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Mad Max: Fury Road - Discussion & Poll - CLOSED


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Mad Max: Fury Road  

41 members have voted

  1. 1. Recommendation?

  2. 2. Execution?



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@Kvalsvoll, I think your post really gets to the heart of the issue.  As long as it's easier to pirate than to obtain media legally, people will choose to do so.  The people running things don't get this because they aren't aware of just how easy it is for younger people who are internet savvy have access to peer knowledge that's common among that age group.

 

The industry is gradually catching on by offering streaming as an option, and to the extent that it works without glitches, people use it.  Of course, I'm a bit saddened by the inevitable destruction of video and especially sound quality that occurs as a consequence of having to fit all the data into a low bandwidth Internet pipe, not to mention the lowering of standards on the assumption that "most users are listening on their laptops", etc.  I'm sure there's plenty of that going on, even as they try to market Atmos to the masses while even enthusiasts like me are pretty skeptical about its virtues in a home theater environment.  Of course, you also don't see me rushing out to buy a 4k TV so I can stream 4k video content that most likely looks worse than Blu-ray due to data compression.  Sadly, the industry seems to have no clue what anyone wants these days.

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Certainly an enjoyable movie, but I'd only give it four stars for bass.  Lots of fun engine sounds, explosions etc, but nothing exceptionally deep (or at least deep frequently) that I noticed.

 

I watched the movie with a couple AVSforum friends (carp and jedimastergrant) and a friend from work on with a full Atmos setup (4 ceiling speakers) with eight UM18-22.

 

It might possibly be my favorite overall movie experience so far for audio - but it wasn't because of the bass alone.  The Atmos was done really well, everything sounded exceptionally clean.  I didn't really feel the wobble effect of the sub 30hz content that I can feel in some of the better 5 star bass movies, but very enjoyable.

 

For the movie we ran it at -5dB from reference master volume with the sub1 bank (5 subs on front wall) and sub 2 bank (3 subs behind the seats nearfield) both 4dB hot.  So ~6-7dB hot overall.

 

All three guys in the front row said their teeth were chattering because of the bass.    :D

 

A solid 4 star bass movie in my opinion!  But a five star movie for overall audio with the Atmos mix.

 

 

I thought the dialogue was exceptionally clean - the whole mix was exceptionally clean!  Like I say - one of the best audio experiences I've had in home cinema.  I'm a big fan of the audio in Gravity too -- I think it might be the only other movie that recently measured up in the overall audio category - IMO.  (though I haven't yet seen Gravity in Atmos yet)

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I don't have the Atmos version of Gravity - just the 3d version.  I'd double dip if the 3d Atmos version was available now, but I don't want to reward the studios for releasing Atmos without 3d in the most recent release.  The fact they released Gravity with Atmos without 3d, (so you either get Atmos, or 3d, but not both) and then will probably release it later with both on bluray, and then release it later yet again on 4k with both makes me mad.  That'd be quadruple dipping if you wanted to get all the 'newest' feature releases along the way.  I don't agree with shoddy greedy practices and gimped upgrades which is what they are obviously doing.  :angry:

 

That said the 3d version I have without Atmos, as you witnessed yourself, is fantastic as is, so I'll probably wait for 4k before purchasing again.

 

I've not yet seen American Sniper.  I have John Wick with Atmos and watched it multiple times before I installed Atmos, and have watched the best portions after integrating Atmos, and while the audio is excellent, (especially the club scene) it's not as well done as Mad Maxx IMO.

 

Still by far, the Dolby Atmos Demonstration disk is the best showpiece for the tech IMO.

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Get the Atmos Gravity, if you like the first 5.1 release, it is a very good possibility you will like the 7.1 even better.

 

It's not really the atmos that makes it better, obviously it is a different mix - dialogue now has proper level for reference playback, the hard character of the dialogue is simply gone, dynamics and level overall is much more balanced, bass filtering is different so that bass-eq now can be used to retrieve massive ulf if that is what you want, the strange droning bass is gone and now sounds balanced and much more articulated and balanced.

 

And how can this be.

We know from a video published by the producers that the first 5-1 is a mediocre near-field - levels are pushed, different filtering in bass, background sound effects raised in volume.

We can assume the atmos/7.1 is also a "near-field" - or, more correctly, a home re-mix, but if they do it like this, I have no problem with that.

It is very likely that the 7.1 sounds more similar to the theatrical, on the 5.1 the dialogue level is too loud for reference level playback in theaters.

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I totally get that. It doesn't bother me really when new versions of movies come out. We choose if we want to get it or not. In this case Atmos > 3D so I'll happily re-buy a movie I enjoyed. I really liked the 3D in Gravity but I'll give it up for Atmos. Gravity is THE Atmos title to own, imho. Might be a while before they reissue it yet again.

 

American Sniper is an awesome mix and definitely recommend it. It's also a good movie too.

 

Pretty sad that the demo disk is the best showpiece so far. Sure, it's in-your-face with the overhead effects but so far it's the movies that are truly 'immersive'. When you forget that you're watching in Atmos and you're surrounded in a bubble of 3D sound... then that's it to me.

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This movie sounded great in my system.  The bass was very good in my opinion.  I could not detect any clipping.  My only wish was that it went just a little bit lower in spots.  There is scene I can think of that could have benefited from a nice bass sweep like the one that is WWZ or EOT.  It is missing just the lowest stuff like we have in OHF, Elysium or some of the other big bass movies that really dig deep.  But, it was practically non stop from beginning to end.  I would say this a must buy.  I should say that I listened to the non Atmos track in a 5.1 system.  Besides the bass, it was an outstanding mix with info in all of the channels.  

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 7 months later...

Wow, I'm such a slacker, spending so much time building and tweaking my system instead of actually watching movies.

