Widescreen Review, November/December 1999, Volume 8, Number 6, Issue 35, by Gary Reber

Mastering Soundtracks At Mi Casa

Critical Listening To The Re-Mastered Dangerous Ground 5.1 Soundtrack

The following conversation took place at Mi Casa, the post production mastering studio owned by producer/engineer Robert Margouleff and co-proprietor engineer Brant Biles. The Mi Casa team was joined by Jesse Torres, New Line Cinema Post Production DVD Technical Operations Manager. Together, these gentlemen are responsible for pioneering the work of mastering motion picture soundtracks for optimum playback on home theatre systems. Widescreen Review Editor and Publisher Gary Reber asked the questions during a recent visit to Mi Casa.

Gary Reber, Widescreen Review: How is the DVD format affecting motion picture, television and audio entertainment?

Robert Margouleff: With the advent of home theatre, we have begun to see a major cultural shift. Instead of going out to the movies for our entertainment, new digital technologies have allowed us to bring the motion picture experience into our homes. The hi-fi set, the television, the computer, VHS and LaserDisc, have converged onto one universal storage medium: the DVD. Audio, video and film now have a common digital language which can deliver high quality picture and 5.1 surround audio into our living rooms.

WSR Reber: Would you explain the 5.1 audio format in more detail?

Margouleff: The platform 5.1 Surround represents left, center, right, left rear, right rear and "dot 1 " (. 1) for the subwoofer. The "dot 1" is the lowest two octaves of a full-frequency channel. Incidentally, the term "dot 1" was coined by Tomlinson Holman, who is the "TH" of THX^®. The subwoofer channel seems to be a heavy topic of discussion amongst a lot of engineers. There are people who will feed full frequency information to the LFE, or subwoofer channel, and then wonder why, after it goes through an encode/decode process, the bottom end doesn't sound the same.

Brant S. Biles: Yes, that certainly is not a good thing. When Robert and I are building a LFE channel, or working on a LFE channel that's already existing, we will make sure to emulate the crossover characteristics of that low frequency channel onto our master tape and not leave it up to the electronics of a crossover somewhere down the road.

WSR Reber: So where do you set the cut off for that low frequency channel?

Margouleff: Our monitor crossover is set at 80 cycles. We use an in-band measurement scheme to set our surround and subwoofer levels. What has to happen on a 5.1 platform is that it has to be able to play a movie that has a certain predetermined surround and subwoofer level that is measured for theatrical release, and it also has to accommodate the subwoofer for music-only surround recordings.

Biles: Originally we would set our sub level so that it had the same energy as the center channel did. We quickly realized this was a mistake and adopted the ITU in-band alignment standard for our 5.1 digital remix and remastering studio.

WSR Reber: This is the practice that has been historically adopted by Dolby Laboratories.

Biles: Exactly.

WSR Reber: But I have been told that the standard that Dolby adopted was not shared with DTS?

Margouleff: Originally, we based our mixes on equal energy coming from all speakers including the subwoofer. But when our 5.1 music mixes were played on a home theatre system that was set up for film playback, the subwoofer level would just knock you out of your chair.

WSR Reber: The problem occurs on the surround processor side of the equation. With the exception of the Millennium DTS^® Digital Surround processor which had no Dolby^® Digital capability, home theatre equipment manufacturers were building the processors according to Dolby specifications in which an automatic plus 10dB of bass boost was directed to the LFE channel. The boost was to compensate for the -10dB signal level assigned to the .1 LFE channel by Dolby. So if your DTS mixes were set at 0dB, and the consumer's processor was set to a 10dB boost, then DTS mixes would be +10dB louder than Dolby Digital mixes in the .1 LFE channel. And WOW! That is what was happening in all those early mixes, because no one was talking to each other to come up with an agreement on a level that would be the standard to which both codec systems would adhere and manufacturers would build accordingly. Competition is an interesting phenomenon, and here, the two competing digital surround formats were operating in isolation to one another.

Margouleff: I think that is settled now.

Biles: One of the original considerations for actually having the subwoofer level at -10dB on the master tape and raising your processor 10dB on the LFE channel, was to allow for extended headroom on tape. Now, with the advent of digital recording on almost everything, headroom certainly is a problem. Some of it has to be dealt with, but it's not a problem like it was in the analog world where you get saturation and lose your transit response on low frequency information if you were way up at the top of your threshold saturation.

WSR Reber: Yet it is true that upwards of 98 percent of motion picture soundtracks are still printed to a analog magnetic film printmaster.

Biles: Yes, everything we work on is transferred to digital.

Margouleff: Terry Beard, the founder of DTS, said to me early on that home theatre and DVD was going to be a very different medium than film or television. As soon as you start re-purposing any medium that was designed for another application, a certain amount of technical and aural translation is going to have to take place. On DVD, we have been able to dramatically enhance the sonic experience of motion picture soundtracks. That's one reason why I think we ended up working with Evan Edalist and Jesse Torres at New Line.

WSR Reber: I agree. New Line has been out front ever since the Lost In Space anamorphic widescreen DVD release.

Margouleff: Being a music producer, I look at the film industry as an outsider, versus somebody coming from the motion picture side with the idea that audio is only secondary to the picture. In audio, everything isn't recorded as a picture of reality like the film camera does. With audio, if someone makes a big mistake, we can lift a good section from over here and put it over there. You know, fix it and paste it; seamlessly edit the thing together so it sounds like a totally live performance. In reality, it isn't. You know, it's magic. It's all done with strings and mirrors and tape. In home theatre, we're beginning to see a melding of that approach, not only with the audio, but with the picture as well. We want to have the soundtrack occupy the same space as the listener. So we want to move the audio out of the picture frame so that you truly do live inside the movie.

Biles: Today we are faced with a very different way that people look at movies. With the quick cutting and all the electronic synthesis of the image using CGI [Computer Generated Imagery], even the picture is changing. For example, if you look at Star Wars: Episode IV, the Banthas out in the desert are elephants covered in wool. They are actually live creatures in costume. Now take a look at The Phantom Menace. You've got Jar Jar Binks, one of the main characters, who is completely computer generated. It's no longer a snapshot of reality.

Margouleff: In addition to New Line spending a lot of time and money to do the finest quality telecine transfers to take full advantage of the medium, they have also realized the need to properly process and remaster the audio for their new DVD releases.

Biles: Reason being, when most films are mixed in surround, they are mixed for a large theatre, where you have 300 to 500 people sitting among diffusive rear speaker arrays. These mixes are set up so that there aren't jarring effects in the rear that are going to make the audience turn around and look. We call this the "exit sign" effect, where the audience is not looking at the screen and paying attention to the movie, but are distracted by what's behind them. Also, films are mixed so that the person in the last row can hear the dialogue as well as the person in the first row, and so that the dialogue is not obstructed by too much surround information coming at them.

Margouleff: We also noticed that the films sounded much brighter than the music we were mixing. This we found was due to the fact that many of the films were mixed on monitors utilizing the X-Curve calibration standard, and then played over the flatter speakers in our studio. The use of the X-Curve on the dubbing stage and in auditoriums was meant to standardize on a single house curve for movie theatres. The X-Curve is flat from 50Hz-2kHz, then down 1 dB per 1/3 octave beyond. Above 10kHz, additional roll-off is used, and the curve is supposed to be adjusted to room volume. With everyone mixing to this curve, it made the mixes interchangeable from the dubbing stage to the theatre. This was a standard setup in the early 1970s and was really intended for farfield auditorium exhibition. Basically, most films that are transferred to DVD have been mixed utilizing the X-Curve, but for home theatre with its flatter, nearfield monitor needs, correction equalization for the EQ built-in for the X-Curve playback must be made. They call this Band-Aid "Re-EQ." It is commonly applied to film material, but not music material. When we master a soundtrack, we compensate for the X-Curve, based on the sonics of the picture we are working on. One curve DOES NOT fit all. You don't have to use "Re-EQ" on pictures we work on as we have already applied the correction for the flat home theatre system.

WSR Reber: Now, if only New Line and the other studios pre-"Re-EQing" would indicate on their DVD and LaserDisc packaging not to engage "Re-EQ" for such titles that were mastered "flat." This is certain to be a new confusion factor, especially for enthusiasts who have purchased home theatre processors equipped with Cinema Re-EQ, [for example, THX-certified controllers] and who routinely engage re-equalization when playing movie soundtracks. What Brant describes has been the school of thought for a lot of years in movie sound creation. But there are directors today that will say they are breaking that old school thinking and putting more aggressive spatial sound into the theatres and into our homes.

Jesse Torres, New Line: Right, and I must say there was a film that Bob and Brant did for New Line, Wes Craven's New Nightmare, in which the surround and energy in the content of the surround channels is quite substantially above that old school of thinking.

