It's been a wonderful learning process for me. But it's not likely I'll ever develop Ben's capabilities, nor his equipment in order to setup cinema sound systems correctly. I hope this CP500 lasts a long, long time because I don't fancy my chances at ever successfully fully replacing it if that necessity ever comes. John.

Video came much later for me Ste. 35mm is a little more complex (to say the least) but it's the involvement that makes it so much more special. Of course, getting it all to work properly can be a bit of a conundrum but getting it all sorted in the end always feels good. John.

My TR7 is currently off the road George so I won't be making it to the Gaydon event this year. I've got to focus on the 50th anniversary weekend of the TR7 in September but I'm a bit in limbo right now as I need to get under the car and I don't like doing that. I have a friend with access to a lift and that's what I'm waiting on. The Dolby CP500 is an exciting piece of kit for those of us who have been into this Dolby surround sound malarkey for well over 30 years. The complication actually starts to make sense when you get into it and have people like Ben around. I shot quite a lot of video of him configuring it and I think I'll be referring back to that quite a bit in the future. John.

Next time you're looking to change your telly John see if you can get a more basic set and spend the cost of an OLED on a video projector. Contrary to what the 'experts' preach, all you need is a white wall to get started and then you'll never look back because projecting a movie is an occasion every time. We tend to go into our screening room three evenings a week so that it always feels special but we still have a telly in the living room. The telly is mainly used for watching KZfaq but lately we've been running many of our LaserDiscs through it too. John.

A real learning process for me. Still much more to learn. John.

It's been a learning process Key. The standout has been the tiny wires out of that green Phoenix connector which go to adapters and then into the Pioneer THX amp. All that cobblers about spending money on the best interconnects to get the top possible quality out of a Hifi and then cinemas have the thinnest wires from a multi-thousand pound processor to a multi-thousand watt sound system. It illustrates how I was led up the garden path and how much money I used to waste. John.

You're welcome Rey and thank you. I seem to be somewhat more patient these days because 30 or 40 years ago all of this process would have driven me nuts!

Thank you Roy.

Many people prefer two channel stereo sound so you're not alone there. It can be a bit of a minefield but modern amplifiers with all the myriad surround sound systems do automatically switch to whatever they're receiving. It therefore isn't as complicated as it may appear in that regard. However, many discs do require a check in the menu options to ensure the right surround sound is being output and that catches people out quite a lot. A good example of where just about everyone will get it wrong is the 4K Arrow disc for Robocop because the default is one of the newer, remixed digital soundtracks when the best sound is had from the original Dolby Stereo (four track matrixed) sound. The dialogue is too low on the digital options. By the way, I prefer records to all other ways of listening to music. John.

Greetings Trev. I might have identified the wrong black plugs but they're around that location so I'm not far off. I didn't want to pull the card out again just in case I damaged it somehow. They can sometimes require quite a lot of force to pull them out. I've only ever seen Alien Resurrection on 35mm. Twice in the cinema and then I held out for a film print for a few years and managed to resist the NTSC LaserDisc when it appeared in 1998. People constantly tell me it looks terrible on home video whereas it looks like a work of art on 35mm. A Super 35 production so not exactly the best quality and certainly not as good as Alien which was shot 18 years earlier. John.

@@moviecollector5920 The Bluray has Black Crush. If their TV isn't set up correctly it will look awful. I got it looking pretty nice with the right Gamma setting. It will look spectacular in 4K if they do it. Trev

@@doublebillmovies I've loved Alien Resurrection from the first time I saw it. Unlike Alien 3 I enjoyed it from the opening reel and that didn't let up. The Alien Newborn is the scariest looking creature I think I've ever seen in a film but others tell me they think it looks stupid. I think it must come down to seeing it as it should look on film or via a botched up video where everything looks poor. Right, just finished watching your latest so I'll get over and leave a comment. John.

Thank you Rick. I now have doubts that the three black pegs I said were the jumpers may not be but hopefully anyone using this video to put their own CP500 system right will follow the instructions on the sheet and work it out for themselves. I didn't want to pull the card for fear of damaging it after all the work to get the damned thing working. John.

