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I wish more manufacturers did things like this (and more trailers each too please! Like the old Dolby Digital days) -- we have a few in rotation that we play religiously (still need to get hold of the older Barco one with the fireflies, one of our projectionists hates it... ).
That is Barco's "Stinger" The QSC one was supposed to be for QSC Certified Cinemas (sort of a THXesq thing but with more of an eye towards more QSC purity in addition to, at least, building the theatre right. Without a cinema division, anymore, I suspect that program is dead. The realities are, QSC has no consumer recognition (and neither does Barco, really, or Christie.) Dolby does have consumer recognition so whatever they produce can seem more official rather than just confusing branding.
I want them to put out something that's as good as the Atmos 'Unfold' trailer -- even in 5.1 (not publicly!) it sounds spectacular and is easily my favourite of the new lot of trailers. Underwater Symphony is pretty fun though!
That is Barco's "Stinger" The QSC one was supposed to be for QSC Certified Cinemas (sort of a THXesq thing but with more of an eye towards more QSC purity in addition to, at least, building the theatre right. Without a cinema division, anymore, I suspect that program is dead. The realities are, QSC has no consumer recognition (and neither does Barco, really, or Christie.) Dolby does have consumer recognition so whatever they produce can seem more official rather than just confusing branding.
Ahh, branding.
Let's look at the history in cinema, shall we?
Initially, the only "branding" the movie going public knew was studio and/or producer names (Fox, Warner, Selznick, etc.)
Widescreen got known mainly as Cinemascope thanks to a certain studio proudly tagging their features right after the fanfare.
Then when sound started undergoing changes, maybe Vitaphone was widely recognized, but certainly the other brands (Perspectasound, D-150, etc.) were not. (comparing to today's standards that is.)
Dolby was pretty much unknown to consumers until a few big film releases namely Star Wars (ep.IV). (Yes I am aware of other films prior to, but Star Wars was the chosen one that made "Dolby Stereo" a household buzzword.) It also helped a lot that Dolby licensed their noise reduction to the consumer audio market.
USL (then known as Ultra*Stereo) came along and gave Dolby a good challenge, and filled a void in the market, namely budget and independent theatres that needed good quality stereo sound to help compete with the bigger fish. USL's sound trailer was simple yet sounded awesome and always had a "wow" factor to it. All of the patrons of the theatre I worked at knew what Ultra*Stereo was, and tended to ask if a film was playing in one of the two auditoria I had. (I didn't forget Kintek and Panastereo, but they were very few and far between in my service territory back then, it was always Dolby or USL.)
Then DTS came along, and my time in the field during the film era proved it also had a good recognition. (Compare that to SDDS, which was always met with blank stares or "WTF is that?" when I asked the average moviegoer.) Of course, like Dolby, DTS also was smart enough to branch off into the consumer market where it gave Dolby a good run for the money. (And continues to do so.)
Then DCinema came along and totally disrupted almost a century of exhibition. We had some familiar players at the start for projection (JVC, Sony) that most consumers knew well or at least heard of. TI, most famous to the average Joe for very expensive and sophisticated calculators, was the background player that most knew, but never heard of in reference to cinema. (Like Christie, Barco, Kinoton, Century, Simplex, etc.)
As for sound, JBL (again well known in the consumer space) was king for speakers in most theatres. Altec was a major player that was not too widely known by most, but had arguably better products.
Then the next major shift... QSC entered the fray. I was familiar with QSC as a professional sound reinforcement company with very rugged amplifiers (Series One, anybody?) and great sounding live sound speakers. I missed out on the opportunity to test out a prototype of the amplifier that has become the king of film sound, namely the DCA series. (I encountered it at the MTS office, where Todd had it sitting by his desk. It was in the familiar chassis, but with absolutely no markings whatsoever. When I asked him about it, he facepalmed and said he'd forgotten that I rebuilt amps all the time and had comprehensive test equipment, and would have really tortured that amp to see how it held up. But it was too late it was being shipped back to QSC that day.)
Then QSC developed their cinema series speaker lines, with custom active crossovers tailored to the speaker and DCA amps with the excellent Dataport interface. They quickly overtook JBL for overall sound quality and especially price point.
Not resting on their laurels, QSC continued to make revolutionary additions, namely Q-SYS which as we all know is the ultimate in flexibility and performance in today's cinemas.