Margouleff: It's funny, because when you put one of these films up on the Sadie Daw, you can actually see what's going on graphically on the screen. Take the subwoofer, for example. You can tell where the mixer is coming from. In some movies, you will see only the subwoofer in action as a low frequency effects channel. Every time there is a door slam or an effect, or a clap of thunder, there is a little peak on the LFE track. But then when the music comes in with a big dance groove or something, there is no subwoofer at all. The music mixer is sitting over there at the mixing console with the dialogue and effects guy and he doesn't get access to the LFE channel.

Biles: In Wes Craven's New Nightmare, they didn't send any of the music score to the LFE channel. In that particular case, Robert and I created a subwoofer track from about 60 cycles on down to give the low strings and tympani bass enhancement for the DVD release. An interesting thing about this movie, though, is that when they mixed it, some of the Freddy Krueger vocal effects were going to the LFE. "I'm gonna get you now!" went to the subwoofer.

WSR Reber: In my principal review system, I have RTAs [Real Time Analyzers] on every channel. And I also use a Dorrough six-channel loudness metering bridge to track signal levels. I evaluate hundreds of movies on DVD each year and I totally agree with you. I can spot a mix. I can see everything, I also have center back surround processing which I've had since 1981, and I currently use the SMART Circle Surround EX� and DTS ES professional theatrical [modified with consumer equipment interfaces] as well as the SMART Circle Surround EX� Junior (CS-EX Jr.) processors to monitor phantom center back surround channel signals. By the time we review Austin Powers-The Spy Who Shagged Me, the first DVD with encoded Dolby^® Digital Surround EX�, I will have installed the Lexicon MC-1 processor with THX Surround EX� decoding using two center back surround loudspeakers instead of one. The SMART units are products of SMART Devices, Inc. [800 45-SMART]

Margouleff: There is a very different mindset from the guys who mix for films, and guys like us who come from the music world. We want to have the music and the action occupy the same space as the listener. So we want to move the action off the screen so that you truly do live inside the movie. Rather than using an objective kind of approach to audio, we want to take the other extreme, a totally subjective approach to the audio where you truly do live inside the scenes.

WSR Reber: You're in the scenes.

Margouleff: Exactly. Thanks to New Line, we've been given the liberty to push the envelope. We've begun to meld the objective and subjective elements of a movie and bring those elements together. We don't interfere with the original intent of the producer and director, but master the movie much like a record.

Biles: Let's sort of spell out what it is we're doing here at Mi Casa. In the music industry, once a producer finishes an album and has all the songs mixed and everything is recorded to satisfaction, he will then take that album to a mastering facility's engineer, whether it be Bernie Grundman or Bob Ludwig and have the album assembled. Instead of an individual collection of songs, it's put together as a package of songs, where each song is consistent and levels are matched from song to song. It is the final stage before replication. It's the last point where you can correct any nuances that need to be changed before you jump off the cliff and go out to the public. Maybe there's a little too much 3kHz in it--it's a little too biting--maybe there's not enough bottom end, you can change the EQ curves. That's been going on for decades in the record industry. Now with the transition of a lot of films to DVD, what we have been doing in conjunction with New Line Cinema is re-mastering the soundtracks.

WSR Reber: But are you going deeper than the printmaster? In other words, are you going back into the multi-track music and other sound element tracks?

Biles: There are four films that we're about to embark on for New Line. It's a collection of three: House Party /, // and ///; and a film called Total Eclipse, which is a Leonardo DiCaprio film that he did in France before Titanic. In those situations, we will be going in and remixing from the original ambience stems, effects stems, dialogue stems and music stems. But for the most part, what we've been doing is taking the six-channel printmaster, having it transferred in 20- or 24-bit six-channel. We will take it and perform the mastering task that has been done for decades on audio albums to the DVD audio itself. Our intent here is not to change the initial idea; not to change the intent of the artist, or the intent of the director or film producer. Our job is not to go in and say, "Well, I don't like that, let's change it." What we are here to do is just supplement it, make it better; enhance it and make the transition to this platform a better one than just simply transferring a printmaster and throwing it onto a DVD.

A lot of folks ask, "Well, why do you need to do that?" The reason is because some films are mixed better than others. With some of them, you listen to the transfers and think, "This isn't bad, this is really close, it's really on the money." Some of them are horrendous where things will just rise up into the rears and/or have so much reverberation and ambience on them that it obliterates what's going on on the screen. Another situation is where you might have a scene where the actors are in the middle of a storm. If I'm going to be watching a film and watching a scene that's occurring in a storm, I want the storm to be around me, I want to hear the thunder and lightning coming from in front of me, and maybe a tree being hit by lightning over behind me to the left and rain pouring all around me. I don't want it to be confined to the left and right speakers in the front with maybe just a hint of it coming from behind me.

WSR Reber: That drives me nuts when the soundtrack fails to put me in the scene.

Biles: I want to be in the scene as much as possible.

WSR Reber: I put Saving Private Ryan on the cover of Issue 33 of Widescreen Review.

Margouleff: That had a lot of stuff going on.

WSR Reber: It went for 24 minutes solid with the most incredible soundfield I've ever heard. It was unbelievable. In fact, in the last three years, I've never tripped the 30 amp circuits that my amplifiers are powered from. But this soundtrack shut down my massive Krell amplifiers, and it tripped the 30 amp circuits. These are 300-watt Class-A power amps. That's the most intense soundtrack I've ever heard in my life. The sound design of that was just magnificent during that long pounding battle segment.

Margouleff: Well, like Brant said, there are good mixes and bad mixes.

WSR Reber: And there's an example where sound designers and re-mixing engineers really got a hold of those elements and created what I call a holosonic� [Widescreen Review trademark] soundfield experience. 

Margouleff: Well, DVD is really in its infancy. And what we're doing now is adopting other formats to fit into that discipline onto that disc. Soon we'll start to see products designed for DVD-specific applications. For example, the multi-view aspect of the product. We're doing a thing for DTS and UniPix Miramar called What A Blast, which is a multi-angle DVD of buildings being imploded, one after another, where you'll be able to switch from one view to another, with the music of Tangerine Dream in discrete 5.1.

Another thing that's new with DVDs is that a Web link can be put on the DVD, so now you can also call the mothership. So, for example, if you want to have added content on a New Line movie, the Web link will call up the New Line Cinema Web site for that particular movie. All the information about that movie--when it's going to be released in Europe, extra interviews--all of the very pertinent information, can be accessed. There'll be a tremendous high degree of interactivity. You'll be able to move off that DVD and into cyberspace. In the near future, this is where it's going. So what will happen is we'll have a lot more space on the DVID to really go for that super-high quality image and audio. I think we're at the beginning of something very exciting.

WSR Reber: Are you implying then, that more of the supplemental aspects of the DVD release will be shifted to the Internet?

Margouleff: Could very possibly be.

WSR Reber: Which would free up more space for higher resolution; higher picture quality. Is that what you're suggesting?

Margouleff: Yes, that's what I'm suggesting.

WSR Reber: And with DVD-9 becoming more of a standard release format....

Margouleff: Well, I think that's something that Jesse can address.

Torres: It's definitely a very good idea to have the added value material on a Web site, on a server that we can update as often as we want. In the meantime, I think our added value is what's really been shining out in the marketplace, and that's what I've been hearing a lot of feedback on. How people, for example, just love to hear the director talk and watch the movie at the same time.

Biles: Well, that situation is something that you would definitely have to have left on the DVD if you're going to have director narration while you're watching the film.

WSR Reber: That's a carry-over from LaserDisc.

Torres: You know, we also include the featurettes, behind the scenes ....

Margouleff: The trailers ....

WSR Reber: All a carry-over from LaserDisc?

Torres: Yes, you get theatrical trailers. It's full of all types of media that's tied together in such an elegant way. Bob and Brant definitely enhance the audio. It really just makes it that much more of an enveloping experience, I've been working with Evan Edelist for a few years now, and before I started getting into the audio mastering side of it, it pretty much didn't exist in my world. I felt that there was a theatrical mix--you can use that for the DVD--and that's how I think a lot of studios felt. But we've been focusing so much energy on picture, it made us think maybe we need to re-analyze what we're doing and maybe we should start focusing on the soundtrack....

Biles: ... on re-evaluating the sonic process.

Torres: Absolutely.

Margouleff: And that's when Brant and I came on the scene at New Line.

Torres: It just makes sense. We're spending so much time and money on the picture, and for us not to do this thing with the audio; it just wouldn't do the picture justice.

WSR Reber: That's real progressive thinking. How is this structured in the contracts with filmmakers? This is their Mona Lisa; this is their theatrical work. They spend months or years creating this film, and you have someone who sits in a post production house for a month just doing sound, then what happens?

