers, or electrostatics set up properly (with a tube amp). A whole generation of people have grown up not knowing what mid-range is because of the compression of that frequency which occurs with CD audio. The sampling rate is insufficient at 48K, 98K is the minimum required to sample all the waveforms. Solid state amps are superior with the harmonic distorion but what about non-harmonic distorion? This is where tube amps are superior and sound real, not harsh. It's like Louis Armstrong said about jazz, "If you don't know, I can't tell you". Digital processing is great for special effects but the sound processing changes the phase of the signal and the resulting sound is artificial. Carver amps attempt to fix this with "Holographic sound" but IMHO it doesn't work. If you like the sound of MP3 then non of the above applies to you as you might not hear the difference anyway, IPOD's have the worst sound.

[dmanshead]

Since then though, I quit drinking. Haven't had a alcoholic drink in 2 years.

cool 6 yrs clean and sober for me!!!!

[drfsupercenter]

I hate iPods, but my Rio Cali sounds fine... at 128k :O

All my parents' records sound like crap, two speakers and no subwoofer...
And as far as analog goes, VHS sound is way distorted once playing the tape a few times, I know this from renting tapes from the library, DVD sound not only has DTS and Dolby, but even on a system like mine with just left/right/subwoofer, it sounds better.

Maybe it's just me.

[toomanycats]

VHS blows, to put it mildly. Record only sound good the first few times you play them, it's true. DvdAudio will be the way to go eventually. HiFi VHS if used only for sound can give you a near CD quality playback. You can record 6 hours of music and feed a video signal just for sync, ( on some older machines) and have music for a party, a cheap way of providing high quality sound and record music without all the copyright fuss since your using line level into the VHS machine. The problem with any digital format is always the sampling rate, not only what is capable but to what extreme the person mastering wants to go to make a really decent recording. U2 purposely makes poor quality recordings so they won't copy good, IMHO. If you are not using full range speakers on all channels then you are missing out on the best sound since Dolby Digital as well as DTS offers 20 to 20K on all channels. It is amazing how good the sound can be on some small computer systems, it is just that they don't scale up that well.