LHF system solved sound quandary

the average sound perfectionist would likely blanch at the idea of screening a feature film inside an antiquated building with the acoustic quality potential of an eight-track cassette.

Not just your average audio a-type personality, two-time Emmy Award winner Michael Leader met the challenge last month, setting up a one-time, state-of-the-art private theater inside the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology for a hush-hush conference of some of the biggest food corporation executives in the world including the presidents of Coca-Cola, Nestle, and General Foods.

Leader, president of Vancouver-based Leader Sound Technologies Corporation, got the call last month to set up a 35mm projection studio inside the museum for a screening of Disney’s Pocahontas. Nestle is Disney’s European partner and execs from both corporations would be in the audience. The caliber of sound in that room was certainly not up to par for anyone involved in the motion picture business, says Leader.

In the course of three days, Leader and an army of three put a $16,000 high-end sound studio together, complete with fiberglass acoustical panels to control the sound reverberations of the stage, a soundproof projection booth to hide the cranking of the 35mm machine (GT Projection and Sound, headed by George Torbica, worked on the projection side), and enveloped the room with Leader’s signature system, the Leader Hollywood Format Signature Sound System.

The state-of-the-art lhf system, designed by Leader, includes a 22,000 watt sound system, Leader Cinema Products’ Main Screen Channel Speaker systems, and four sub-woofer systems containing a total of eight 18-inch woofers powered with 8000 watts.

Surprising to industry folk used to hearing ‘digital’ attached to any ground-breaking ’90s technology, the lhf sound system supports Dolby surround sound, which works with the lhf very wide bandwidth for analog transmission that ‘plays back analog the way it’s supposed to be played back, providing a smooth, rich, full sound that totally encompasses the audience,’ says Leader.

The Pocahontas experience gave Leader the chance to again prove that louder is not better when it comes to sound quality.

In mainstream movie theaters, the normal playback level is 85dB. But the problem in some cinemas is that the sound systems are not accurately calibrated to the 85dB level or are missing the necessary sub-woofers needed to balance the sound, says Leader.

The distorted result means that ‘the low frequency sound effects either on the track or mixed for the system are not being played back in most cinemas. The sound system actually gets in the way of communicating the wide range of sound effects on the film,’ says Leader.

Taking into account that the audience was accustomed to a refined sound, Pocahontas was played at 83dB, relying on the high number of sub-woofers in the lhf system to maintain the dynamic balance for the very low frequency effects in the movie and not blast them from their seats during the action scenes.