Margouleff: Can I just say something here? That was really a major concern of Evan when we first came on the scene. But this is much more likened to mastering than the original creativity.

WSR Reber: I understand, but you still have the producer of the album, traditionally, of a music record and the artist following it all the way through and they know about the mastering process. That's all part of it, because they check their discs before they sign off and say, "Release it."

Margouleff: The bottom line for us has been that most of the pictures that we have been doing so far, the production teams have long since have gone to the four winds.

Torres: Talking about catalog titles, we keep the intent, whatever the composer or the supervisor's intent was, we try to keep it as true as possible. We are dealing with older movies that only exist in mono. Sometimes, for example, we made stereo from mono. As far as changing anything, we can't do that.

Biles: Our intent here as far as mastering 5.1 audio for a DVD feature release is not to change the initial idea, not to change the intent of the artist, or the intent of the director or film producer. Our job is not to go in and say, "Well, I don't like that, let's change it." What we are here to do is just supplement it, make it better, enhance it and make the transition to this platform a better one than just simply hanging a printmaster and throwing it onto a DVD.

Margouleff: And certainly, if any producer wanted to come in here and have a listen for themselves, we have great Rugula and great coffee. We are very happy to have them in and get their comments at any stage. This is not some sort of secret process. We do pride ourselves that we come from the music world of really trying to enhance audio.

WSR Reber: Let's address the enhancement problem. For example, let's say one of the enhancement features you're going to make is to make the surrounds stronger, more aggressive; wouldn't that change the artistic intent of the original filmmakers?

Margouleff: No, I think what it would do is enhance their intent, because we're taking a mix that was designed for 500 people and making it an equally intense experience for six or seven people or two people or even one person. Also, another aspect of it is that a lot of guys will sit there with the original soundtracks, which are designed to be played at a specific level, which is 85dB SPL and leave it at that. When you're sitting in your bedroom, and your looking over your feet at the television screen at the end of your bed with the remote control, every time there is an explosion or gunshots you don't want to wake up the neighbors, so you keep the volume control way down, then when you get to the intimate part of the dialogue, you're bringing the level back up again and the whole thing is like a ride, a level ride. We try to monitor that, at what we would consider at least 10dB lower than 85dB. We do this to make sure that when we hear dialogue, that we can hear it as intelligible at those levels. You also find especially in a lot of the older movies, a lot of noises from the medium, which sounds like "SHHHHH," and a lot of pops and noises. You hear false ADR [Automated Dialogue Replacement] loops and bad edits, so we get rid of all that stuff. We actually build a model of the noise, then by using our Sadie/Cedar DeNoise noise removal system we make an "antichrist" of it, and we superimpose that and remove the sound of the medium. That actually removes the sound of the medium, which is something I think the originators would have largely welcomed in every way.

WSR Reber: Let's take a current film, Austin Powers-The Spy Who Shagged Me, which you are mastering.

Torres: For anything new, we do not change it, we just clean it.

WSR Reber: So nothing changes, for example, in terms of raising the dialogue level or spreading the dialogue.

Torres: No, the dialogue stays the same for current films.

WSR Reber: The new generation re-recording mixers, sound designers and filmmakers are hipper. They are really into the three-dimensional holosonic soundfield school of thought.

Gary With Robert Margouleff (Left), Jesse Torres (Center) And Brant Biles (Right) At Mi Casa.

Biles: Not to back-pedal a little bit, but Robert was saying how sometimes we will monitor a film at a lower listening level than you would have at a movie theatre. Our room is set up here and measured at 85dB.

Margouleff: We use the SMAART Program to measure the room's spectral response.

WSR Reber: Is it a PC-based program?

Margouleff: Yes it is.

WSR Reber: What does it do?

Margouleff: It is an analysis tool that we use to measure the spectral response of our room and also the electrical spectral response of our output. Theoretically, there should be no difference. It is also used to check phase relationships and to do other acoustical room response measurements to obtain a flat power response.

Biles: In conjunction with our Radio Shack sound meter.

Margouleff: The cheapest, most universally used piece of gear in the audio world is the Radio Shack analog sound pressure meter.

Biles: We do spend a good deal of time monitoring at the intended level.

WSR Reber: Do you prefer the analog one or the digital SPL meter?

Margouleff: I prefer the analog one.

Biles: Once we are finished with analyzing the film for clicks, pops, noises and sounds of the medium, we will make the audio more of a transparent communication from the speaker to the listener. So you are not listening and saying "Oh my God, what is that noise on the dialogue?" instead of just listening to the dialogue. At that point, we will turn the soundtrack down and listen to it and say maybe that line is a little to low coming out of this loud scene. Maybe we need to just bump that dialogue just a bit and ramp it in a little bit more so that the time that it takes the person's ears to actually adjust to listening to volume levels, they won't be missing anything. The one thing I must say, and probably the big reason for all of this re-mastering for DVD release is the fact that with the DVD you've got a rewind button and it better be right or else you're going to get people screaming at you. All they are going to do is just sit there and keep playing the mistake saying, "Did you hear that." It has to be right when it goes out there. When you get to a theatre you see a movie; two hours it's gone; you've eaten your popcorn and you're off to your next thing. But with someone who buys a movie on DVD, you can rest assure that they will be going over it with a fine tooth comb.

WSR Reber: None of this stuff on DVD is new, I mean LaserDisc was the first format to pioneer all this stuff, there is really nothing new on DVD. In fact some navigation aspects of a DVD player can't yet do what a LaserDisc player can do.

Margouleff: I agree with what you are saying, but I think the DVD world is just at the beginning of how the medium is going to be used in the end. Especially when we know where it's going.

WSR Reber: Especially with the 5.1 acceptance and the more aggressive filmmakers with a more imaginative sense for putting people into the scenes sonically. And to me it's been audio that has been at least 80 percent of the experience. Not the picture, but the sound.

Margouleff: What we are trying to do is get the world turned on to 5.1 surround and to get product into the DVD format. I think it is a major leap forward in terms of what technology can bring to the home. The DVD, however, is a very unforgiving medium and you hear every little mistake and every little problem that pops up from the theatrical print.

WSR Reber: One of the things that drives me nuts when I'm reviewing movie soundtracks is the non-spatial integration of dialogue in a scene. It's like it doesn't relate to anything. It's so obviously either extremely close miked, or it's ADR, in which case, the ADR mixers failed to achieve any kind of ambient integration of the scene and actors speaking.

Margouleff: Well, I'll tell you that is the basic filmmaking practice from the olden days. Where they say, listen, we're making a theatrical print here and therefore the dialogue track has to be separate from any of the stereo and surround tracks because we have to be able to put in the Italian version, or the French version, or whatever. So we'll put the dialogue all on its own track in the middle, and it won't leak into any of the side channels. We're going to sacrifice isolation to get the kind of quality that you're referring to, Gary, of having dialogue in its own space.

Biles: In a situation where, let's say, you have a scene that takes place in a tunnel, you know somebody's getting away from the monster and they're in the tunnel, and they're yelling. Most of the time that echo reverberation will stay in the center channel.

WSR Reber: Yes, it will and that is unacceptable.

Biles: It's preposterous. It's ridiculous.

Margouleff: Well, what if someone says, "You can't do that! Because that's center channel... all that dialogue has to stay on that track." That's fine if it's going out for a theatrical print, but for a DVD we can certainly get away from that and we have been a little bit, but we've been very careful not to destroy anybody's intent of what they were doing. But some of the movies coming through now actually spread the dialogue out along in the front speakers as well. We have been doing a little bit of that to help improve the integration because once it's on the DVD you don't want to have it separated at all.

WSR Reber: I hear that, but, in some cases I feel, they've spread it out too much. The dialogue starts to lean to the left or right of the soundstage depending on which side of the center sweet spot you are listening from. And I've heard both examples of that. The one that drives me nuts the most is the dual-mono, which I always criticize as "big, fat mono" where they spread the mono to the left and right, and sometimes they'll even put the dual signals slightly out of phase so that there is no phantom center imaging. Do they think that sounds better?

Biles: As far as what, as far as creating a stereo soundfield from....

WSR Reber: It's mono, it's definitely mono, but their taking a mono film and instead of the audio ending up as center channel the way it really was, they spread it and sometimes they offset it a little bit out of phase. It doesn't mono phantom image dead center on a good system, with excellent stereo reproduction if you have an equal intensity signal, each channel merging together to perfectly create a phantom image in your head at the center, without the necessity of a center channel speaker to reproduce the mono center signal.

Biles: Also, if you have equal energy-left rear, right rear-that's in phase, it will appear in front of your head. If you're facing forward, and pan something around the back and it gets to that point where it's even energy from the left and right, you'll perceive it as coming from the front.

