Was great to find your site. I think about this stuff alot .. and one of my clear thoughts during Avatar was that the sound was a let down.

But then cinema sound is always fairly flat & blunt in general. Try closing your eyes next time you watch a film. Its revealing to see how much your brain fudges audio cues into the visual cues to create spatial sensations. But when you cut out the visual cues then the sound becomes very mono dimensional & clunky.

So while the film industry has made huge progression in surround/3d/multi channel sound .. they have also put a huge roadblock in the way by committing to specific formats that are really all about commercial objectives and not sonic results.

In many respects the sonic results of 5.1 are so poor & hammy that it has left many consumers skeptical of the promise of surround sound. This ever present skepticism has been a problem ever since quadraphonic promised the earth and just delivered expensive stereo system.

Still its a massive kettle of fish “3d Sound”. One persons favorite soup is another persons fertilizer. Sound is such a subjective environment and the laws of physics are a bit of a party killer too.

I think mass entertainment will have to change a lot before we get real 3d sound environments. We have to break down the audience-stage barrier, as long as the audience is in one place and the entertainment is in front of them then there really is no point in producing high fidelity 3d sound. Its simply too out of context.

The other problem with film sound would be choosing what to make sonically 3d. What do you do when the camera changes angles or cuts to another shot?

I think 3d sound mostly ends up in the too hard basket or the more popular “why bother when you can fool them with gimmicks” basket.

In my view there are still some fundamental changes that need to happen in they audio is reinforced before we can really leap forward across the whole gamut of audio industries.

What we need is wireless smart speakers boxes that know where they are located in relation to the other speakers boxes in the system, what their specific & exact orientation is, what their capabilities are as a box and also what it sounds like where they are located.

So you put your speakers where ever you can, however you want and where ever suits. “ping” the system and let it crunch the spatial data and then feed it signal while letting super fast boy-grouped chips smash through the algorithms that tell what speaker to produce what part or parts of the sound based on the spatial requirements of each sound.

I guess you could call the system “a school of fish”?

I’ll probably be crucified for saying this, but I felt that the Avatar soundtrack wasn’t all that impressive. I admit that I went in with high expectations, and perhaps my dislike of the film itself contributed subconsciously to my feelings on the sound. In fact, most of the soundtrack was pushed aside in favor of annoyingly generic “melodic tribal shouts” / the same “hopeful strings and chants” score that I swear I’ve heard a million times before. As a result, the soundtrack took too much of a backseat to the music.

This is just my opinion.

I have always slightly taken side with those that say that too much sounds coming from behind or from the surrounds will confuse the audience and detach them from the film. Ofcourse, each film does have scope for more surround activity plus there would be films in which depending on genre, style and scenes, a strong use of surrounds would be great and justifiable.

It is hard to believe that an upgrade of world theatres to a system like the 22.2 or the IOSONO would happen anytime soon and I do believe if it does happen it would be more of a theme park/special location thing. But I would really like to get a chance to experience the IOSONO sound and see how well it works! It is an exciting world to follow that of technology in sound projection for film. I’ve been tracking back the history of it and its great to see how it has all evolved from the early days!

Personally I thought the Avatar soundtrack was very good but ultimately as pedestrian as the story. It’s like Cameron thought maybe a mindblowing story coupled with mindblowing visuals and mindblowing audio would be just too much.

You have to wear glasses to get the best visual 3D effect. IMO you have to wear headphones to get the best aural 3D effect.

The soundtrack that still sticks out in my head as being the best I’d heard in years – Cloverfield (no matter what I think of the movie overall).

I saw both Avatar and Cloverfield in the same THX certified screen.

S’funny, although I saw Avatar in 3D, my mind’s eye recollections are all essentially 2D. I also remember thinking that Avatar was showing the age and limitations of 24fps with various shots strobing horribly whilst others were just fantastic.