Home THX Cinema surround mode, THX Surround EX

Home THX Cinema surround mode

THX is an exclusive set of standards and technologies established by the world-renowned film production company, Lucasfilm Ltd. THX grew from George Lucas’ personal desire to make your experience of the film soundtrack, in both movie theaters and in your home theater, as faithful as possible to what the director intended.

Movie soundtracks are mixed in special movie theaters called dubbing stages and are designed to be played back in movie theaters with similar equipment and conditions. The soundtrack created for movie theaters is then transferred directly onto Laserdisc, VHS tape, DVD, etc., and is not changed for playback in a small home theater environment.

THX engineers developed patented technologies to accurately translate the sound from the movie theater environment into the home, correcting the tonal and spatial errors that occur. On the AVR-5800, when the Home THX Cinema mode is on, THX processing is automatically added after the Dolby Pro Logic, Dolby Digital or DTS decoder:

Re-EqualizationTM

The tonal balance of a film soundtrack will be excessively bright and harsh when played back over audio equipment in the home because film soundtracks are designed to be played back in large movie theaters using very different professional equipment. Re-Equalization restores the correct tonal balance for watching a movie soundtrack in a small home environment.

Timbre MatchingTM

The human ear changes our perception of a sound depending on the direction from which the sound is coming. In a movie theater, there is an array of surround speakers so that the surround information is all around you. In a home theater, only two speakers located to the side of your head are used. The Timbre Matching feature filters the information going to the surround speakers so that they more closely match the tonal characteristics of the sound coming from the front speakers. This ensures seamless panning between the front and surround speakers.

Adaptive DecorrelationTM

In a movie theater, a large number of surround speakers help create an enveloping surround sound experience, while in a home theater there are usually only two speakers. This can make the surround speakers sound like headphones that lack spaciousness and envelopment. The surround sounds will also collapse into the closest speaker as you move away from the middle seating position. Adaptive Decorrelation slightly changes one surround channel’s time and phase relationship with respect to the other surround channel. This expands the listening position and creates— with only two speakers—the same spacious surround experience as in a movie theater.

THX UltraTM

Before any home theater component can be THX Ultra certified, it must incorporate all the features above and also pass a rigorous series of quality and performance tests. Only then can a product feature the THX Ultra logo, which is your guarantee that the Home Theater products you purchase will give you superb performance for many years to come. THX Ultra requirements cover every aspect of the product including power amplifier performance, pre-amplifier performance and operation, as well as hundreds of other parameters in both the digital and analog domain.

Lucasfilm, THX, Home THX, Re-Equalization, Timbre Matching, Adaptive Decorrelation and THX Ultra are trademarks of Lucasfilm Ltd.

THX Surround EX

In 1999, a new surround system was launched simultaneously with the release of the movie “Star Wars Episode I”. “Dolby Digital Surround EX” is a new movie sound track that greatly enhances the sense of spatial expression and the positioning of the surround channel sound. The result is 360 degrees of movement and moving sound effects that seem to pass right over the listener's head.

This system was developed jointly by Lucasfilm THX and Dolby Laboratories, fusing Lucasfilm's idea of improving spatial expression and achieving a uniform 360 degree sound positioning with Dolby Laboratories' matrix encoding technology. Emphasis was placed on compatibility with the existing system Dolby Digital 5.1-channel, and the new "surround back (SB) channel" was added to achieve improvements over the conventional 5.1-channel system in terms of the positioning of the sound at the rear, the acoustic image of sound moving from the two sides to the back as well as sound moving from the front to the center rear with the multi surround speaker systems used in movie theaters, thereby enabling various types of surround sound.

The surround back channel signal is a matrix-encoded signal inserted into both the Dolby Digital SL (surround left) and SR (surround right) channels. Upon playback, the signals are decoded by a high precision digital matrix decoder within the Dolby Digital decoder into the SL, SR and SB channels and output as 6.1 channels of signals. With the AVR-5800, the signals further undergo Home THX Cinema processing to achieve a THX Surround EX system.

Even without the proper environment for playing the SB channel, Dolby Digital Surround EX signals are 100% compatible with existing 5.1-channel playback systems, so they can be played as such. In this case, the SB channel signal is produced as a monaural signal from both the SL and SR channels, so none of the signal components are missing. The effects specific to THX Surround EX (the sense of spatial expression and the positioning of the sound), however, are the same as with conventional 5.1-channel surround systems.