Whiplash Discussion & Poll - CLOSED

[nube]

Whiplash (5.1 DTS-HD MA)

 

Level        - 2 Stars (105.6dB composite)
Extension - 1 Star (48Hz)
Dynamics - 5 Stars (32.83dB)

Execution - 3 Stars (by poll)

 

Overall     - 2.75 Stars

Recommendation - Buy (by poll)

 

Notes:  What this is not - a bass movie, though it does have pretty solid kick drums in places.  What this is - a spectacular movie with solid percussion that's very well mic'd and mixed, including fantastic acting, and all set to some of the best standard jazz you'll hear anywhere.  I'm only including it here because we have a bunch of musicians who frequent the site, and ya'll should watch this movie.  It's the best movie of any genre I've seen in the last year+.

 

PvA:

 

[raynist]

Thanks!

 

I like the soundtrack to this movie but haven't watched it yet.

 

Must looking at the extension rating you would think this had a filter, but looking at the graph you can tell it doesn't. I am guessing the big peak between 60-70 is from all of the drumming and skews the extension rating.

[Rowan611]

Loved this movie. No, it isn't a bass movie; however, it is so well mixed I gave it a 5. And the last 10 minutes is outstanding. I agree with nube, one of the best movies in a very, very long time.

[SME]

So without all the kick drum at 60-70Hz, this is really a 1 star level and 5 star extension film?  I wonder where those two jumps around 20 Hz come from?  It may not be especially audible on its own, but surely contributes some heft to other effects.

 

I can't wait to see this!

[BeastAudio]

I have streamed this soundtrack several times on Deezer (lossless service) and have really enjoyed it. I bought the movie but have yet to watch it...

[SME]

This is the first movie I watched with Audyssey turned off, pretty much since I got a receiver with Audyssey.  This is the first movie I've watched with my new custom OpenDRC-AN room correction filters.  I'm using a 6144 tap minimum phase FIR filter derived from 11 measurements along with IIRs to handle the major low frequency issues.  I will work on mixed phase corrections in due time.  Fortunately, I waited until I'd gotten the bugs worked out of the system.

 

It was already clear with music playback that my new filters are superior to Audyssey MultEQ XT, despite being merely minimum phase.  This movie definitely brought that home.  I was a bit surprised by how minimalistic the mixing was.  A lot of content seemed to concentrate in the center channel.  At the same time, it sounded like a large bulk of the recording was done on set and presented with only minimal alteration.  This style set up an incredible contrast with the scenes in the performance halls which sounded incredibly polished in comparison.  Either way, the recording work was excellent.  The dialog was captured extraordinarily well.  And, the musicians' performances were believably real.  Having played in an full orchestral ensemble in high school, I can say this is about as close to the experience as I've had in a movie.  That final scene and the credits will make a solid system demo.

 

I played this back at "-1.5".  For reference, my system is roughly calibrated to 80 dBC with a bass ramp up to 85 dBC that begins roughly around 250 Hz.  I probably could have happily listened at "0", but I hesitated to play it even at "-1.5" because my system is running a new calibration and all the bass trapping sapped away a good bit of the output I once had.   In addition to substantial bass trapping, I have 44 sqft of diffusion strategically placed on all walls of the room.  I just have to say that diffusers are like drugs.  After I bought my first four 2x2s, I got hooked.  They make my room sound bright and clear without a hint of fatigue, harshness or loss of audibility of the lower frequencies.  Also, the acoustic cues in recording (including natural or artificial reverb) are greatly enhanced.  Of course, I can hear clipping better too, but that's not my fault!

[maxmercy]

How many DRC-AN units do you have for the surround setup?

 

JSS

[SME]

How many DRC-AN units do you have for the surround setup?

 

JSS

 

I have 3 units.  Each provides processing for either 1 or 2 channels.  Obviously I use each unit for two channels.  It's nice that they got Dirac running on these things because otherwise I'm afraid they'd discontinue them.  It's not obvious how to make the most of FIR filters, and there's a lot of ways to do things poorly.  I was actually rather shocked at how good my first correction (well, third if you ignore the buggy ones) sounds.  I was really expecting it to sound weird or worse.  I may run into more trouble when I try to do mixed-phase correction.  I'm kind of interested whether linear-phase crossovers really make a difference.  The idea of a linear-phase crossover is that the bass arrives at the same time as the rest of the sound, relative to the recording.  With a minimum phase crossover which is typically used, the bass is actually delayed a bit relative to the rest of the sound.  It may not be enough to be easily perceived though.  All the same, I'm running bi-amped bass with a crossover at 50 Hz which adds a decent amount of delay to the deep bass, in addition to the delay from the mains crossovers at 80-110 Hz.