So, that leads up to the discussion at hand...how to get QSC as well known as Dolby, DTS, JBL, etc. This trailer is an excellent start. QSC needs to, as Dolby and others have done, also produce one sheets and other lobby materials to promote their sound.
Theatre owners and managers need to make sure they keep their sound systems tuned and performing to spec, and most importantly, as I did when I ran the Grande in L.A., need to try to actually be present in the lobby during show ends to HEAR what the customers are saying as they exit. It was the best way to know what needed attention, and also to know what one was doing RIGHT. You may also be surprised at how many people ARE curious as to what sound system is used (not in a direct way, but from comments like "that sounded great", which is a good starter to letting them know what you've got behind the screen. )
Will QSC and the projector brands ever become household names? Probably not, since they don't really have any consumer products to tie into. But as the experts in the exhibition industry, we can do our part to at least make them names associated with quality presentations and worth asking about.
I guess JBL somewhat started to drop the ball after the whole Harman acquisition, with focus shifting somewhat away from the professional market space and more into the consumer space as well as some "ultra-high-end" niches. Still, some of the older JBL speaker and driver designs remain among my favorites. QSC, until this day, has strictly focused itself onto professional audio needs and as such has come up with a bunch of products business actually want and use.
Dolby's roots are squarely in the cinema market and ever since the 1980s they've effectively used the cinema itself as a marketing channel for their brand name. People knew it from the cinema, so seeing it on your tape cassette deck, your AVR, your DVD player... it must be good, right?
Other than Sony (who already exited the market), only NEC is a brand that's currently somewhat known in the consumer space. I've got a bunch of old TFT panels around here with NEC branding. Also, NEC used to be a pretty well known brand for office and home-cinema projectors, even before their brand-merger with Sharp. While Barco isn't globally known for consumer products, Barco used to build radios and TVs for the European market until somewhere in the late 1970s.
One of my favorite "format snipes" or "format trailers" remains the long version of the Dolby Train trailer, the one with the original DOLBY STEREO DIGITAL logo at the end. Back in the day of me being a projectionist, we had one 35mm copy of that trailer still left, unfortunately, not everybody had been kind to it, it had some deep emulsion scratches... I've yet to find a worthy transfer of it. It apparently appeared on some laserdiscs, which is seemingly the best format currently available.
Star Wars was the chosen one that made "Dolby Stereo" a household buzzword.) It also helped a lot that Dolby licensed their noise reduction to the consumer audio market.
I would argue that the consumer audio market did much more to make Dolby a household name than cinema did. I think people would equate Dolby in the theater with surround speakers, rather than audio quality, if they even were aware of the brand, since the two pretty much arrived hand in hand.
I was in the music business (a consumer audio store) from the time I was in high school (1970) until 2013, so I was around for the entirety of the "high-end consumer audio" era. I went to work at my theater in 1975 and became the owner in 1979, so I've overseen every audio development there, too. We had DTS digital in the theater, and later Dolby, and currently the Trinnov Ovation2, with QSC speakers and amps, and I can confidently tell you that in my whole entire cinema career thus far, not one single person has asked me what kind of sound system we have. I've probably had four or five people ask if we have "surround sound" over the years.
But in the music store, any serious audio fan who was shopping for a cassette deck would ask if it "had Dolby" although a lot of people thought tape decks sounded better with Dolby turned off, because the sound was brighter.
Of course I'm talking from the small-town point of view -- but even when the "big city" theaters had Dolby and we didn't, and lots of people would go to Billings to see movies if we didn't get them soon enough, I don't remember anyone coming back raving about the sound or the name "Dolby." But in home audio, they would ask for it by name.
And you would be correct Mike, and since I was based in La La Land back then, I guess I just ran into more cinephiles than one would out this way. In this discussion I was strictly speaking from the cinema side, where even my most clueless of young friends back then sought out movies played in "Dolby Stereo". And back then, theatres always hyped up their Dolby showings..now, not so much. (Although that is more due to the fact that 99.9999% of all films released these days are in stereo of one format or other.)
Another thing I lament is the fact that so many newer films have simply horrible sound mixes...limited dynamic range, unintelligible dialogue (Tenent anybody?) (I think I just spelled that wrong... F it.) and mixing it near-field style. No sense of balance, no wide stereo spreads, no proper use of surrounds, etc.
The Golden Age of Cinema has truly died and I am thankful I was at least lucky enough to enjoy the last reel of it.
