Most recently I upgraded to
77" OLED and 4K/UHD...without of course realizing that ~95% of recent big budget movies made over the past decade or so shot in native 4K digital format are of the "comic book hero" genre.
So I've recently been scouring online sites for movies shot in native 4K (i.e., not upscaled or transferred from photographic film negatives--which I find virtually all have visible dynamic range, texture, and color pallet issues)--but that are also not of Marvel comics genre. That list is surprisingly short for the last 10 years of moviemaking. Nevertheless, we've been acquiring 4K movies from that short list within the last couple of months, and the visual presence is stunning. I never thought that the image quality, dynamic range (in particular the black portions of the scale) and rich natural color pallets would be so lifelike. The best looking movie that I can remember seeing is
1917...for its sheer beauty of natural landscape colors and lifelike fine resolution.
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As far as multichannel sound is concerned--well, that goes back more than 45 years (to 1978) when I heard an exceptional three-channel setup at Sheffield Audio in Houston (Klipschorns & a Belle center), and noted the clarity and insensitivity of the soundstage imaging to walking around the room and listening to that early setup. I foolishly allowed my best bud [the both of us basically just-graduated engineers working high paying jobs in Boomtown USA] to talk me out of them. I learned the hard way to trust my own ears and not someone else's over that notable experience.
I already knew the effect of delayed surround channels from my days as a music major listening to the long time delay reflections of a large pipe organ in a large music auditorium, and also a demonstration of delayed surround delay channels in a physics lab. I knew what 5-channel surround sound could do by that time. The issue was that there were no 5.1 recordings back then. So I had to wait until I had the capital and time to build a hi-fi 5.2 music system at home. It only took 32 years (finally empty nesting) to have
a real hi-fi surround sound setup, and another 10 years to get it dialed in correctly to minimum phase performance (less than 90 degrees of phase swing, all channels, above the room's Schroeder frequency).
When I say that with the right surround recordings, it's very close to the real thing (live acoustic music), I'm not just saying empty words. I can close my eyes and listen to Beethoven's piano sonatas in 5.1...and I'm there.
www.rtings.com