If a 35mm print of Point Break turns up I'll give you a shout. John.

​@@moviecollector5920 I am still waiting and hoping for a review from you.

When digital soundtracks first started proliferating in the top London cinemas I used to think the previous analogue Dolby Stereo sound was often better. I think the digital sound improved though but it seems awfully close on this system at home a lot of the time. Magnetic sound on 70mm prints was better than Dolby Digital so perhaps I was judging cinemas by memories of sound 70mm blow-ups a lot of the time. John.

Later 70mm 6 track was dolby sr​@@moviecollector5920

I'm actually enjoying this Summer. It's nice not to be too damned hot like the previous couple of years. Feels much more like the temperatures I remember as a child. I hope you're enjoying it too. I think it also helps that we're able to sit in the home cinema without feeling overcome by heat. John.

Morning Jim. I think the Marantz SP-50 was the first to have an amplifier within it. It was only 30w for each of the two rear speakers but combined with the excellent Phantom front centre channel mode it meant that us mere mortals could have Dolby Stereo in the home for about £225 back in the early 1990's. I got it from the same branch of Richer Sounds just off Bloomsbury Square that I've been using on occasion ever since. It works well with 35mm analogue stereo but now the CP500 is working with the new FP20 projector it probably won't get so much use in that regard. However, right now I'm just hooking it up to a Super 8 stereo projector as I haven't done that for about 25 years so I want to see if it works better with Super 8 than the Pioneer THX amp does. John.

First again. Amazing.

@@moviecollector5920 🫡

You'd probably have to find a Technicolor dye transfer print of The Towering Inferno Stephen otherwise it would likely be a salmon colour by now. But I don't know if any IB Tech prints were ever struck of that title. Someone somewhere will still have a 70mm blow-up and it's possible the colour would still be okay. John.

I've been fiddling with Dolby sound processors for well over 30 years Dave so I suppose it's a fairly normal thing for me to do after all these years. I think I have some fiddling to do with the CP500 but I don't want to touch anything other than the most basic settings after the brilliant work Ben has done for me. Alien Resurrection lacked the punch I think it should have so I'll start by checking another feature and see if it's the same. If so, then I'll start at the amplifier side by putting the subwoofer output higher. John.

There are plenty of CP500's around right now David so I hope I'll be alright. It's not like it's still working in a cinema 15 hours a day, seven days a week so it might last for years and years given the comparatively small amount of use it will be getting. Alien Resurrection didn't sound quite as good as it should so I'm going to see how others now sound and tweak a little where required. Most have sounded rich and full and better than anything I have heard off a home video disc so that's been a pretty good start. There was something I adjusted when I first had the digital sound working that made it all sound so much more like THX should sound so I'll have to poke around for that. It was a basic equalizer setting if I recall correctly. I should have made a note of it because it's possible that's been reset in the whole process but we'll see. John.

@@moviecollector5920 yes John you should hopefully get a lot more life and use out of those CP 500 boards than we ever did during their spell in the commercial cinemas . Oddly we noticed that in daily constant use the CP 500 had a greater circuit board failure rate during the hotter summer months even despite our efforts to keep the projection suite at a constant moderate temperature during the shows . As far as i am aware you can only hear and get the 100% best out of any THX sound standards set ups with the provision your auditorium or cinema room acoustics and speaker systems meets and matches their certificate specifications and criteria measurements .

@@davidhardy7356 Home THX has different criteria and standards David but Ben did go through all the equalization processes on the CP500 so I don't think this little 'Empire' will be too far off what would have gotten through the certification process in a commercial cinema. I know there should be sound deadening all through an auditorium for commercial THX but we want it to be a nice room in the house as well as a screening room so I don't think we're ever likely to go down that route. The funny thing is that the reverberation in the huge Empire 1 always made the sound in there more impressive than screens 5 and 7 in the Warner West End and the other THX in High Wycombe. I never went into the Curzon on Shaftesbury Avenue after they passed THX certification so I never got to hear that one. I would have visited but they always had rather strange choices of film showing in there. Did see Death & The Maiden there prior to the THX certification and it was a lovely auditorium. I think there was only one other THX cinema in the UK at the time. John.