 

The wife and I watched this one this weekend.  Going by most accounts that this one was loud, I started at my "average" level of "-6" until the wife complained about dialog intelligibility.  "Is there a tweak you can do for that?"  Once we got to the middle of the film, there was finally a quiet scene with enough dialog for me to gauge the "appropriate" playback level, and I ended up bumping it up all the way to reference.  At that level, the action scenes were quite loud but the sound was very clean and never got uncomfortable.  I noticed some mild refractory effects on the hearing by the end, but I felt recovered within a few minutes or so.

 

In terms of overall quantity (subjectively speaking), this movie provided the most bass of any movie I recall watching.  My wife and I agreed that we were literally feeling bass more than 50% of the time.  Even many quiet scenes involved enough bass to shake the couch.  I actually worried about the breaker tripping on the circuit which is currently running my 55" LCD TV, 2 Emotiva XPA-5s, a Denon 3313CI AVR, 2 350W BASH sub amps, as well as the BD player, two PCs, and my Motu A16.  The level indicators on the Motu were bouncing like crazy for much of the movie.  I also worried that this one might just push the neighbors over the edge.

 

I could have done without the bump at 30 Hz, which was obvious as it so often is with other movies that have it, but thankfully the bass still had plenty of variety.  I'm not sure which scenes hit real low, but I noticed plenty of lower frequency stuff.  The mid/upper bass was also a lot of fun.  There were some impressive chest punches including the moment when some guy gets speared in the chest.  The swift tactile punch was startling and complimented the on-screen action very nicely.  ;)

 

Where this track really excited was in the content above the sub range.  Both my Motu A16 and my chest told me that my mains were getting quite the work-out.  This is confirmed in the PvA.  Look at the green trace above 80 Hz.  There's a lot less roll-off there than for most movies.  It will make your mains cry if they are weak or under-powered.  My ported AE TD12M mains (97 dB/W) definitely showed their stuff, and I'm surprised my dual 6.5" Hsu Research HC-1 (soon to be upgraded to AE TD12M) held together.  Having two big power amps (up to 600W/channel into the TD12Ms) surely helped.  By the end, the amps were actually quite warm, enough to heat up the metal rack, which is a first.

 

Anyway, I liked the movie a lot.  As others have said, it's not a great movie, but I wouldn't want anything else from a Mad Max movie.  For what it is, it is very well done.  I don't see any benefit from BEQ other than maybe taming the 30 Hz bump, which IMO was altogether unnecessary.  What makes the bass so great in this one is the massive amount of mid/upper bass content.  Great props to the sound team for making a movie that's wicked loud without any fatigue and for not cheating us on headroom.  Unlike most movies, this one sounds great at "0" despite being loud as hell.

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Too loud, too often for what I would consider truly outstanding sound.  While the sound matched the onscreen action, it was a workout for any system.  

 

I liked The Road Warrior the most out of the series so far.

 

JSS

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I can't argue with this.  I can mention that my wife also loved it and did not find it offensively loud when played at reference.

 

Also, my TD12Ms seems to be sounding a bit better since this past weekend.  I think Mad Max helped break them in.  :)

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To best answer your question, I did some new measurements as it's been a while.

 

Reference for me with -20 dBFS RMS (~= "-23 dBFS" in REW) sine sweeps is currently 79 dBC for 300 Hz and up (no treble roll-off until above 10 kHz).  The bass response slowly rises from 300 Hz to 84 dBC @ 20 Hz. These metrics are derived from the response with 1/3rd octave smoothing applied.  If instead, I measure with pink-noise and RTA, I get 80 dBC for -20 dBFS band-limited to 500-2kHz and about the same for full-range pink noise.  With full-range 1/3rd octave RTA (very roughly), I get about 79.5 dBC for 1 kHz and up and an increase of ~1 dB per octave going down in frequency to 83.5 dBC for 120 Hz and under.  I did all of these measurements using an SPL meter calibrated within +/- 1dB.  The system was originally calibrated against a RadioShack SPL meter, which in principle should be good to +/- 2 dB, but it read about 1.5 dB higher on average than the calibrated meter; hence I'm running approximately 1.5 dB below my intended target.

 

You could argue that (my intended target) isn't really reference, and that's fine.  As I see it, it's not unreasonable to use a house curve or X-curve to reduce some part of the response by 6 dB or more to account for differences that are apparent subjectively.  A typical X-curve (used in a theater or dub-stage) rolls off above 1-2 kHz or so, so this roll-off has little effect on the response of the 500-2kHz pink noise used for standard calibrations.  If for whatever reason, one chooses to slope down in the bass frequencies instead of the treble frequencies, then the system will play too loud if calibrated with pink noise to 85 dBC.  Furthermore there's some confusion (still unresolved, AFAICT) about why the "-20 dBFS" Dolby Pink Noise sample is actually "-18 dBFS" and whether or not that implies that we should be calibrating to 83 dBC instead of 85 dBC when using a true -20 dBFS pink noise source.

 

My current "ideal" target curve puts the "mid-bass" response in the 60-120 Hz range at around 82-83 dBC, but it's running a bit hot right now, and averages the same as the deep bass response at close to 84 dBC.  Mad Max was very loud, but to me the loudness was almost entirely confined to the bass frequencies, so as far as both loudness and equipment demands are concerned, I was running pretty darn close to reference, IMO.  And just so you know, lots of movies are too loud for me at this level.  Typical playback level for me are less than that, as low -6 dB or lower for a lot of films.  As with Mad Max, these playback levels are usually chosen based on the subjective loudness of the dialog.

 

FWIW, I just bumped up all my levels by +1 dB to be consistent with my new measurements using a better SPL reference.

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