Extreme Audio – IMAX!!
Adam Rayner despairs over his local multiplex who seem to have all the gear but no ideaand ends up at the new Odeon IMAX in Uxbridge, Middlesex
My background is in pro-audio and my first ever boss had massively expensive ‘multi-cell’ tweeter horns he had swiped from a dead cinema. He would regale me with tales of pro audio history and was a major early influence upon me.
Along with the time I called the projectionist at the Empire Leicester Square and nagged him for half an hour after seeing an Indiana Jones flick in THX, I had sparked a lifelong fascination for high end pro kit of sound and vision. And you have to hand it to my local VUE Cineplex in Watford, for they have got some really sexy sound and projection stuff, with 4K images and fat bass.
Also, they have posh seats with more space as well, that you can book for extra.
Using my iPod Touch, we booked regular seats for three for Marvel’s Avengers Assemble and off we went. In nice and early, we go down to the screen when they are through turnaround and I discover the mobile version of the website that I had used made no mention of the allocated seating.
It turns out, in our usher-free cinema room that most people have sat randomly and the musical chairs game begins. This goes on deep into the programme with every late arrival sparking as many as three sets of people-movements, complete with underlying aggression.
Did I mention the room was stifling? Sweaty and close and without the aircon being used. After all the workers are driven like donkeys so could never notice anyway.
Then, in our 2D screening, they randomly show a Fuzzyvision 3D trailer. (Without the Real D glasses.) Something inside snaps and I go off to find the manager. Steaming from the ears, I stump up to the person collecting tickets and he seems to find a fat angry punter utterly hilarious. Then he cops an attitude to the fact that I am ticked off and treats it like some sort of street event among thugs, finishing with ‘Yeah, keep walking..’ as I stump off back to ‘enjoy’ the film.
Point is, the whole place seemed to be run by The Unwilling, or at least the Not-Bothered and the absurd threat to my physical safety was just not on in a big chain. (he was a scrawny kid, so the sheer braggadocio was actually quite funny. The fact that this was a little snot and that I – six foot two of walrus-like proportions – could have just squashed him was not the point. The lad was ready to threaten punters upset at being treated like cattle, despite the posh equipment they were sat before.
Being me, I followed through by mail to head office and bless them, the terribly sweet PR at VUE thought that a form letter and two show-up-and-hope-to-get-your-choice tickets (for our party of three) would mollify me.
It didn’t. She got them back in shreds.
Of course, I would not find out about any outcome regarding my suggested sacking of this fool, especially when so very many other people need jobs but it did seem grotesque and with what was spent for the cinema visit, it just rammed home harder than ever before why ‘hell is other people’ (Sartre) and why home cinema is the best.
***
But in a lovely post-script, in looking for an alternative, I have found a cinema experience worthy of the name.
It is the purpose-built Odeon company’s Imax in Uxbridge. Yes you pay two bob to park (but it’s dry) but the Imax has an usher who makes an announcement. Food on sale is thrice the choice of VUE and the massive sound system in the cinema uses monstrous bass bins behind the screen. The whole experience (Prometheus) was as awesome as the Avengers was a bloody ordeal.
I know where I shall be heading in future!
NOW READ ON:
The above is an article with almost no editing, that will be in Home Cinema Choice magazine this month. But you know me, as soon as I clapped ears and breastbone around the 118dB 20Hz low bass performance, with awesome clarity and placement, in that Imax cinema, I HAD to know more. I called their PR firm and before I knew it,. I was on a conference call to the top Canadian dudes behind Imax and was given the whole vertically-integrated story.
It is one of systems, film makers and cinemas all working together. From the cameras, to the projectors, to the six discrete channels of audio, with FULL range speaker enclosures in all directions, to the microphones and opticians’ cameras pointing at the screen to monitor its performance, the whole thing is breath taking.