My Pioneer amp dates from about 1999 and it still puts out better audio than just about everything else around today. There are better out there but most people tend to go for soundbars so the house isn't cluttered but when you've had the best it's hard to imagine downgrading too far. John.

The CP500 was fine other than having the optional 683 card to switch the three front channels into LFE. I don't know what the idea of that was but apparently it's quite common. The problem was getting the analogue sound out of the FP20 correctly but with friends like Ben it's no longer a problem. It's going to be a lot of fun from now on. John.

@@moviecollector5920 sound's good mine must had that set already thanks for your comments.

@@allensphotographyvideo You must also have had the correctly grounded analogue sound lead. Let me know if you've had occasions where the digital sound fails over to analogue or if not, what the error readout generally says on most of your features. I'm finding that trailers are usually lower which seems to mean they've had fewer screenings so less damage to the digital soundtrack.

@@moviecollector5920 I run the dolby cat701 dolby digital reader. My error rate is 4 to 7

@@moviecollector5920 I run the dolby digital reader cat701 my error rate is 4-7

Like a pair of DP70's. Then again, every home should have a pair of those! John.

😂so he hasn’t persuaded you to install a 165 degree curved screen yet

@@sillygrandad Funnily enough, I was just discussing that very possibility with Mark Stuckey but doing it with Super 8. It's actually a 120 degree curve for the D-150 lens and I think that's just about viable.

Now that would be an interesting subject for the channel

Planning a further visit to work on the Basement Head and checking the A Chain is the next visit now located the missing test loops at home.

I see that Ben has done a reply already below so he has even more checks planned at some stage. Always great fun when we get together so that can't come soon enough as far as I'm concerned. Now then, what has been interesting during this whole process is the focus I had on probably alignment issues which others agreed with. There was one trailer on a reel that all of a sudden started to failover half way through (and in my case go silent because the analogue sound wasn't working). This was a mystery because I was sure it had run the digital track all the way through initially. I tried running that reel several times to see if I was perhaps doing something that had caused the failover but in the end I gave up. Then I showed it while a visitor was here and prepared to operate the volume on the second sound system I'd hooked up as soon as it reached the point where it consistently failed over. But it played the digital track all the way through. I had played with a few prints that failed over by using a finger to pull the print towards me just after the sound cell and sometimes the digital sound would kick back in. All this indicated an alignment issue. Remember me mentioning the forefinger width measurement of the bottom loop? There was one reel of the feature Star Wars The Phantom Menace (reel 4, which is the climax of the pod race so the best reel of the whole damned film!) which had consistently not registered that there was even a Dolby Digital track on the film. Well, I've been playing with the forefinger measurement and ensuring each print is laced up exactly the same and I haven't had a single failover since including that troublesome reel from The Phantom Menace. It only registers 5 and 6 on the error readout too. So, with all this new information do you think there is still something out of alignment? It would seem so to me because I cannot believe that the bottom loop would ever be so critical but something there causes it to run out of alignment if it's not spot on. Thank you for such a detailed comment which may well be of great help in the future. It's wonderful to finally have all this working so well and if I have to stick with things as they are and take my time to get that bottom loop set onto the exact cog on that bottom loop every time then I can live with that. It would be nice to be able to be a little more relaxed about it though. John.

And I've been ensuring the masking is all as straight as possible Ben along with getting the Kinoton as well aligned as possible given the angle its projecting at. It's surprisingly straight with minimal keystone effect and CinemaScope mumps now. John.