I would argue that the consumer audio market did much more to make Dolby a household name than cinema did. I think people would equate Dolby in the theater with surround speakers, rather than audio quality, if they even were aware of the brand, since the two pretty much arrived hand in hand.
While you may have seldomly gotten a question regarding your sound system, people do notice those big, bold trailers at the start of the show, at least if you ran them. Many of them also noticed the logo on your marquee or other marketing outings.
Dolby's exposure in the mass market of household audio appliances and portable music players was obviously much bigger than their exposure via their cinema channel. But I'd say that their "cinematic backbone" gave them much of the credibility they needed, not just the exposure.
I can confidently state that Dolby was established in consumer's minds via HiFi long before Dolby System in Star Wars. Dolby, with respect to cinemas started as a surround sound system. Heck, in 1980/1981, there were the starts of home Dolby "MP Matrix" decoders just to get the surround sound. It was the opposite of what Dolby had intended. Dolby, in cinemas started as NR (their bread and butter) and EQ to bring a wide range audio...in Mono. The CP100 had no surround EQ or channel. That was an optional adapter (that most everyone got). The CP50, the CAT116 (surround decoder) was also an option (that, again, most everyone got) until Star Wars where (again, it was still called by the NR name Dolby System, not Dolby Stereo)...but Tony is right, that is where the floodgates, from a cinema standpoint, Dolby Stereo took off and was mostly associated with Surround Sound...not NR or EQ (where Dolby thought they'd make the most impact).
When Mike was taking over the Roxy, Dolby Stereo movies accounted for less than 20% of released titles (and probably more like 10-15%. Even movies like The Terminator were released mono. Yes it was low-budget but still...it would be a surround-sound type movie. One often saw the Dolby Stereo movies in the summer with the vast majority of winter, Academy Award contender movies coming out in glorious mono. It wasn't until the mid-80s or so before things would radically change. Also, in the '80s, the 70mm blow ups really took off and with that, the use of subwoofers. I knew of almost nobody that added subwoofers to their strict 35mm Dolby Stereo systems. I'd say less than 10%. That started to change, again as 70mm became more popular and subwoofers became more of a thing. It wouldn't be until the end of the '80s before I'd think that the consumer would associate Dolby Stereo with the whole sound system thing but mostly surrounds and boom. Things like Dolby SR were mostly to appease the film maker's and studios...with zero demand from the consumer side (and really no demand from the exhibitor). It was Digital Audio that pushed Dolby SR as a backup format. SR was incredible but there wasn't this stamped for it.
Mike hit the nail on the head, as far as consumer perception of Dolby in their lives. It was something from their cassette decks that one either liked or hated or perverted (record with NR on, playback with NR off) and then was Surround Sound for movies. It was always much more than that but that wasn't the perception. If the surrounds weren't blasting all of the way through the movies, your Dolby wasn't working...or so they thought.
It's funny though Ioan Allen always spoke about how the Cinema business led the consumer business and that getting that Dolby name on the Marque was the best way to license the technology into consumer products. I imagine Dolby made far more money from licensing to the consumer market than they ever did selling cinema processors and NR units.
Anybody else notice that weird popping/snapping sound when the big fish appears in the background near the end? It sounds like cycling or clipping artifacts from the bass ramp in the center and LFE channels. I'd almost like to use this since we have QSC amps across the board but those artifacts are bad. In the LFE those pops go up above 10KHz, which definitely ain't good.
It's funny though Ioan Allen always spoke about how the Cinema business led the consumer business and that getting that Dolby name on the Marque was the best way to license the technology into consumer products. I imagine Dolby made far more money from licensing to the consumer market than they ever did selling cinema processors and NR units.
If you just look at their raw financials, you see that on paper, the whole cinema business is more of a marginal side-business than anything else. Yet, they have been highly committed to the cinema market and it looks like they're there to stay for a while. For them, the cinema business is the ideal marketing and R&D space.
Their footprint in cinema gives them both credibility to the end-user, but also towards the studios and content creators, who equally need to commit to formats like Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision for them to be relevant.
This situation obviously evolved over the years, but I'd say it's pretty safe to say that Star Wars was a big turning point for Dolby's presence in the cinema and public awareness of the Dolby brand as such. I guess we also have to thank George Lucas here, for his efforts to make movies sound better in theaters. Surely, not everybody converted from mono to "Dolby Stereo" overnight, but it surely made both the crowd and the exhibition industry aware of the need to considerably improve upon sound.
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