Why thank you.
I think you really missed my point. All of them. Don’t assume I don’t know about setting up a dedicated home theatre or have not done so.
Im not talking about what home theatre enthusiasts aspire to. I’m talking about what movie producers aspire to. And commercial theatre aspire to. They are the limiting case.
I don’t dispute there is a quest for excellence in movie production. I am always amazed by the extraordinary levels of dedication and technical ability one sees. But they are directed at a different goal. Massive dynamic range is fine, but isn’t an end goal. Nor does it guarantee a reasonable final distortion free result. For music the dynamic range is what is natural. It can be huge, and live music can have extraordinary dynamic range. Usually never captured in available recordings
I attend a lot of live music. Even under lockdown two concerts this weekend. In a few minutes a world class string quartet in one of the best venues in existence for chamber music. There is no sound system on the planet that can get close. Still.
My point is that movie production technology is not directed at this, and other immersive technologies that might have helped have been stillborn.
This leaves a gap in requirements for AVRs.
This is still very ignorant of the state of the art in movie/tv content and based on some outdated notion of what the audio in movie making is aimed at. Movie audio doesn't degrade audio or aim for less because it will be played in movie theaters. For a long time, it has been limited by bandwidth/storage/transmission fighting for space with video content. But that is no longer true and just like music audio recording, the master that is created is aimed at as high a fidelity - dynamic range, tonal balance, imaging - as any music recording. What happens later depends on what media it gets into. When you buy a blu-ray of a movie with lossless, uncompressed audio, one excepts no less than buying an audio stream/disc. So, the views above are based on a very false and parochial premise.
Everything that applies to great music-only reproduction helps audio in a movie. But the requirements are actually in addition to that in HT. There are several reasons for this. For example,
1. The audio that is being captured is more often than not sounds that most people hear on a regular basis. The pots and pans, the man on the street speaking, the ambience of a bar, the creaking floorboards, etc. For that experience to sound natural and real, it has to be captured and played back as accurately as possible because it is easier for the human ear to detect (from familiarity) any failings there. One may not be directly listening directly to whether a creaking floorboard sounds natural, but I can assure you that an experience that makes it as real as if it was coming from your own house makes a huge difference. This has implications from recording to reproduction. The production is aimed at capturing that - not where it will be played just as music recordings aren't based on whether it will played in a high-end system or an iPod.
2. The surround experience goes far beyond anything music has done so far and places great demands on both recording and reproduction. The holy grail of HT audio is that 3-D holographic image that places the audience right in the scene. The fact that one is watching video and therefore is less aware of or requires less than the audio is based on a false premise that human perception is limited to only one thing at a time.
Some examples of fantastic recordings (I am happy to post clips of this if people are interested):
The opening scene of the movie Dunkirk. Watch it with audio turned off and the video is quite simple really and will look like a cartoon of not much happening. But add the audio with a high dynamic range and a natural capture of the gun shots (dynamic range, fast response, etc) that ring out in contrast with the pedestrian but well-captured sounds of "normalcy" before it (with all of its nuances captured which would even allow knowledgeable people to figure out what kind of a rifle it came out of let alone distinguish a rifle from a pistol) and the surround mix for situational context and the whole scene transforms into that gripping depiction of reality/danger more so than the video itself. It has very little to do with just loudness as some people might think.
Or for an even more pedestrian example, take the opening scene of the remake of A Star is Born from the stage performance to the cab scene following it. A compressed, down-mixed 2 channel audio will convey that sound fine but listen to the lossless format on a well set up and tuned surround system, it will be the difference between watching a music video on YouTube and getting what the director intended. To get you close to the character (whose psychological transformation is one of the main points of the movie) as much as the camera focusing on him does. You feel right on stage as the band or the character himself would hear and feel and the contrast from that performance to the sounds inside the cab is the striking difference between the public and the private life of the character well-captured in the audio.
And you need a great system to accurately reproduce that intent while you can get away with a lot less. But that is the same in music too.
None of the all-in-one AVRs can still do that because they are compromised designs with amps fighting for the same current capability, cramped quarters competing for resources and design trade-offs, etc. This is one main reason for getting a pre/pro and selecting the rest of the chain to get to that holy grail arrangement, not any more "quixotic" than the pursuit of perfect reproduction in audio.
Not all movie/tv audio is great reproduction but not all music reproduction is great either. But we judge our equipment based on how it can reproduce the best recorded/engineered content and the latter is not any more/less constrained than the best audio recordings.
There is probably as much good HT audio recordings as there are contemporary audio recordings so let us stop with those false premises.
