It takes more than just overwhelmingly humongous visuals to create the immersive “IMAX Experience” that moviegoers have come to expect. The film’s soundtrack plays an equally vital role. Here’s an in-depth look at how IMAX engineers develop and deliver a sound big enough to match the on-screen action.
As you can see in the incredibly detailed video above, producing IMAX-quality sound takes much more than just blasting it out of oversized speakers, though the system’s multi-thousand watt amplifiers certainly help. Every aspect of the theatre space is controlled to enhance the film’s audio, from utilising whisper-quiet air conditioning to actively monitoring the room’s acoustics and remotely optimising the various speaker outputs. And through the use of its “Phantom Image” technology, IMAX can create a more well-rounded and realistic 3D soundscape. The amount of engineering that goes into generating IMAX’s audio is simply staggering.
But IMAX isn’t the only film format to reimagine how we listen to movies. Sound systems like THX and Dolby Atmos also compete to deliver the biggest and most realistic audio possible. Which format do you prefer? Do you even notice the difference? Let us know in the discussion below.