WSR Reber: I haven't perceived that. Of course, I resolve phantom center back signals with a center back speaker.

Biles: But is it a little off center? Or is it right behind your head?

WSR Reber: Deep behind; with the image centered along an arc that is seamless across the rear speakers with separation perceptible in the far left and far right rear. But I haven't noticed what you are describing. If it is a phantom center back surround image it stays localized in the rear, not in the front of my head.

There are numerous examples of soundtracks that are too loud overall and above standard theatrical reference levels, often with dialogue that is quite forward sounding relative to the other sound elements. My criticism is often directed to the sound designers in this regard when overall SPL is rather extreme and pushes towards distortion and irritation.

Margouleff: Levels, generally speaking, on a film soundtrack, an optical or something that's going to be in the movie house, have to be at a reference level of 85dB.

WSR Reber: Reference to dialogue.

Margouleff: On a DVD, it's like a record. We want to get maximum bit resolution to the disc. That doesn't necessarily mean louder, but we want to use up the little bits on your meters as much as possible so that you don't throw away the 20-bit or the 24-bit resolution.

Biles: And certainly if you're not maximizing bit resolution, you're losing a good bit of your signal-to-noise ratio. Some might say it's way down there but if you're in a scene where you're out in a field and there's a gentle wind blowing behind you that's really soft, you don't want that sputtering. By raising it, we try to get it at the maximum bit resolution, on transfer and all the way through the process keeping it 24-bit. I can see where some movies might appear loud.

Margouleff: The best thing to do is to turn the volume down a little bit. [Laughter.]

WSR Reber: That's one thing that the motion picture industry has prided itself on versus the record industry, which has no SPL reference standard for playback.

Margouleff: This is not motion picture, this is DVD.

WSR Reber: It may be a DVD release format, but it is still movies with audio that came from the original motion picture soundtrack.

Margouleff: Some things are going to come and go away because they don't really make sense...

WSR Reber: So you're saying that we're going into an age where a DVD soundtrack's SPL level is as variable as putting on different music CDs where you're constantly turning your system volume control up or turning it down depending on what CID you're playing?

Margouleff: I think there will be an industry reference but I think that also you will see that the DVDs themselves will be louder to take into account the maximum bit resolution.

WSR Reber: Let's hope New Line doesn't do this one awful thing.

Margouleff: What's that?

WSR Reber: The MGM logo trailer at the beginning of every MGM DVD peaks out all six channels at full SPL bit resolution. Since I often forget that I am about to review an MGM DVD, the trailer blasts, and I panic to turn the thing off because it is so irritatingly loud. Your ears don't get a chance to adjust to the level. You put the DVD on, and the first damn thing that comes up, and you always have reference level on your system, is just like holy shit!

Margouleff: I'm not talking about going through the roof, but you really do want to strive for maximum bit resolution which is a different requirement of the medium. And right now New Line is releasing everything in Dolby Digital AC-3^® 16-bit and Dolby Surround. But we're doing all our transfers and everything in 20- and 24-bit because they're going into an archive in high-definition. Because now with television beginning to broadcast in high-definition with the 5.1 audio and soon with HD and electronic cinema, even the movie houses will be projecting electronically with 5.1. Whether it's Dolby Digital or DTS, you're going to want to have maximum use of the bits. Twenty-four bit audio is a thing that's going to happen within the next year or two or three and we're going to want to have product in that format.

Biles: Certainly this does not mean cram the stuff through a limiter and get it as loud as you can. That's not what we're talking about. We're just saying get the maximum bit resolution. If you're leaving the top three bits unattended....

WSR Reber: The overall soundtrack....

Biles: Yes, we're not talking dialogue versus music, we're talking just overall trying....

WSR Reber: ... to get it to its maximum bit rate. Right, I agree.

Margouleff: Utilize the medium to its fullest, from an engineering place, that's really what we need to do because we want the message to leave the medium. What has happened in the past, with tape recordings, for example, is when recording the kick drum, we would cram the kick drum level on tape until there was no more room to get dynamic range, and the tape itself would limit the level of the kick drum. In digital recording, we don't want the medium to limit the message so to speak.

Biles: Well, you don't. It's a very fine line between no distortion and chopping your waveform into a square wave as far as digital recording is concerned. There is no saturation involved.

Margouleff: That's what I'm saying. We now have left that kind of philosophy behind us. We are now in a place where the medium in many ways exceeds the needs of the content. We can't use the medium itself as a limitation to create the art.

WSR Reber: Let me go back to a review in Issue 33, Rush Hour. Did you work on that New Line DVD?

Margouleff: No.

WSR Reber: I gave Rush Hour a 4.5 out of 5 score for sound quality. Here's what I wrote: "The Dolby Digital 5.1 discrete soundtrack on the DVD and LaserDisc is preferred to the otherwise superb matrix PCM LaserDisc soundtrack. The sound is very dynamic and features a smokin' score. The Dolby Digital is nicely delineated with respect to the soundstage, spatial directionality and split surround envelopment. The soundtrack is at times system threatening with powerful bass extending to below 25Hz... and that's even in the surrounds, with even more boost from the . 1 LFE channel. Dialogue sounds quite forward and lacks good spatial integration." That's one of my pet peeves. And usually that's one reason why I mark the sound score down. Continuing... "The DTS Digital Surround LaserDisc soundtrack is distinguished by a smoother overall response and a more coherent soundfield." It was better than the Dolby Digital version. Have you noticed that?

Margouleff: Dolby Digital is a much more compressed sound.

WSR Reber: DTS tends to be less ping-pongy than Dolby Digital. Dolby Digital tends to be either there or there [pointing to different speakers in the room]. You never get good phantom imaging between two channel vectors.

Biles: I think it's the difference in compression ratios between the two formats.

WSR Reber: But not everyone can hear that. I get some people who get very upset with me when I will favor a DTS soundtrack. I guess they're not hearing it due to the limitations of their equipment or something else.

Biles: I had the opportunity to do a little shoot-out test where we had a six-channel unencoded master going out to both a Dolby Digital encoder and a DTS encoder. Those in turn going to the respective decoders, and coming back to a console. And I could switch between the three sets of six channels; unencoded audio, Dolby-encoded audio, DTS-encoded audio. And the difference between the unencoded audio and the DTS was negligible. There might have been a little phase variance in the subwoofer channel, but besides that, the whole soundfield was still there and held up very well. Switching to Dolby Digital, it was like somebody put up brick walls between the speakers and we were now listening to something that was no longer a nice, circular, ambient sound. It was more like we were sitting inside home plate of a baseball field. You know with your center speaker being the pinnacle of that point on the plate and it was very cut in stone that those were your limitations, like brick walls. That's the best way I can describe it as opposed to being airy, fluffy pillows.

Margouleff: I think that both have their purposes and their applications. They both have 
certain advantages. One of Dolby's advantages is the fact that you can get it onto a DVD with a lot more movie. It takes a lot less bandwidth. So you can get more soundtrack onto the DVD. DTS requires a lot more bandwidth because it is less compressed. And that extra space is valuable because, in some cases, like with New Line that releases in Dolby Digital, for example, they have so much added content. They have other things on the disc other than the movie. They feel that extra content is an important element of their sales.

WSR Reber: We just completed analyzing our 1999 Readers' Survey which consisted of more than 200 questions. It took up to an hour to fill it out. We sent it out to 7,600 random readers, and we've gotten back more than 2,500 completed surveys, Remember, it's more than eight pages long. It topped last year's six pages and 175 questions. There are a lot of questions about DVD, because the DVD Video Group supplied about 30 questions they wanted to purposely ask, but we asked our own questions, too. And one of them was: Do you want to see multiple language soundtracks? The overwhelming majority said they did not. They just want an English soundtrack.

Biles: Who did you send the questionnaire to?

WSR Reber: To the magazine's readers.

Biles: Did you send it out worldwide, or just to the U.S.?

WSR Reber: Worldwide.

Biles: If your responses came in just from the U.S., of course, you know they would only be interested in an English soundtrack.

WSR Reber: Yes, but regional coding is supposed to handle that.

Torres: It doesn't work too well. It does what it can, but it's not perfect.

WSR Reber: Our readers don't want regional coding. They do want both a Dolby Digital 5.1 and a DTS Digital Surround 5.1 soundtrack on the same disc. More than 80 percent wanted both. Granted, the DTS Digital Surround soundtrack does take up more bandwidth, but the result for the audio enthusiast is they can hear the gains in resolution and spatial dynamics and appreciate those gains. That's worth it to them, those differences, even though at times the differences are subtle.

Biles: I don't think they're that subtle.