[3ll3d00d]

Do they have sufficient horsepower to implement such a crossover to a sub? 6k taps per channel at 48kHz is about 8Hz resolution so seems a bit coarse. My correction filters / crossovers (64k taps on a PC) certainly have a v ugly shape on the low end if I cut them down to that sort of size.

[SME]

Good question.  I haven't yet ascertained whether I will be able to do this.  I'll know for certain once I start working on actually designing the filters.  I'm not too worried about resolution just yet.  The resolution limitation comes into play when one wants to do corrections at a fine level of detail.  For example, suppose you want to suppress a peak that's only 5 Hz wide, the FIR filters won't do this well.  For linearizing the phase of a crossover that varies smoothly over a wider range of frequencies, however, it may do just fine.  6144 taps with 48 kHz sampling rate is 128 ms in time, so I suspect there's plenty of room to linearize crossovers that introduces delays in the neighborhood of 30 ms or so.

 

Of course, I'm new enough at this that I could be totally wrong.  When I'll get around to try it, I'll certainly comment on whether or not I get it to work.

[SME]

Out of curiosity, I just went and computed an all-pass FIR filter for linearizing the phase of a 4th order Linkwitz-Riley high pass filter at 80 Hz and the resulting impulse response decays rapidly and is < -100 dB beyond 20 ms or so, which is about 960 samples.  With windowing, I imagine I could get away with a considerably shorter filter, which is nice if I want to avoid adding too much latency to the processing.  So yes, this correction appears to be completely feasible with the OpenDRC-AN.

 

By the way, 64k taps is a lot of taps to use for audio processing at 48 kHz.  Depending on how they are designed, such filters can actually cause more harm than good.  Personally, I'm not even sure I need the full 6144 taps I have available to me.  I'm not sure what you mean by "cutting [your filters] down to size", but be sure they are being windowed rather than just truncated since truncation usually makes a mess of things.  For good bass frequency resolution, IIR filters are usually a much better choice, and they may save you a couple bucks on your power bill if your PC is otherwise idle.

[3ll3d00d]

What are you using? RePhase?

 

I use http://www.audiovero.de/en/acourate.php

 

The function I was referring to is CutNWindow which has a variety of options around how it is cut down to a shorter filter. It does all this correctly for sure.

 

You might find http://www.acourate.com/XOWhitePaper.pdfan interesting read. I guess the question is what is the difference between a linearised minimum phase crossover and a linear phase crossover? I could calculate it later in acourate perhaps.

[SME]

I am using my own software.  I'm a bit new at this, but I've studied the theory pretty extensively at this point.  I'm familiar with but haven't tried Acourate.  It certainly looks like a capable program.

 

There's effectively no difference between a linearized minimum phase crossover and a linear phase crossover.  By design, the linearizing filter cancels outs the phase shift introduced by the minimum phase crossover.  The reason I'm doing this is so that I can continue to use the bass management in my AVR.  I can't do bass management effectively in my OpenDRC units because the only process 2 channels a piece.

[maxmercy]

You need to start a thread in the 'bass gear' section for this.  Fascinating stuff.  While extremely powerful, FIR filters can have serious drawbacks to people listening outside the measurement zone/MLP.

 

I would be very interested to find if you can hear a difference between a well implemented IIR vs FIR setup, given the same starting conditions, and correcting for a multi-seat area.

 

JSS

[3ll3d00d]

My experience is that these filters are one of the biggest improvements I've made & that that improvement spans the entire listening area. Subjectively imaging is substantially improved, it really snaps the whole thing into place. This effect is perhaps even more noticeable with the surround sound stage which really hangs together perfectly now. I haven't experienced any downsides (like audible pre ringing) but then acourate sorts all that out for me, designing them yourself from scratch sounds like an interesting challenge for sure

[SME]

I started a new thread here.

[Reefdvr27]

Really good movie, but certainly not a bass movie. I am surprised to see a 5 star??

 

Anyone else sit and try and figure out what other movie the kid drumming was in??  I did and it drove me nuts, but he was the star baseball player that came to the party in Project X. I loved that movie. 

[Rowan611]

Really good movie, but certainly not a bass movie. I am surprised to see a 5 star??

 

Anyone else sit and try and figure out what other movie the kid drumming was in??  I did and it drove me nuts, but he was the star baseball player that came to the party in Project X. I loved that movie.

 

He was also in the remake of Footloose. I think people, myself included, are giving it a 5 because it was such a well done film. Might not have a lot of bass, but it's so incredibly well mixed. Just my .02

[maxmercy]

Just saw this.  Audio overall easy 5 Star.  Not a bass film, but was not expecting much either, but a little was interspersed here and there.

 

JSS