JBL SP MKII User Manual

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JBL SP MKII User Manual Manual pdf 8 page image

your system!MOTION PICTURE SOUND: A BRIEF HISTORYIn the early 40’s, the large movie studios owned their own theatres and could enforcequality standards. In those days motion picture theaters provided higher quality soundreproduction than home radios or phonographs.An anti-trust action forced the studios to sell their theatre holdings in the 50’s. When thetheatres became independently owned, each theatre could choose which films it wantedto show. In turn, the studios eliminated their technical staffs which had been responsiblefor maintaining sound quality standards. As a result, the quality of sound in the theatresfailed to keep pace through the 50’s and 60’s.The turning point came in the 70’s with the introduction of the Dolby Stereo® recordingprocess by Dolby Laboratories. The consumer electronics market tends to think of Dolbyexclusively as a noise reduction system used in cassette decks, but a significant portionof Dolby’s business is in the professional audio industry. Dolby Stereo allows four channelsof sound to be recorded on the two available optical soundtracks of a 35mm movie print,with excellent results. One of the first commercial successes of this new technology wasSTAR WARS in 1977.The impact of STAR WARS on the movie-watching public is hard to overestimate. Thequality of the sound track caught everyone’s attention and changed what people expect-ed from film sound. Suddenly, people rushed to see new releases in better-sounding the-atres, and the ones which upgraded their sound systems were rewarded with increasedrevenues.Unfortunately, there was no standard of performance for the sound systems in theatres.Even the best auditoriums sounded different from each other and from the sound thedirector heard in the film studio because of variations in room acoustics and sound sys-tems. In 1982, George Lucas gave his full support to create a new movie theatre soundsystem standard: the THX Sound System.The THX Sound System was designed to complement and enhance the playback ofDolby Stereo, which was the established standard for film sound recording. THX pickedup where Dolby Stereo left off, encompassing standards and technologies for poweramplifiers, speakers, patented Lucasfilm technology and the acoustics of the theatresthemselves to ensure the best possible reproduction of movie soundtracks.By 1991, THX systems had been installed in nearly 500 movie theatres and studios world-wide, with many more in various stages of construction. THX has become the industrystandard for post-production mixing facilities as well as for theatres and/or studios.3