ESSENTIAL LOUDSPEAKERS
TACKLE DCI COMPLIANT ROOMS & DOLBY IMMERSIVE PROCESSING WITH DBM DbM has teamed up with TPI, the experts in high-end professional cinema audio. Today, Giles Smith, CEO at TPI, and Barry Sheldrick, Director of Sales at DbM, discuss the challenges and opportunities surrounding the creation of Dolby-processed DCI cinemas in the residential space, to assist installers in navigating this sector and helping them to seize opportunities. Giles explains: Typically, a DCI cinema is a commercial movie theatre or professional screening room that adheres to a stringent set of standards, as laid down by Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI) (a consortium of major film studios) for video and audio playback. The goal of DCI is to ensure uniformity, highquality technical performance, reliability and consistent visual and audio presentation across different theatres. The standards cover not only audio and video equipment specifications but also a myriad of other aspects, including dictating the format for delivery of media content known as DCP (Digital Cinema Package) files. The DCP files are particularly important as they are delivered fully encrypted and are often locked to a specific projector or screen for displaying at a particular time and date.
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Now, whilst DCI-compliant rooms are usually found within the professional movie industry, DCI standards can also be applied to home cinemas, yielding not only the benefits of clearly defined performance criteria, but also allowing for the playback of commercial cinema content in a residential environment. When specifying a DCI-compliant solution for a project, both video and audio equipment must be carefully considered. The video playback device will usually contain a device called the media block. The media block is the central hub from which all DCP content is derived in a playback situation. The video content will display via the playback device (large-format LED screen or projector) whilst the audio gets transmitted from the media block as a mix of either AES3 and AES67 feeds, or just an AES67 feed. These feeds then need to be decoded; the most popular solution
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for this is to use one of the Dolby range of cinema audio processors, which utilise their ATMOS-branded version of the SMPTE immersive audio standard. When deciding to use a Dolby cinema processor, one must understand that these are controlled devices which can be supplied only to approved projects through approved designers. To gain Dolby approval for an ATMOS cinema (and thus the supply of a processor) the whole project must go through a design process controlled by Dolby themselves, and fully reviewed by them at each step. Complete design drawings must be submitted along with a rigorous Dolby Atmos Room Design Tool submission. This process can take several weeks and is specifically designed to ensure that the proposed system design and loudspeaker layout absolutely achieves the performance characteristics required, not only
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