Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site

zako wrote:

I dont get it,,,Why introduce a system thats been around in all the CINEMA theaters for the last hundred years,,  I guess what goes around comes around again,,,

Well, they did not “introduce” anything as I understand they have no commercial objectives in this project. They have some time and money and they juts demoed some piled up speakers. Since Silbatone has a lot of WE exposure it is no surprise that they brought a rendition of cinema speakers. Why did they do it? Well, this is my disagreement with Silbatone and with many other people who have the vintage sickness under the scull.

I have written many times at my site that old cinema speakers from 30s are garbage. They are garbage from design and from implementation perspective. The requirements to sound at that time were extremely low, the objectives were to serve large open space audiences and people did what they did. The good part the at that time no one saved money on materials and engineers did not developed bad habits  that become wide-spread later on. So, some of the elements of the cinema acoustic systems were indeed very-very good and contained capacity that was not even near close to realization at that time. Those cinema-speakers people are  fanatically pray to WE, Bell, Klangfilm, Telefunken, Marconi and many others without “getting” what is the key positive element in the sound that they like.  So, they just brainlessly are mimicking whatever they do not understand, to a different degree of success.

The truth is that some of those vintage elements are remarkably unfriendly for reuse, very non-liner, have very narrow bandwidth and it require a LOT to sound acceptable for today demands. You will very seldom see successful sonically and design-wise intelligent reuse of cinema elements from far past. What Silbatone demonstrated I find is not intelligent reuse. I am sure it did not sound like zippy crap in the rest of the room but it is not enough for me to consider what Silbatone demonstrated as “interesting” attempt.

Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site