And, with my knowledge of the systems used of Meyer Sound by Metallica’s Big Mick, a dear old mate now, and the joys of THX technology and other high power systems, I can happily state that no more powerful and accurate sound system for public broadcast can possibly exist in ANY other venue. The sheer levels of perfection, acoustic tuning and equipment design mean that no other auditorium could ever justify the cost, other than fixed-installation, long-term payback. For the kits’ cost is epic.
My personal bent was to want to get up close and personal with the IMAX bass ordnance. So, after my session with the technicians on the phone wherein I was part of a four way conference call, which was novel. I got to go visit the cinema in Uxbridge again.
It was lovely. I met the manager, to whom I had been introduced by the London based Imax PR firm and was handed over to the technician in charge of the Imax screen. This meant I was able to go see the projection room at Uxbridge’s Odeon complex in the Chimes shopping mall.
I did get to see the projection room at the old ABC cinema in Harrow 20 years ago when a mate worked as projectionist. This was before it was split and then finally became an Asian cinema. I recall the amazing ancient 1950’s grade engineering and the huge platters of 35mm film. I know that art house cinemas these days have to wait their ruddy turn with actual celluloid films as that is all getting a bit quaint now. (there’s fewer copies and any breakages the cinemas have to repair themselves, missing frames and all!) It’s nearly all huge digital gizmodery and Vicky, the ‘projectionist’ although she clearly knew all about film and even showed me the film reels they still have on racks on the walls, is now a computer programmer.
Vicky – Imax projectionist/technician
But I’m getting ahead of myself, for first we saw and snapped the screen and auditorium. For one, the speakers are all pukka FULL range, so can rumble down to massively deep from all corners. There are rakes of smaller boxes with a twelve and a horn in, all around the perimeter. But to be allowed into the Sanctum Sanctorum was my aim.
Yes, I was keen to see the huge passive crossovers of gleaming coiled copper, lurking inside the open-air-grilled sections of the vast full range boxes behind the absurd screen but it was the bass makers I really wanted to see.
And they had both. First the original cavernous subsonic rumblers that used 18inch drivers in pairs – they had one with a driver missing, sat in the very corner of the back stage area, possibly as a resonance trap – and they had four glorious monstrosities. Each with four twelves and a sexy slot port, arrayed such that all the ports were in a cluster central to the sixteen-strong driver complement. Four to a box, they have big excursion and super tight control. You could not have got these four bass boxes into anything smaller than a three tonne truck!
Imax bass
The projectors were likewise behemothic and you need two for 3D of course and the terribly sweet and helpful Vicky was a champ throughout, happily standing dwarfed by the screen, the bass makers, the projectors Everything about the Uxbridge Imax is huge except for the tiny lass who bosses it like a Bond villain. I’m definitely a fan of hers!
Finally, get this car-tech peeps! The horns in the speakers are asymmetrically shaped in the same way that in-car ones are, to specifically smooth-out the high frequency energy dispersal thus creating perfect sound staging from every seat. This equal-energy dispersal is about combating a less than theoretically perfect seating position (like in any car bar a McLaren F1) and is the ONLY field of audio to have this in common with car sounds. And you are the only audience that Imax will be as deeply well-understood by!
That technology and acoustical treatment adds up to the profundity, purity and sheer hair-goose-bumpy-making power of the Imax visual, audible and visceral experience. It’s not about watts and lumens, it’s about an emotional response due to excellence. And as such, I just KNOW that Imax is a perfect fit with Talk Audio people of all persuasions, both SQ and SPL. Imax is (to quote Tom Hanks) ‘Optical Poptitude!’ with SQL in living, breathing reality. Get along and experience it as soon as you can – check out the British Film Institute and Odeon and Imax on yer Google search but get there if you can.
ere’s the Odeon linky
link
Talk Audio would like to offer a huge thank you to Brian Bonnick, Chief Technology Officer at Imax corporation in CANADA, the super cool UK pr folks’ Emily Dimmock at Edelman and especially General Manager Elaine Pullen and rest of her staff and management of Odeon in Uxbridge, who all made me most welcome.
And here’s a gallery slideshow of the whole shoot: gallery