WSR Reber: Well, I know some people would agree with you. I would in a lot of cases, but in some cases the Dolby Digital holds up pretty well when not critically dissected. Dolby has gotten better over time and definitely have been improving since 1994. But still, to me, DTS is the superior codec. And I'm looking forward to reviewing a DTS soundtrack at half the DTS 1536 kilobits per second bit rate. Saving Private Ryan on DVD will be the first test.

Margouleff: The important issue is 5.1, the platform and the medium. Right now, whatever the codecs are, the marketplace will soon sort out which ones survive and which ones don't, which ones get adopted and which ones don't. Your Readers' Survey underlines what's really good and what the public wants. Sooner or later, it'll go in that direction. I think Dolby and DTS both have their good points and bad points But whether it goes to Dolby Digital or DTS, or both, it still needs to be a first class 5.1 mix.

WSR Reber: I understand and I agree with you, but before the market can sort itself out, you've got to offer the market the choice. And if the studios aren't offering the choice, then the market can never sort it out because they have to take what they get. DTS did an excellent job convincing all of the manufacturers of DVD-Video players to have DTS pass through capability. And all the receivers and processors have DTS Digital Surround as well as Dolby Digital processing. So they're all set. People are all buying DVD-Video players with DTS pass through, but the software companies aren't yet putting the DTS soundtracks on the DVDs.

Margouleff: We totally understand that.

WSR Reber: And here's an instance in which New Line has released Rush Hour on a DTS LaserDisc which sounds better than the Dolby Digital LaserDisc and the Dolby Digital DVD, but they didn't put the DTS out on DVD. Why?

Torres: It's the space.

WSR Reber: Why not issue a separate DTS DVD then?

Torres: We've gotten away from the dual-sided discs; everything is single sided now. We haven't put out anything that was two DVDs. In the long run, it's going to cost more. I know we are thinking about it.

Margouleff: Since we started on the scene with New Line, we are providing 20- and 24-bit master tapes, not 16-bit master tapes. So that when the time comes they do have the product in house and archived and ready to go.

WSR Reber: Jesse, do you think that you'll go to DVD-18? That would facilitate the extra space to have both soundtracks and still accommodate a host of supplementals?

Torres: I've thought about that and I can see that happening. As soon as DVD-18 is a little more of a comfortable format, I can see that being a possibility. That would just be more added value to what we've already put out and more space for that [DTS].

WSR Reber: Is there a chance that New Line would limit their soundtrack to an English-only soundtrack and eliminate Spanish or French? It would save a lot of bits right there, because otherwise you're duplicating all the soundtracks in Dolby Digital and eating up precious disc space that otherwise could be used to support a DTS soundtrack version.

Torres: When we first started releasing DVD we were including French and Spanish. But what we found was that our theatrical sales internationally were suffering. People would get a hold of a DVD before the film opened theatrically. The film opens up seven months
after the theatrical release in the U.S., say in France, and they already have a DVD copy with French dialogue. They were modifying all their machines to play all regions; all standards.

WSR Reber: Even though I keep getting denials and letters from Europe saying, "We're not modifying machines, it's not happening in Europe?" 

Torres: They won't admit it.

WSR Reber: Yet I get other reports to the contrary saying they are modifying the DVD-Video players. In fact, there is a Web site dedicated to "Code Free" DVD players at www,codefree.com.

Torres: And that is the reason why we can't include French or any other languages on our DVDs anymore. It's affecting our international department. Now, they are releasing their own DVD versions, and international DVD is becoming big. But there's also another issue with that. We don't want to affect their sales, so it's been pretty much left up to Home Video to just stick to English; stick to domestic Region 1, and leave it at that.

WSR Reber: So English-only.

Torres: English-only and English closed-caption.

WSR Reber: And then Region 2 or whatever would have their specialized language(s)?

Torres: Yes.

WSR Reber: I think that's smart.

Torres: For example, Lost In Space. People in France were just waiting for that one. They were hot for it. And I'm not sure if the DVD got out before the theatrical release, but it was a major concern of the studio. International territories have put up money for these features to release theatrically in their countries. They've paid in advance for those rights. I would say it wasn't until the second year of DVD that International started to notice how all those languages were affecting those territories.

Biles: Having the language on the DVDs was undermining the actual theatrical release?

Torres: Yes.

WSR Reber: Because the people buying DVD-Video players are not buying strictly Region 2, or if they are they're going into a shop and paying a hundred bucks or whatever, and they're having the machine modified to defeat regional coding to be able to play any DVD from any region. And then they buy their American Region 1 DVDs off the Internet from mail order e-tailers, have it shipped to someplace in Europe or whatever. And they don't bother to go to the cinema.

Margouleff: I am an advocate of removing a lot of the extra material and putting it onto a Web site with a view toward getting better audio, being able to put a DTS 5.1 and a Dolby Digital soundtrack on the same disc. That's one reason to get more space. It would be to off load some of the added features, I think in some cases there would be a lot of advantages to that.

Gary In The Sweet Spot In The Mi Casa Studio Critically Listening Along With Robert Margouleff & Brant Biles

WSR Reber: One of my concerns as a purist is that DTS' position is now seriously threatened because while they've successfully got the manufacturer's of the players to support DTS Digital Surround, and the surround processor manufacturers and the chip manufacturers as well to incorporate their technology, the studios have yet to fully support DTS. So now, virtually anything you buy has a piece of hardware that's going to have a DTS component to it, in addition to Dolby Digital. But the software isn't being released. The hardware manufacturers are getting upset because why should they put this extra expense into their surround processors or into their DVD players when there's virtually no DTS software to play through them?

Margouleff: This all has to do with the subtle form of business, the way Dolby handles their business. Dolby has been in the marketplace longer, and they have a lot more money. It's a David and Goliath situation, basically.

WSR Reber: Sadly so.

Margouleff: Clearly, whether we do Dolby Digital or DTS, we have to be able to serve both masters at the moment as do people like New Line, or Columbia TriStar, or MGM or anybody. The thing is, I agree with you. If I had my druthers, I would have DTS immediately available on all DVDs. But I think that there are larger sales issues that we are really not privy to or have knowledge of.

Biles: There are larger political issues.

Margouleff: All we have to do is start to talk about this stuff and these guys start hyperventilating about it. I'm not talking about New Line in particular; I'm just talking in general. You get these things that have nothing really to do with the bottom line but have a lot to do with who's manufacturing what and who's in this or that marketplace and how sales are being handled and stuff that doesn't even cross our minds as the purists that we are. I think we're going to have to be living with that for a while and hope that it sorts itself out for the best. I have done all I can. I am a firm proponent of DTS audio. I am not embarrassed to say it or anything else. But I also have to face the realities of the marketplace, and in house where we do nothing but 5.1, we have to be able to serve both DTS and Dolby Digital and make both of them as good as they can be.

WSR Reber: You're doing that from the perspective of creating the best possible master.

Margouleff: Clearly there is a difference between 386 kilobits per second and 1536 kilobits per second. And there is a difference between 20-bit and 24-bit. There is a difference.  There is no way of denying it; it's not going to sound the same. There is clearly an advantage to DTS. The disadvantage is the space disadvantage of being able to get enough stuff on the disc. When that technology sorts itself out and disc capacity goes from 9's to 18's, or whatever it is, and we have the opportunity to get rid of some of the foreign languages, and get down to one language... and we get the Web sites up and running so we can get a lot of this stuff interactive on a Web server versus on the disc, then we will have the room to really do it. I know that DTS is running some lower bit rate stuff at Universal. I think it's 768 kilobits.

WSR Reber: It is 768 kilobits.

Margouleff: They're running some of the features at that lower bit rate which is still quite good, still a step above Dolby Digital's 386 or 420 kilobits per second bit rate.

WSR Reber: But up to this point, DTS has denied that, though they acknowledge their codec supports the lower bit rate. They say to me that they're running the full top end bitstream data rate of 1536 kilobits per second, though their codec can support even higher data rates with 24-bit resolution.

Margouleff: I don't know if they are or they aren't, but I do know that the DTS codec is totally scalable. The real issue here is the people who, like Jesse and Evan, have at least given us the liberty to start doing 20-bit stuff and to really start to make the soundtracks live as much as they make the pictures live in the transfers.

WSR Reber: Now let me ask you another question. Let's say that the industry eventually goes to DVD-18 because there are some powerhouse filmmakers such as Spielberg or Cameron who want the best that it can be. They're looking for that maximum capacity to do some different things. What about the impact of DVD-Audio? How do you see this six-channel discrete DVD-Audio platform relating to DVD-Video?

Margouleff: Here's how I feel about it. There are a multitude of new, multichannel audio-only formats coming down the pike; all able to produce high quality audio. For example, SACD [Super Audio Compact Disc] which originally was promised in a 5.1 version but instead is being released in two-channel stereo only. It's a very bit-intensive system, what they call DSD [Direct Stream Digital], single bit. Sony and Philips, of course, are throwing a lot of energy behind SACD. There is also Dolby Digital and all the variant Dolby formats out there. There is DTS and now DVD-A [Audio], with Meridian Lossless Packing [MLP].

