Los Angeles' DGA Theater upgrades to Dolby Atmos with Meyer Sound theater systems

Five Acheron 100 speakers have been installed for the five channels of the front display, each paired with an Acheron LF subwoofer, while 22 HMS-12 and 32 HMS-15 powered speakers are used for surround sound.

Directors Guild of America (DGA) has recently completed a total renovation of his living room DGA Theater in Los Angeles. Guided by a committee of six leading filmmakers, the renovation project has brought the 600-seat space to the forefront of film technology with the installation of a Dolby Vision laser projection custom made and surround sound system Dolby Atmos including more than 70 cinema speakers Meyer Sound.

To translate its creative concepts into specific designs, the DGA committee hired the architectural firm Executioner. In turn, Gensler assigned audiovisual engineering to Tom Schindler, senior vice president of the San Francisco-based consulting firm Salter.

From the beginning the committee insisted that the highest level of audio reproduction must be achieved. "We first measured the acoustics of the room," explains Schindler, "but this aspect was well achieved with the original design. Both background noise and reverberation were well within standards. So the critical factor came down to speaker selection."

Working with Dolby engineers, Jose Castellon y Gary Meissner, Schindler wrote a complete performance specification with options for different speaker manufacturers.

Based on their unique perspectives as filmmakers, DGA committee members requested a live audition to make a final decision. “When the decision on the speaker system was going to be made, we decided that we weren't going to rely solely on the printed specifications,” says committee member, director Michael Mann, in a recent DGA interview. “We wanted to hear what the systems would sound like as we moved through space.”

Meyer Sound and another manufacturer brought the systems for a comparative listening session attended by Mann and another key committee member, director Michael Apted. Each system was tuned by manufacturers' representatives for maximum performance. Dolby representatives consulted with the DGA team to select a wide repertoire of soundtrack clips to evaluate dialogue clarity, effects impact, and musicality.

Schindler recalls that "everyone had similar impressions. In a lot of the content it was difficult to say that one device was clearly better than the other. Each system had its relative strengths, but in a lot of the overall content the Meyer Sound system was judged superior."

Michael Mann states that "both systems were technically perfect, but Michael Apted and I chose the Meyer Sound system because of the difference in emotional musicality. You can listen to two or three sound systems and, although technically they are very similar, one sounds more emotionally musical than the other. These are the kinds of decisions that any of us on the committee would make if it were a movie. It was great to be able to think and execute the same way in the design of the exhibition hall."

For the five front display channels five speakers have been installed Acheron 100, each paired with an Acheron LF subwoofer. The main LFE channels receive powerful reproduction from twelve X-800C cinema subwoofers, aided by another eight 750-LFC for surround bass management.

For the channels surround sound are used 22 HMS-12 and 32 HMS-15 self-powered speakers. A Galaxy 816 network platform supplies the processing for the front display channels.

The integration

The start-up of all audio and video systems was contracted to the group Diversified’s Media & Entertainment under the direction of the engineering director Adam Salkin and the project manager Eugene Tuzkov.

Viewed from the installer's perspective, Meyer Sound's exclusive technology, IntelligentDC (remote DC power for powered surround speakers) offered clear advantages when applied in critical quality scenarios, according to Salkin.

"It means the wire going to the speakers can be thinner," says Salkin, "so you don't have to worry about running heavy-duty speaker wire. That's the biggest advantage. But it also means we don't have to worry about variations in wire distances. In this case we have racks of equipment behind the screens, and if we were running the wire to the passive speaker all the way down, we'd have to account for high-frequency rolloff. Also, with self-powered systems, the amplifiers are built in and matched to the drivers, plus if you have true bi-amplified systems you get better sound quality.”

Other members of the DGA oversight committee included directors Christopher Nolan, Jon Favreau, Betty Thomas and Shawn Levy. The overall direction of the project was led by DGA national executive director Russ Hollander and two executives on his team, Marcel Giacusa and Tim Webber.