Just stopped back to say . . .

Just saw Spider Man 2 in a Leow’s movie theater, and the presentation was atrocious!

· Dirt and hair on film: mild but obvious, and on a print that has supposedly been in use for only a few days.
· Repaired print in use: at least two places where the print had been broken and spliced, visually missing a few frames of the film plus causing an old-fashioned analog film audio “fudlump” shortly after the edit went past the projection gate.
· Analog audio from film, with surround sound processing: I suspected this in the first few seconds of the film when what was supposed to be steady violin notes played back with changing pitch at about the same rate as a film reel would complete each revolution – a steady up-and-down pitch variation as one would experience when playing an LP record on a turntable that rotates at an inconsistent speed. ‘Analog’ was confirmed later when a film edit caused the audio to “fudlump” in an analog fashion, not a digital glitch. Also, there were no distinct upper high frequencies and lower bass seemed non-existent – this would occur with analog optical audio tracks due to both high-end and low-end roll-off.
· Center channel sound overdriven and distorted: either one or more drivers in the center speaker array were mildly damaged, or a preamp or processor input was slightly overdriven, because, except for the most quiet of conversations, everything from the center channel was reproduced with mild over-modulation distortion. Of course, this could be the effect of the old-fashioned optical analog audio tracks on the film. Also, the center channel level was so high compared to the left and right mains and surround speakers that, except for one scene where the organ was played in the church, only the center channel seemed active during the whole viewing.

I was thoroughly disgusted. This type of viewing is only possible with theater personnel gross apathy and incompetence.

A friend of mine has a $500 MSRP Onkyo ‘home-theater-audio-in-a-box’ 6.1 system purchased for under $400 that outperforms that movie theater’s presentation in every way!