They're all out there, which says to me there are a lot of technologies that can do the same job. Just like you can have a car, it can be a Range Rover or a new Trans Am Firehawk; it still has four wheels, a steering wheel and a seat to sit on, and it still takes you from point A to point B.

So we have a lot of technologies that all are different and can store information on disc. I have not yet seen or heard MLP. Has anybody else? [Laughter] I have called over there once or twice asking for a demonstration of MLP. They said just put the regular recording on and that's exactly what it's going to sound like. That to me is not a demonstration of MLP. My opinion is that I don't think that the public is gonna go for MLP DVD-Audio. I don't think you can expect people to buy yet another player. This is only my opinion and I cannot back it up with statistics. What's the advantage of DVD-Audio when you can put a 24-bit 48kHz DTS recording on an existing DVD-Video disc and have beautiful music and have everybody who already owns a DVD-Video player not have to throw their player away to buy a new player? For me, I think DVD-Audio only is a wonderful dream, but if you put all these players behind a black curtain and turn them on, I doubt that you will hear enough difference that is going to warrant you going out spending several thousands of dollars for it.

Torres: Do you doubt that you will hear a difference?

Margouleff: Not enough to make a discernable difference.

WSR Reber: People are going to have to buy all new pre-amplification equipment because the DVD-Audio and SACD player outputs are six-channel analog and sound quality will be dependent on the quality of the machine's digital-to-analog converters.

Margouleff: So is it near us, in terms of hitting the marketplace? I think not. It might be five or six years down the road. Maybe Sony's Direct Stream Digital will become a special thing. We heard a DSD 5.1 demonstration at the AES [Audio Engineering Society Convention] a year ago that had a big bank of computers in the back room. There were a whole bunch of guys hovering around. Okay, it was nice. It was fine, but it was nothing that was any greater or any more beautiful than DTS. It didn't make that big of a difference to me, except for the fact that you have to completely trash every kind of recording and piece of equipment you have to produce in the format. There are those issues of compatibility. Why do we need to have this? What is the pressing issue if we can put 24-bit codec resolution, even if it's Joe Nobody's codec, I don't care whose it is, if we can put the codec on a DVD-9... or whether it's a movie or music or what have you, if we can already put 24-bit at 48kHz on there, and everybody who's bought a DVD-Video player can put the damn thing in the player and play it, why are we doing this? This to me is the master wank. It's silly, and it's gonna do the same thing unfortunately that was done to quadraphonic back in the 70s. This is going to confuse everybody with a variety of formats and everything else. I don't think it pays. We should be letting the musicians start writing music for 5.1, that's much more interesting to me. Let the music and the artist occupy the same space. Let the soundfields be there for films and for music, and let's stop worrying about how many digits the thing has, and let's start worrying about artistic content. Let's worry about what does it sound like, does it nail your heart to the wall? Does it make you feel like there's something righteous going on musically. That's what's more interesting to me.

Sooner or later the pressure of technology will force those things to change. What we can do in the meantime is fill the content as best we can with the stuff that is righteous. And sooner or later with people who make movies, television pictures, and who make records are all going to realize that there are elements from all the disciplines that are going to come together. I think we need to create a much more unified situation and think of 5.1 as the one common conversion platform.

WSR Reber: Returning to the control over the 5.1 discrete mix, what control spreads the dialogue?

Biles: That control we call divergence. It will take dialogue from being hard center to totally phantom center and any variation in between, which sometimes isn't a good thing, because if you have the same sound source propagating from three places you get some really interesting comb filtering as you move from side to side.

WSR Reber: You have a control to create hard center channel or phantom image center  from the combined left and right signal, and anywhere in between?

Biles: Right.

WSR Reber: While I have the same control over the center channel signal using the Mirage LFX-3 electronic crossover controls, I never use the phantom/real image level control for reviews, though I prefer personal listening with the control set to somewhere in between phantom and real. It is a very nice effect and I know Richard Hardesty, who's our Audio Equipment Review Editor, actually prefers phantom center over hard center. But you are limited to the sweet spot listening position-two speakers for one set of ears.

Biles: Well, a phantom center is a lot easier to listen to. You could take identical dialogue, have a dedicated center, or phantom center, and when you spread a mono channel out to left and right, deleting the center channel, there is a 2.7, 3.2 kHz dip that occurs because of the time delay.

WSR Reber: Dip in what?

Biles: In the spectral response of what you're listening to. It's softer to listen to, it's not as aggressive.

WSR Reber: That's a reason why it sounds more spatially integrated, with less of a forward "in your face" presence.

Margouleff: It's not like a dentist drill hitting you between the eyes. For movies there is a medium place for that. This is still a growing field. I think the thing that we really need to now focus on is the real imperfection of getting things that need to be repurposed, that is, movies and music, onto the 5.1 platform. Fortunately for us, New Line, which is probably the most iconoclastic and the most wonderful and the most innovative of all the independent distributors, has given us the privilege of allowing us to take the audio up that next step. And I want to make sure that what we do is in every way really enhancing the process and so far everything we have been doing has been received in a very positive way. And I think that a picture speaks a thousand words.

I think the first film we did was Pleasantville. For about three weeks afterwards, we went over to get it archived and so forth and I sort of felt like I must have done something wrong. I mean because we did something that people didn't know exactly what to think. And Jesse and I were looking at each other for a minute and I was wondering, "Did I do something weird?" Oh wait a second, I'm the guy that's the right guy, I'm the guy that has the gold records. And I somehow was made to feel....

Biles: ... that your decisions and your mastering of it were wrong.

Margouleff: You know what I'm saying? And the reality is that we're going to face a lot of this in music, I think, and by doing this people are going to challenge us.

Biles: Everyone has opinions.

Margouleff: Everyone has opinions, and we're going to feel challenged by it. But the thing is, I know in my heart of hearts and by what I listen to that what we're doing is the right thing to be doing. And I think that we need to really proceed in a way of doing this without, again, interfering. I think that the bottom line is, like any mastering house we have to be very cognizant of what the original intent of the music is and what the picture is and that we have to seek to maintain that and to enhance that and we cannot, unless the producer or director is sitting here with us, say change this, change that. Unless we're the original mixers we have to have that ethical standard and we must maintain that. I think that's the most important thing.

WSR Reber: I agree. Earlier you said there were 10 or 12 films you've worked on now for New Line? Have they all been released?

Torres: No, not all of them have been released. One that Robert did for us was The Corruptor, which will be released very soon [see the review in Issue 33]. He did perform a clean up but we didn't do any kind of remixing.

WSR Reber: One other thing, to come back to the system set-up at Mi Casa. You're using powered Genelecs and obviously these loudspeakers don't go down to 25Hz. Are you using bass management to send all of the bass information to the big JBL subwoofer?

Biles: As far as bass management is concerned are you asking if we....

WSR Reber: I have seven subwoofers in one of my primary reference systems, the Mirage M1si system. I have a subwoofer capable of below 25Hz bass at full scale SPL electronically mated to each full range speaker, that on their own, are capable of bass down to 25Hz.

Margouleff: You want to know what's going on below 40Hz on the Genelecs? We listen to every channel with the subwoofer; we'll listen to this and the subwoofer for this channel. We manually listen to every....

WSR Reber: So you can isolate each discrete channel's speaker, but you always have the bass in each discrete channel assigned to the subwoofer so you're hearing....

Biles: No, no, no. If you're talking about do we use some sort of bass management where we are chopping at a frequency, everything in our five Genelecs and shoving that to the subwoofer, no, God no.

WSR Reber: So where's the deep base being reproduced in the surrounds?

Biles: Have you ever heard Genelec's 1032? It gets pretty low.

WSR Reber: Yes, but not much below 40Hz. From monitoring my RTAs [Real Time Analyzers] often in soundtracks I measure lots of deep bass that extends below 40Hz and even below 25Hz.

Margouleff: We will listen to what low frequency information is going to the Genelecs. In some cases, we'll take that information and put it purposely into the subwoofer and remove it or roll it off at 30 cycles, for example.

WSR Reber: Otherwise, you're running a full range signal into the Genelecs and letting the speaker naturally do whatever it does to attempt to reproduce below its low frequency capability.

Biles: Yeah, it depends on the situation. What I meant to say is that we do not have a set and forget method where we're going through a bunch of crossovers.

Margouleff: That's fine for home theatres based on the kind of speakers that they're using where they might need to have bass management, where there might be too much bass information going to the surrounds for their particular kind of surround speaker. So they're going to want to send all that stuff to the subwoofer(s). But when we're mastering it, we need to know what's there, and we want to be able to manipulate that manually so we know what's what.

