I still don't get the drift of the point you are trying to make. If it is that much has changed since the original THX specs were established, that is true, but having been involved in the film sound industry since 1984, overall, I think that much of the change has been in details and not overall working practice.

Hun, it certainly seems that THX is headed towards making its own room correction devices. The Utra 2 specs are still only standards THX requires to be in a receiver/SSP in order to attain that stamp of approval. They certainly have taken great steps to allow HT users to experience a cinema like quality. Altec pointed out earlier that THX was ORIGINALLY set up to standardize cinema playback to ensure that the artists intent was met. It also appears that Audyssey and the Trinnov systems are similiar in nature to the THX desire to offset the limitations most of us have in our home theaters due to space and placement of equipment. While the Audyssey system appears to be very accurate fpr analyzing speaker placement and the Trinnov system appears to allow a user to compensate somewhat for poor speaker placement, the THX system wants simply to translate the cinema experience to your home using technologies which will mix/enhance or attenuate signals from various channels of your HT to accomplish its stated purpose of translating the artists intent to the viewer/listener.

Anything THX thinks it can make money at, it will do. THX computer speakers anyone????

Is it true that Sony never applied for THX qualification certification on their receivers because they didn't want to have to pay for it?

I don't know about Sony, but that's exactly why Outlaw never applied for THX certification: cost that inevitably resulted in a higher price to the consumer. They felt that the potential "gains" weren't justifiable for the associated cost.

I suspect that some solid parallels could be drawn between THX and ISO certification - not in what they specifically represent technically - but rather the market forces that caused them to come into being, their success (or not), their acceptance (or not), etc. One is in the consumer's face (THX) while the other is well hidden behind the scenes (ISO). However in between sits the manufacturer, who needs to go through one heck of a juggling / balancing act to decide if he wants to play - or not. And based on tons of first hand experience with ISO I think it's largely a crock, you can guess how I'm leaning with THX.

Sony never applied for THX certification because their quality control is so bad that they'd never be able to meet the spec.

Oh, I don't believe that for a minute.

Sony never met a spec they didn't manipulate. You can't lie about your specs and meet THX cert.

I have owned over a dozen Sony electronic products and have only had ONE issue that was fixed under warranty. So I can not confirm your claim of bad quality control.

Your last two posts seem biased and generalized. Sony is the "ONLY" company to manipulate specs? Welcome to capitalism motivated by human nature. But I digress from the thread's intention.

My next question would be...what is the "purist" way to listen to a film's original dubbing, unfiltered, uncodeced, unDSP'd, unTHX'd? Pardon me if this question is ignorant. Most movie formats are done in DolbyDigital, or DTS?? Or PCM the basic format with processing applied afterwards?

Gonk It sets distances and channel levels, much like the 990's auto setup does, but then it also applies audio processing separately to each channel (EQ, etc.) to try to compensate for room effects.

Does the processing happen "realtime" or just during set-up?