DTS' Loren Nielsen talks BIG sound and how it all started with Steven Spielberg.

DTS: An Innovative History, a Visionary Future

Loren Nielsen, VP, Content & Strategy, DTS (an Xperi company)

DTS introduced the Digital Theater System to the world in 1993 with immersive sound in the blockbuster film, “Jurassic Park”, forever changing the game...

Yet, in addition to transforming the cinema experience, DTS now applies its future-focused mission to bring solutions to wireless home audio, incabin connected car sound and sensing, and home theatre experiences. With 30 years of experience and innovation, DTS has delivered a ‘Dedication to Sensational’. DTS’ journey began with a dream of creating an audio experience as engaging and authentic as the dinosaurs on the screen.

It Started with a Roar

Before DTS, theatres projected film with two-channel audio on an optical track printed alongside the sprockets. Thanks to the foresight of Terry Beard, a Caltech-trained engineer with a 20-year history of inventing stereo optical recording equipment, digital audio caught a big break. A friend offered an introduction to Steven Spielberg, and Beard knew he’d have only one chance to make his mark.

Beard remixed scenes from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” in DTS and presented them to Spielberg. The world-famous director nearly leapt from his chair.

“I was flabbergasted,” Spielberg said, and recalled switching back and forth from the traditional soundtrack to DTS, “It [DTS] sounded exactly like a 70 millimeter six-track sound.”

While other digital audio codecs compressed their soundtracks onto the film’s limited real estate, DTS brought uncompressed 5.1 audio into the cinematic audio experience, initially via synchronized optical disc.

With Spielberg’s and Universal Studios’ “Jurassic Park” soon to be released, DTS deployed its digital audio hardware in over 2,000 theatres. If you know your cinema technology history, then you will also note how similar this was to the first steps into the talkies when movie audio was produced using shellac records that played in sync with the celluloid film running through the projector.

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world-class mixing stages in 15 countries have installed DTS:X production tools

PLF Grows Even Bigger

Streaming content is saturating the home entertainment landscape, making it more challenging for new releases to find a foothold in this crowded terrain. As audiences stayed home during the pandemic, this only exacerbated existing hurdles to bringing people into theatres.

By positioning cinemas as entertainment destinations, a premium experience that can only be had with a night out means that theatrical releases screened in premium large format (PLF) theatres stand out. This has also facilitated cooperation between the production and distribution studios and the exhibitors, bringing excitement to coming releases with event-driven campaigns and advance-ticketing opportunities.

Because of these advantages, the number of PLF theaters is growing exponentially. According to the latest report from Omdia, the number of PLF auditoriums has more than doubled since the mid-2010s. By the end of 2020, there were close to 6,400 PLF screens globally.

Large Format, Huge Sound, Flexibility

Yet the cost of licensing prescribed PLF formats can be prohibitive. This has encouraged many exhibitors to create their own PLF experiences. Instead of relying on proprietary technology, companies such as American exhibitor, B&B Theatres’ Grand Screen, or Korean exhibitor CGV and their ScreenX PLF theatres, have installed screens as wide as 60 feet, also liberating themselves to choose the best audio solution for the experience. DTS:X was designed with these deployments in mind. Since its debut in August 2015, DTS:X has enjoyed worldwide adoption by major Hollywood motion picture studios, cinema owners and mixing stages. To date, more than 300 theatrical titles have been released and exhibited with a DTS:X soundtrack, over 1100 screens around the world have installed or are committed to add DTS:X, and more than 120 world-class mixing stages in 15 countries have installed DTS:X production tools.

DTS:X Cinema is designed to take full advantage of the freedom of being built on the royalty-free, non-proprietary MDA object-based audio to achieve an optimal immersive experience from the very best and most elaborate cinemas, as well as within more modest cinemas where physical limits and cost constraints prevent adopting PLF installations.

DTS:X Cinema speaker configurations can be divided into two components: the base layer and the height layer. The base layer covers all the speakers in a typical 5.1 or 7.1 cinema, plus any added to fill the gap between the surrounds and the screen. The height layer covers all the speakers added to support height effects anywhere above the base layer. DTS:X permits configuration options for both base layer and height layer speakers. Once all of the base and height speaker locations have been fixed, a Speaker Configuration File is created that allows the MDA processor to generate the appropriate speaker feeds for each speaker and array. Sounds may be delivered to a single speaker or address an entire array as a group. This means that there’s no predetermined theatre specifications, implementations can be scaled to any multiple of theatre sizes. In short, DTS:X builds additional quality into the source to ensure the ultimate playback experience for cinema and beyond. And DTS:X does all this royalty-free, meaning that exhibitors can charge a premium admission fee without worrying about DTS collecting a portion of the box office receipts.

A Trustworthy PLF Partnership

Another notable aspect of DTS:X is that it doesn’t require proprietary equipment. Exhibitors can use already existing speakers or employ any of the many DTS:X-certified hardware solutions. Certification is achieved by complying

with the DTS:X installation guidelines and installing DTS:Xcapable equipment available from industry-leading servers, sound rendering/processor companies and speaker manufacturers, including GDC Technology, QSC, ADDE Audio, Delair Labs, DK Audio, Elipson, JBL, KCS, Klipsch, Meyer Sound and Trinnov.

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A consistent visionary for 30 years, DTS’ main goal has always been a more immersive, more enjoyable audio experience. With DTS:X in thousands of cinemas worldwide, this aim to give audiences authentic, stimulating and reliable sound is nearly realized.

Bitstream Simplicity

When SMPTE created the standardized immersive audio bitstream (IAB), they ensured that a single IAB digital cinema package would be interoperable with IAB immersive-sound-supported theatres. This streamlines the contentfinishing process and reduces the number of mixes and cinema masters producers and distributors have to make. A simplified digital content package (DCP) for theatrical distribution and DCP management in theatres, enables studios and content creators to supply fewer audio versions for each movie.

Loren Nielsen, Vice President, Content Relations and Strategy for DTS’ parent company Xperi, says of the DTS:X difference, “IAB opens the door to broader DTS:X adoption in theatres and plays a critical role in enabling studios to reduce their overall title mixing and mastering versions. DTS:X for IAB also supports high frame rate content.”

DTS:X for IAB has already been implemented via beta sites capable of DTS:X for IAB playback in theatres across Hong Kong, Singapore and France. Plans for further deployment, with many theatres transitioning to DTS:X for IAB will be enacted in January 2023.