curegeorg:

I think if you were to take that "live" music system and plop in into your living room (if it were big enough of course), you would probably find it rather bad to listen to. These systems are made for maximum sound pressure levels and maximum reliability - "fine sound quality" is a secondary consideration. Of course they try to get the best sound possible in a live venue, but the big horn systems make the unavoidable tradeoff of finesse verses reliability.

You can just imagine if a speaker cluster at a live concert failed from too much SPLs - no sound, no concert, no moolah...

While the systems in a commercial movie theater don't have quite as hard of a time of it SPL-wise as a concert venue, they nevertheless are made for maximum SPLs and reliability. Again, there are unavoidable tradeoffs in the designs of the horn speakers that can produce these high SPLs and have the necessary ruggedness. Things such as fine silk dome tweeters that have flat response beyond 20kHz are certainly not what is found in a speaker used in a movie theater!

(I have worked in the past for the two major loudspeaker manufacturers who produce speakers for both live and movie theater use - JBL and Altec Lansing).

[This message has been edited by soundhound (edited June 04, 2004).]