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Author
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Topic: It's Official -- I'm Jadded! (aka Mike Must Have Digital)
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Mike Olpin
Chop Chop!
Posts: 1852
From: Dallas, TX
Registered: Jan 2002
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posted 09-13-2003 11:13 PM
First off many praises to the Management at AMC Palm Promanade 25. Especially Dion. He handled my refund very profesionaly. Deffinately the best experience i've had talking to an AMC manager (no offence to anyone), and definately the reason I will return and continue to enjoy movies at this theatre.
(rant mode on)
I'm going to see the Sneak Peek of Fighting Temptations tonight. So up comes Fandango where I take a look at my options.
Parkway Plaza 18 - Hmmm nope. went there last week.
AMC fasion valley - Screens under 8 feet tall. No thanks.
AMC mission valley - Torus Screens. Nuff said.
UA Horton - No Stadium Seating
Pacific Grossmont - Wow. Cant describe the Suckiness of this place.
Ultra Star Chulla Vista - Again, No Stadium Seating. (sorry Tim and Mike, wihing I had gone there now!)
Anyway, I landed on the Palm Promanade, One of the Handfull of AMCs that I actually like. Got there early, bought concessions, sat down in the theatre and listened to Chris Eric Stevens "Take It Back to the Old School" with a new version of "Saturday Night". Things are going well. They even extended the side masking at showtime! (A touch I really like!) The trailers run through. All Paramount. All sounding great. Then The feature started. The drop in audio quality was really significant. Most people probably wouldnt notice, but for me it was compleately unlistenable.
Long story short.
Used to be a time when this would bug me, but not to an extent where i couldnt enjoy the movie. Now In this case, I actually got a refund and left! I still havent seen Fighting Temptations beyond the first 5 minutes.
Why do I care so much? I dont know! Have I become Jaded listening to so many films?
And another thing.
Why does AMC continue install SDDS, the most rare digital format, in all there houses? Is this why people think there Home Theatres kick the shorts off there Multi plex? If they frequent AMC, Mabey there systems do! Heck! A 150 dollar radio shack amp with cheap speakers would sound good compared to the Analog backup used in most theatres! And when your ONLY system is SDDS. that winds up being a good third of the time! Why does Paramount have many of there trailers mixed in SDDS when they dont relese most of there movies in it! Would SDDS even still be around at all if AMC didnt buy into it?
It just makes me go Nuckin' Futs!
Ok I'm done now. Let me go find my flame resistant suit, to protect me from the AMC employees and SDDS proliferaters that post here.
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Martin Brooks
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 900
From: Forest Hills, NY, USA
Registered: May 2002
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posted 09-15-2003 11:06 PM
Mike, you're absolutely correct to walk out on any presentation that sucks. I've been doing it for years.
I remember seeing some rock concert film, probably around 1974 or so at the otherwise wonderful (now-defunct) Loews Kings in Brooklyn (pre-Dolby). I purposely called first to make sure they were showing the film in 4-tk mag. They were, only one channel was missing. There would be a closeup of a musician going crazy playing an organ only you didn't hear any organ. The manager claimed "it was supposed to sound like that." I wrote directly to Larry Tisch on that one. He admitted to a technical problem.
When I saw E.T. (I think at the now-defunct Movieland on Broadway in Manhattan), there was a high-pitched tone heard throughout the film. Sounded like 10K to me, except that I knew the system probably couldn't reproduce 10KHZ. I complained at the end of that one because the theater was too crowded for me to get out and back into my seat center seat. The manager said to his associate, "oh..he heard the problem." They gave me another ticket, but why would I want to go there again?
When I saw Buena Vista Social Club, tracks were coming out of the wrong speakers. The genius projectionist told me to sit all the way on the left. Got my money back on that one.
More recently, went to see "The Secret Lives of Dentists" on the third day of the run. Print had a continuous scratch. Got my money back on that one also.
And those are just the bad experiences that I remember.
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Scott Norwood
Film God
Posts: 8146
From: Boston, MA. USA (1774.21 miles northeast of Dallas)
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 09-16-2003 04:44 AM
They showed trailers in digital when the feature wasn't? How tacky! That says two things to their customers: first, "our sound maintenance sucks" (since their optical sound was bad) and, second, "we care enough about marketing to install 'digital' sound, but don't care enough about actual sound quality to install a system which can play back your film, no do we care enough to maintain our optical system, either."
Oddly enough, I've recently been caring less and less about digital sound lately. Maybe it's because I've been lucky enough to see films in theatres with properly aligned optical systems and maybe it has something to do with the fact that I haven't seen any big, loud, action movies lately. Obviously, it makes a difference for anything with a really good sound mix, with lots of music and effects, but for dialogue-centered films with only incidental music, I don't hear much benefit.
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Martin Brooks
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 900
From: Forest Hills, NY, USA
Registered: May 2002
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posted 09-16-2003 11:30 AM
Actually, even for films that are not effects films and primarily dialog, I greatly prefer digital sound to optical, although I'd probably prefer analog mag to digital.
Maybe SR is okay when absolutely everything else in the A- and B-chains is tuned perfectly and the acoustics of the house are good, but IMHO, you get better high-end in digital and that is essential for dialog intelligibility. In fact, it's probably more important for dialog than it is for music and sfx. Also, since SR (analog) is matrixed, you get less separation between the channels, so you have lots of music leakage into the center channel mixing with the dialog.
Regardless of the format, whenever I'm in a theater (and this goes back to mag days), the first thing I listen for is a clean high end and decent channel separation. If I hear that, I always breathe a sigh of relief.
Having said all that, as I've posted elsewhere, when I saw King Kong at the Loews Jersey last year, I thought the old optical sound in that theater sounded just great.
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