questions on how a town theater works (1 Viewer)

[kirtis_mcleskey]

How many watts does a typical town theater have, I've just always wondered becasue the bass on Return of the king at our theaters sounds awesome , it vibrates you lol

and how do they play sound since film is on a strip, is it by a cd ?

 

[GrahamT]

Thousands of Watts and the audio signal is also on the film.

 

[ChrisWiggles]

Depends.

There are optical stereo tracks(analog), along with DD and SDDS on the film digitally(if they are there). DTS uses a small timecode, but the actual audio data is on CD-rom.

Obviously the speakers and power in theaters depends on the size, etc. Very big auditoriums with very good bass often have very very big arrays of subs with oodles of power. Then again there's a small independant little cinema near me with two tower speakers mounted on the front wall, with probably just a small amp driving them.

see: http://www.filmsound.org/film-sound-history/

http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/movie-sound2.htm

Also has a good little illustration showing the actual tracks. The previous and following pages have good info as well. IT also seems a lot more technically complete then i recall this howstuffworks article used to be...

 

[Steve Lucas]

I know it takes a LOT of power to do bass well in a large room. My church seats about 1200. For bass we have Renkus-Heinz Subs. 4 18" and 4 15" drivien by 12,000 watts. Thats just for the subs. The mains are RH line arrays with thier own amps. The sound is awesome.

 

[ChrisLazarko]

Just for an example, the IMAX theater that is around by me which is a dome uses something like 44,000 watts of power... now that's alot of power.