3 ms·

I worked in the Cinema industry when Dolby Atmos were introduced. It was a pretty big upgrade and quality assurance for each auditorium were strict. Speakers ha

by Thlom 5y ago

I worked in the Cinema industry when Dolby Atmos were introduced. It was a pretty big upgrade and quality assurance for each auditorium were strict. Speakers had to be installed all over the roof and more speakers had to be added all around the auditorium. So in a Cinema Atmos can be pretty great, but how you can translate this to a home theatre setting is beyond me.

aspenmayer 5y ago
How were installs like this calibrated? How are home installs calibrated, for that matter? Open source solutions/recommendations especially appreciated.
- dtx1 5y ago
  My denon receiver comes with a microphone and an integrated calibration tool
- izacus 5y ago
  For home installs the AV Receiver driving the speakers comes with (usually a proprietary) function to calibrate based on your sitting position. I'm not sure if there's many opensource solutions - the quality of autocalibration is a big differentiating feature between AVR OEMs.
- nitrogen 5y ago
  Check out Duff Room Correction for an old school open source option. There's also Room EQ Wizard, but that is not open source. In high end home theaters there were proprietary installer tools like JBL's ARCOS (which I worked on). And there are pro calibration tools like Smaart. In any case it's some combination of measurement, gain calibration, delay compensation, and generation of FIR or IIR filters to control frequency and phase response. Followed by subjective tweaking by the installer. Plus maybe some secret sauce for various things in the proprietary algorithms.
izacus 5y ago
You translate it by using Dolby Atmos setup (which people are doing for a few years now and is available at home as well). For cheap setups, people bounce sound off the ceiling while for better setups people install speakers into the ceiling. Automatic speaker calibration for a given room is pretty much a standard feature on AVRs today so that part is also taken care off. It's not quite the same as cinema, but there's still a massive market for people that want more than farting out of cheap phone speakers.
- Jaruzel 5y ago
  My setup is FAR from cheap: DENON 13 channel AVR, Monitor Audios all round, and KEF upfiring Atmos, all in a nice 7.1.4 setup (with a 100" projected image). I went with upfiring, as I didn't want to hack loads of holes in the original ceiling of my 90 year old house. Yeah they are not as good as in-ceiling speakers, but I wouldn't say upfiring is always for 'cheap setups' - sometimes you have to just live with the restrictions you have.
  - izacus 5y ago
    Ah, sure, I didn't mean "cheap" as in "low quality" but more cheap in terms of "don't need to hire builders to drill holes in your ceiling". (I'm using upfiring system as well due to same restrictions :D )

by Thlom 5y ago

aspenmayer 5y ago

How were installs like this calibrated? How are home installs calibrated, for that matter? Open source solutions/recommendations especially appreciated.

dtx1 5y ago
My denon receiver comes with a microphone and an integrated calibration tool
izacus 5y ago
For home installs the AV Receiver driving the speakers comes with (usually a proprietary) function to calibrate based on your sitting position. I'm not sure if there's many opensource solutions - the quality of autocalibration is a big differentiating feature between AVR OEMs.
nitrogen 5y ago
Check out Duff Room Correction for an old school open source option. There's also Room EQ Wizard, but that is not open source. In high end home theaters there were proprietary installer tools like JBL's ARCOS (which I worked on). And there are pro calibration tools like Smaart. In any case it's some combination of measurement, gain calibration, delay compensation, and generation of FIR or IIR filters to control frequency and phase response. Followed by subjective tweaking by the installer. Plus maybe some secret sauce for various things in the proprietary algorithms.

izacus 5y ago

You translate it by using Dolby Atmos setup (which people are doing for a few years now and is available at home as well). For cheap setups, people bounce sound off the ceiling while for better setups people install speakers into the ceiling. Automatic speaker calibration for a given room is pretty much a standard feature on AVRs today so that part is also taken care off. It's not quite the same as cinema, but there's still a massive market for people that want more than farting out of cheap phone speakers.

Jaruzel 5y ago
My setup is FAR from cheap: DENON 13 channel AVR, Monitor Audios all round, and KEF upfiring Atmos, all in a nice 7.1.4 setup (with a 100" projected image). I went with upfiring, as I didn't want to hack loads of holes in the original ceiling of my 90 year old house. Yeah they are not as good as in-ceiling speakers, but I wouldn't say upfiring is always for 'cheap setups' - sometimes you have to just live with the restrictions you have.
- izacus 5y ago
  Ah, sure, I didn't mean "cheap" as in "low quality" but more cheap in terms of "don't need to hire builders to drill holes in your ceiling". (I'm using upfiring system as well due to same restrictions :D )