First IMAX Enhanced film review...

[Todd Anderson]

Residential Systems has has published a review of Journey to the South Pacific in IMAX Enhanced... interesting read.

What do you think?

https://www.residentialsystems.com/blogs/sciacca-first-imax-enhanced-disc-reviewed

 

[tripplej]

Thanks for the details. I am interested in checking it out. Will look out for it.

 

[Grayson Dere]

Thanks for providing the link to this, Todd. I was curious about what the IMAX Enhanced sound features would be and right after I read, "I found dialog from the center channel to be quite “chesty” with IMAX DTS engaged," I kind of got turned off immediately. Not that I don't appreciate IMAX sound in an IMAX theater, I just don't know if I need that kind of chestiness to be imported into my home theater. The large IMAX sound I thought was because of the interaction between the acoustic space setup and the speakers in the cinema, not from processing to make it sound big.

 

[Matthew J Poes]

The more I read about this the less keen I am on it. I don’t want a disc changing my bass management settings in a way I don’t understand. Black box adjustments like this make me nervous.

I find the review interesting. “Chesty” doesn’t sound like a good quality unless it’s supposed to be like that. He seems to suggest it sounded better, but the concept made me nervous.

The idea of a 11 channel full range surround system in a small room takes on different qualities too. Small rooms can’t take advantage of discrete full range channels and most people’s speakers lack the dynamic range or bandwidth to be used in this way. So what is this disc doing?

It seems like this approach needs IMAX certified speakers which meet their expectations for a given size room (sound familiar yet). Otherwise any modification could risk making things worse and introducing distortion.

I still want to know more but I’m feeling more and more dubious about this idea.

 

[Grayson Dere]

I doubt it's happening anytime soon, but I think it would be fascinating if the IMAX Enhanced product line eventually utilized its own room-correction algorithm similar to Anthem ARC or Audyssey, but tailored to what IMAX intends for the home.

This way at least the large sound might translate better into the smaller home theater size. But then I think they would need their own line of IMAX certified speakers to get the most benefit out of the system as Matthew mentioned above.