Your editor wrote an article after spending time with all 4 systems back last April during the run up to CinemaCon. The article went unpublished since there are too many friends involved and who wants to harm anyone’s income? …or maybe there was inside data that is too intertwined with the public un-known un-knowns…

Suffice to say though that of the four companies involved (Barco, Dolby, Iosonno and Imm Sound), the one least likely to finesse enough program material from the important studios and get the technology right and get it into enough facilities to remain viable in the long run wasn’t going to come from a Barcellona university project (however exciting the 2009 CinemaEurope display was.

But: It is logical that they would come up with technology that would be interesting to the likely front runner. The portfolio that makes progress quicker and simpler and cheaper and allows entry into the consumer market sooner will be the most interesting thing to the impressive layer of executives of the Atmos group.

When hearing the imm Sound system with other technical people, there was general agreement that they played material that would be most impressive to people who needed to be impressed. But it wasn’t the immersive sound that the future will bring us. What they did well was show that there is a need for something beyond 5.1 sound, but Dolby did that a few years ago with the experimental systems they showed at CineEurope in 2009 and CinemaCon in 2010. So most of the sound people agreed that we felt we were being conned by the choices of the program material.

So, good luck to us all. Audio can be so much better. Audio needs to be so much better.

[Apologies for the typos and incomplete thoughts in the first draft of this piece. It wasn’t supposed to be released…and then a big crash happened. We’ll try not to repeat that particular mistake again.]