Biles: And also there's the issue of low frequency localization, which people say you just don't localize low frequencies.

WSR Reber: That's not true.

Biles: That's very untrue.

Margouleff: I like the guys that face the subwoofers to the wall. That's another one of my pet peeves.

Biles: And if you have an event that occurs in the rear channels that is low-end oriented and you chop it and throw it to your subwoofer, which is more times than not going to be in the front of your room, you're going to get this frequency pulling effect, where you'll hear the top-end of whatever the event is occurring behind you and, in a strange way, hear the low frequencies sucking down to the subwoofer in front of you. To me that is most annoying. It makes my hairs on my arms stand on end.

WSR Reber: Well, I know what you're talking about. Not every reference system at the magazine--we have seven of them--can have extended bass response below 25Hz on each discrete channel. But, as I said, my primary reference system on which I review soundtracks has Mirage M1si's, which are bipolar radiators. I personally prefer their imaging capabilities because of the deepness and realness of the soundstage they project. The Mirages go down to 25Hz on their own as a full range loudspeaker system. They're totally full bandwidth. They stand 6-foot high. Electronically crossed to the Mirage M-1si's are Mirage BP-210 Bi-polarsubwoofers, which extend bass response to below 25Hz. They're on each channel, so all five channels have a dedicated subwoofer. Plus I have two BP-400 Mirage subwoofers dedicated to the .1 LFE channel, which are even more capable in the below 25Hz deep bass frequencies at full SPL.

Margouleff: You don't want to be using bass management.

WSR Reber: I don't use any bass management, but I'm just saying that I really know when things are deeply moving. I recently reviewed the Dolby Digital Saving Private Ryan LaserDisc. There is an absolutely perfect demonstration of why you need total full range loudspeaker capability in the surround channels. We're talking about deep bass that is at pounding full scale SPL, with such low level frequency intensity and directionality that you can never optimally reproduce that soundfield without full range deep bass capability to below 25Hz in each vector including the two, or three, if you're using a center back surround channel, surrounds.

Biles: You're absolutely right. On the music-only side of it there is a song that we mixed on the Boys // Men 2 album called "Jezebel," where there were a few different loops that occurred, a few different kick drums. And the way we set it up was that there was one percussive event or group of events that occurred in the front stereo, left and right, and another percussive group of events that occurred in the back, left and right. My first initial thought was, let's channel some of that bottom end energy to really get that thump thing going to the subwoofer and it was like I couldn't because of that pulling effect. That is, the effect of pulling the bottom end from the rear to the front of the room. For that we would have to go with what we have. Because you have to understand maybe I'm wrong here, but you're system with the Mirage's that go down to 25 cycles and then subwoofers beyond that, I mean how many people have that type of installation in their home?

WSR Reber: Perhaps not very many. I'm just saying strive for a system capability that is "always optimal" because I like to know what the optimal reproduction system configuration and capability is. I always like to work from the top down, because then you know where your system's performance is in reference to the optimum. If I don't know what the optimal is then I have no way of gauging where I'm at, performance capabilities wise and our sound reviews would suffer because of that limitation.

Biles: A mixing facility called Front Page has got full range, dual 15's, in all five listening positions, plus an additional subwoofer for the .1 LFE channel.

WSR Reber: Now is the JBL subwoofer in your setup used strictly for .1 LFE?

Biles: Yes, strictly for .1 LFE.

Margouleff: And we happen to love that subwoofer. That's a JBL 4645.

WSR Reber: That's a JBL Pro product.

Margouleff: It's just wonderful.

Biles: Let me ask you a question. Are you familiar with Bag End?

SR Reber: Yes. At the magazine we use seven 18-inch ELF system Bag End subwoofers in various systems. They're awesome.

Margouleff: I don't think there's a lot of things that we're really in disagreement with. When I started talking to you about this when we were fooling around with Pleasantville, we were just getting under way. I mean you and I over the years have seen pretty much eye to eye on a lot of this stuff. You and I are very pro DTS; there's no two ways about it.

WSR Reber: But purely on the side of merits, it's from my pure audiophile instincts, that's where I'm coming from.

Margouleff: Yeah, us too. And I think that that's the level at what we have to take it to, but I do feel that once it becomes known what New Line is doing I think the other companies are going to be soon jumping on the same bandwagon. I think that Jesse and Evan have made some very brave moves here because it's a hard thing to overcome inertia in any big company.

WSR Reber: Let's talk about some of the things you do in mastering.

Biles: Let the sound speak for itself. The first thing I'm going to play for you is a trailer for a movie called A Thin Line Between Love And Hate, a Martin Lawrence film that I think was released in 1996 and is about to be released on DVD. We've also done the entire movie but I'm going to play you the trailer because of the way the track came to us.

WSR Reber: What was the original soundtrack format?

Biles: The original soundtrack on the trailer was four mono tracks. Mono dialogue, mono announce, mono music and mono effects. This is a situation where we have taken them and spread them out using various tools of our trade. I always feel there is something you can do to make the sound a little more compelling as opposed to just taking a mono source and splitting it out to two speakers. Whether it be slight modulating pitch transposition to decorrelate the sound left and right, or time delay or what have you. In all situations, it's a different animal with each one. You have to approach each job with a fresh slate. You can't say well that worked on the last film so that's exactly what I'm going to do on this next trip. What I'll play you is a demo between the mono trailer, which is split left and right, and the 5.1 we derived.

(Demo) (A startling improvement in spatiality, dimensional presence and dynamics.)

Biles: The way we approached that was to first deal with each mono track individually. The dialogue track of the individual scenes where you're actually seeing on-screen dialogue is just in the center speaker. The announce track is spread out to all three but it's about 70 percent center with only about 30 percent being split left and right, so you just get a little bit more of that comfort zone.

Margouleff: And a different point of view.

Biles: And then I dealt with the mono music, and processed that into a 4.1 stem.

WSR Reber: How do you process that?

Margouleff: We have proprietary technology for that.

Biles: Yes we do. There are numerous different boxes that we use and some of the stuff we do inside the computer by actually duplicating the track and offsetting it a few samples, maybe slightly modulating a pitch to spread it out a bit.

Margouleff: Could you imagine putting that little, tiny weenie sound on behind the picture?

WSR Reber: No. But there are so many of them like that. So now you've got your trailers as well as enhanced soundtrack.

Margouleff: Trailers have always been second class citizens because they don't want the trailers to sound better than the feature that's coming up next in the movie house. So they always trash the trailer audio basically.

Biles: Well, what is the trailer for? The trailer is to entice the viewer to go and either see the movie in the theatre, buy it on DVID or rent it on DVD. And if you're presenting audio for a trailer that's substandard, why would the public want this? Anyway, there's sort of a process of expanding the four tracks out to maybe 14 different tracks and then mixing them down to 5.1.

Another function I must say that we do here for New Line is confirmation of the audio throughout the entire movie.

WSR Reber: What's that?

Biles: Making sure it stays in sync from the beginning to the end.

Margouleff: So it doesn't look like a Japanese science fiction movie.

WSR Reber: I have noticed with several soundtracks in Dolby Digital format where it was definitely out of sync.

Biles: In the case of some movies that have come in, I put up our reference Beta tape and I put in our multichannel print, find the offset, run them together. I go and I take the audio off of our reference Beta and phase it against the digital print that we've got that we're going to be mastering and see if it stays phase-locked. If you can get it to the point where you've got a continual cancellation in the dialogue or a phase-notch cancellation, you know that you're in a good spot. When you run into a film where as you align the beginning of the film and ten minutes down the road, you're a good 200 milliseconds out, there's a problem there. And that's another thing that we do here at Mi Casa. We will take the film and do sync-lock, not just on a per reel basis, but on a minute to minute, scene to scene basis and make sure that the dialogue is locked with the picture.

The next piece that I'm going to play for you is an actual 5.1 re-mastering that we did for a film called Dangerous Ground, starring Ice Cube and Elizabeth Hurley.

Margouleff: Now, what we have here is the original soundtrack on one playback machine and the finished product, ready for encoding, on the other machine.

Biles: I've got it coming up so that these first six facers are the original unaltered 5.1 printmaster. These next six are the final mastered product. Just by simply doing that, (pushing a group mute button at the mixing console) you'll switch between the two.

(Demo) (A dramatic improvement in dynamics, spatial dimension and "you are there" holosonic presence.)

WSR Reber: The Hollywood Reporter recently asked me and a few other home theatre magazine editors to recommend the single DVD that best demonstrates the format's technology. I wrote about Lost In Space because I thought that was one of the most remarkable DVDs in terms of delivering most all the features DVD is capable.

Torres: The DVD hybrid?

WSR Reber: Yes.

