New Hollywood Dolby Theatre Premieres Brave with Dolby Atmos Sound

  • The newly rebranded Dolby Theatre (former Kodak Theatre), home of the Academy Awards, reopened this week with new signage and a new audio-visual system.
  • As previously reported by ETCentric, Dolby Laboratories recently signed a 20-year deal with CIM Group (Hollywood & Highland Center owner) for naming rights to the facility.
  • The four-level, 3,400-seat venue has been outfitted with Dolby 3D projection and the company’s new Dolby Atmos audio system. The premiere of Disney-Pixar’s new film “Brave” will be the first to showcase the new sound format.
  • Dolby Surround 7.1 uses different audio channels, while Dolby Atmos object-based sound uses individual speakers rather than entire speaker arrays. In the newly outfitted facility, Dolby Atmos also adds overhead speakers installed on 50-foot trusses.
  • Atmos offers the equivalent of 128 channels, as compared to the six channels of 5.1 or the eight of 7.1.
  • “With sound ‘objects,’ directors and mixers stop thinking about which channel a sound goes on,” reports Variety. “They place the source of the sound in space relative to the listener — that is, they make the sound source an ‘object’ — and then the playback device routes the sound to whatever speakers give the desired effect.”
  • “The Atmos decoder learns all the speaker positions and the acoustics of the room, then the decoder uses the speakers that place the sound where the filmmakers wanted it, whether there are two speakers in the room or 102,” explains the article.

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