Torres: That appeared in the "Hollywood Reporter's" DVD Special Edition issue that was distributed at the Video Software Dealers Association convention in Los Angeles.

WSR Reber: In an upcoming issue, we will be featuring an article that covers all the widescreen format DVD movies that have DVD-ROM content with a review of each enhancement feature.

Margouleff: But you see the difference is when you make that leap from one platform to another, you have to fit the message into the medium and that's what this is about. This is truly mastering. This whole thing is a hybrid of movies and television and music that merges all the elements of all the three disciplines onto one platform. It takes, hopefully, the best from every medium and we try to bring those together into one place to really make the movie deliver its full potential and I think that's really what we're doing.

WSR Reber: Outside of the older soundtracks, which you're doing this with, what about some of the newer soundtracks?

Margouleff: Well, we've also done it with Pleasantville and The Corruptor.

WSR Reber: In terms of making a more aggressive holosonic soundfield, like you've done here with older material? What about newer soundtracks where their sound design leaves a lot to be desired?

Margouleff: You know "you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear." You can only polish it.

WSR Reber: You do that here. You turned a very compressed, very mono sounding track into a dynamic and dimensionally spatial sounding track. Are you saying you won't do that with new, current movies?

Margouleff: We'll do what the movie calls for us to do. Some movies call for more than others do.

Torres: I think where we're going with this whole concept is we should start inviting the talent over, when we're talking about A-title features that have just been released. Let's get them in, let's get a sign-off and get them to approve it. It's still fresh in their head.

Biles: The last thing that we want to do is instill a fear in a filmmaker who might do an Austin Powers or who might do a Lost In Space and say, "On my God, these guys are going to change my film?" That's the last thing we want to do.

Torres: And that's not the case.

Margouleff: And we don't want to create that paranoia either.

BiIes: In current releases, what we'd been doing depends upon the film.

Torres: It depends upon the director.

Biles: It depends upon the director, it depends upon ...

Margouleff: ... how sophisticated the mixer is and what their budget is.

Torres: For the newer titles, we just have to go with the talent and I can see that happening real soon with us and the way we do this, and it's just the next level.

WSR Reber: You know for years now I've been an advocate for starting out with the home theatre version as the primary mix. That's your big mix. Sound people and filmmakers should really sit in this kind of environment at Mi Casa and make their mix. And then they should monitor and change for the commercial theatre. Home theatre is the most intimate place where...

Margouleff: ... you hear everything.

WSR Reber: ... you can put the two or three people who are watching the movie in an imaging-rich audio environment, because that's really what it can be at home... it's not 10 people, it really isn't. It's a couple of people, one who's really an enthusiast, the other one, well just likes the movie or the content, and the kids are on the floor.

BiIes: Or someone's over for a barbecue.

WSR Reber: Or someone's over as a guest or whatever. What I have always envisioned with this technology is that a Spielberg or a Cameron or a Lucas or another progressive director with vision would do this. There are some young directors coming up who I really believe have the vision to latch onto this opportunity, for example Brett Ratner who directed Rush Hour. Now there's a director who has a future.

Margouleff: The younger guys are much more inclined to jump all over this than the guys who are more hide-bound and traditionalized.

WSR Reber: Totally. They're going to go with this spatially enveloping approach. They're going to create these holosonic soundfield environments with emotional sound elements that the past generations have totally ignored.

Torres: You know, from working with Brett, if there is any technology out there that can make his movie better, he's all for it. He loves the way telecine works. He loves the way his movie looks. He loves the fact that he can go and make any kind of changes that he wasn't happy with when it released theatrically. And that goes for the audio. And I'm sure with his next movie, we'll bring him in here.

WSR Reber: Well, that's what I'm saying. Brett would be the kind of guy that is likely to accept this idea of starting here with the soundtrack.

Torres: Starting with the first...

WSR Reber: Mix for home theatre.

Margouleff: I'll tell you this if we could in get in on an earlier stage of it we could do even more.

WSR Reber: Yeah, and then move to it because this is a fantastic environment to create "you're in the movie" soundscapes.

WSR Reber: Gentlemen, we need to bring this conversation to a close. What are the pitfalls of DVD?

Margouleff: We cannot become so enamored with the technology that we forget about the content. We do that often in this business. We now have the technology to really open the artistic palette and take advantage of it. When audio recording was originally invented, we could always record amplitude, pitch and the duration of pitch. But we had to throw away the whole concept of where our sound was coming from--vector--because we could not store it in any way. Now we have, in a strange sense, gone back to the future, or we've gone from the future backwards and picked up the one thing that we had to abandon, which was that sense of vector, or placement. And I have to tell you, that is one of the most powerful forces that we have as an emotional tool, as a tool or a device for use in the composition of music. If you think about, for example, sacred music, it was always magical and spiritual. You went inside the church, the choir was in the back and the pipe organ was in the front. There was incense burning and there was ambient space....

Biles: ... you'd get the light show through the stained glass windows.

Margouleff: They had the whole thing going. For that reason, it became very spiritual. But when recording was invented we had to throw that whole concept out the window. Because we could not store vectors. Now we can store vectors and we can use it not only for film, but we can also do it for music-only. And I think that the existing DVD-Video platform is perfectly adequate, way more than adequate, for doing music-only or a combination of music and picture on the existing disc. I praise everyone for their adventures into all the other formats that are coming down the pike, which I'm sure will find their uses, but I think, for now, it's already here. You can go to Circuit City or Best Buy and buy your DVD player for $199, and we can have 5.1 surround audio and picture, everything you could possibly want. It's here, right now. I want to see the musicians get to work and start to write for the format. And I think, again, it's going to be the young directors, it's going to be the young composers who are going to embrace this. 

We have a cottage industry, here at Mi Casa. I mean, it's my house; "Mi Casa." And although it's voiced flat with SMAART and everything else, and it's a first-class listening environment, it nonetheless emulates what everyone is going to have in their home sooner or later, which is a 5.1 multimedia listening center as a central core of the living space. And for those people who are musicians, who have garage studios, they're not going to make stereo recordings in the garage and then come into the living room and hear every-
one else's stuff in 5.1 and be happy to settle for it. Because they're not going to settle for it. So we're going to have encoders built into home recording consoles. And we're going to have the psychoacoustic modeling to do 3-D 5.1 in earphones. What is that going to do for 5.1? Well, it's going to democratize the medium. And by that I mean, every kid on a skateboard that has a disc player in his backpack, and the little wire coming out with the two little ear phones, will have 5.1 in his earphones while he's playing around on his skateboard. It'll be in airliners. It'll be everywhere for everyone. It's not just going to be high-end guys like us sitting around with our Polk Audio this and Martin-Logan that, and the crossover networks and the fancy bass amplifiers and all the other stuff for $35,000 a pop. If a guy can have it for under 200 bucks and have surround in his headphones, I'm all for it. Because I think it brings a very important aspect to music and to art in general and allows us to retain something that's very, very important for us. It's the only sensibility that humans have that's 360-clegrees. We live inside a sound bubble. It's not always in front of us trying to tell us something. We should immerse ourselves inside and occupy the same space as the art.

WSR Reber: That's a fantastic now future, I totally agree with you Robert. Jesse, is New Line committed to mastering every title in the future?

Torres: Our "A" titles, definitely. We try to do a day-and-date release with the VHS. For the last year and a half we've been remastering our catalog titles. And now I would say the majority of our theatricals will go to DVD as well as VHS, and all the other formats. I would say in the next two years you'll see a lot of our re-releases remastered.

WSR Reber: Re-releases, what do you mean by that?

Torres: Our catalog titles... remastering the old.

WSR Reber: You'll use this technology for all of that, right?

Torres: Yes.

WSR Reber: And as you ready your current titles for release, you'll be looking at those on a case-by-case basis?

Torres: We have our Fine Line movies, and not all of them are released on DVD. But the majority of our New Line movies will be. And eventually I would say that there isn't going to be a reason why not to.

WSR Reber: And hopefully we might be seeing New Line DVD releases with DTS soundtracks.

Torres: I'm curious as to what DVD-18 is going to bring us, and if it will allow us to do that.  But if that were the case, then what else do we do? What's next?

WSR Reber: Well, you're way ahead of everybody else in that regard right now. Thank you, gentlemen for an outstanding educational experience. Do you have any closing remarks you'd like to make?

Margouleff: I just want to do things the right way, that's all. I just want to make sure that the movies realize their full potential and that's really what we're working toward here. We're at the beginning of the DVD era and we're just beginning to figure out how to use it. There are going to be uses for DVD that haven't even crossed our minds yet. And our job now is to find all of the possible uses we can and to use them to their fullest potential. I think that's really the bottom line.

WSR Reber: Thank you gentlemen for this special look inside soundtrack mastering.