@@moviecollector5920 When Ben comes back with his test films and gear, you might be amazed at how far out of alignment your reader _may_ be. For the status LEDs to show that it is constantly missing a corner on its first scan pass (it scans each line many times...the upper four LEDs in each column represent finding the four corners on the first pass...the lower four LEDs in each column represent finding the four corners on ANY pass), the reader is out of alignment. This could be in the form of lateral alignment of the film to the reader or the LED to the reader. You also have azimuth that could cause one corner, combined with the rest to be more difficult to scan. Depending on the print, how they are printed will vary GREATLY so you'll get some prints that are spot-on for your reader alignment while others are not. However, if measured film is used to set it up, you should be in the middle of its tolerance. As such, any print that passes QC, even if not optimal, should be reliably read. My advice is "stay tuned" until Ben can go through it and then see how reliable it can be. It should be VERY reliable (never seeing a drop except at a splice between content).

@@sguttag I ran reel 1 of Alien Resurrection again today after reading your first message and despite ensuring the width of my forefinger on the bottom loop it still failed over to Dolby SR briefly four or five times. You've convinced me. I think Ben was already convinced so he's planning another visit and as it's always such fun when he's here I'm glad we have another excuse. I also have a Spectra portable 35mm and he wants to see if he can work his magic on that one too because the sound out of that has never been very good. We hope to use that projector at a future film collector convention which would be putting it back to its original use because it was often on duty at the British Film Collectors Conventions in London. It's not really bright enough to fill the 24 foot wide screen but we'll see how far we get. Thank you again for the education. I'm going to have to read through everything you've told me several times and run a reel that fails over so I can get a grasp of the flashing light indications. John.

Bonjour Alain et merci beaucoup comme toujours. John.

I haven't heard that. I have heard that Dolby Digital tracks get the most because it's between the sprockets and that makes sense to me. John.

Sean Bean?... Okay, I suppose that was the Highlander front of house set you spotted with Mr. Connery. One of his best roles. John.

Dolby Stereo Paul which was known as ProLogic for the home market. It also plays Dolby Digital but there are various versions of Dolby Stereo with the last being Dolby SR (Spectral Recording). These sometimes sound better than Dolby Digital. I need to play a few features to see what the DD sound is like now it's all sorted. Initially the sound was better than home video discs but that was only obvious after a bit of tweaking. Ben's set it all up properly now so the efforts I made first of all may have boosted the bass a little too much before which has misled me. We'll see. I feel a screening of Spider-Man 2 coming on. John.

Unfortunately not. This is going to be an increasing problem in the future. John.

We used to rent from our closest film library and it was about 18 miles away in the next town. Our most successful (i.e. profitable) screening was The Texas Chainsaw Massacre which was banned at the time but somehow released by Iver Films legally in the UK. We charged 50p a ticket and our school friends came in droves to give us a nice healthy profit over the cost of the rental. Video was some years after this so Super 8 was the first home movie system many of us knew. John.

As a 24-year-old, I'm amazed at the work that went into this stuff in the past, and it honestly makes me wish I could go to the theater and see a re-release of an old movie projected from an old film print with all of the original equipment running in the background. Toy Story or Monsters Inc. would be ones I'd love to see projected from an original print just because the modern HD versions are new renders of the movie. And while they look amazing (especially the stereoscopic 3D renders they did), it'd be cool to see the movie as it was originally rendered back in the day.

@@chrisfratz Apart from the change from film projectors to video projectors I think it's all pretty much along the same lines Chris. You'll still find Dolby sound processors in cinema projection boxes. I don't suppose they have to be quite so resilient now in terms of switching from digital sound to something else though - not at all in fact. John.

However good home video gets it will never have the thrill of being able to run a physical film. It's all complementary though because I couldn't store all the movies I have on video if they were 'reel' film prints. John.

@@moviecollector5920 would love to see a real film print sometime. I enjoy film grain in digital copies. Sounds like an experience.

This projector is too loud but it's so special that it's all part of the fun and the excitement. When it comes to action films then you are rarely aware of it though. John.

That's a Marantz SP-50 Mike which I think I purchased in 1991. It was the only Dolby Stereo processor I could find that had an amplifier in it. The amp was for the rear channels only but with another one or two amplifiers hooked into the relevant outputs full Dolby Stereo four track matrixed surround was in the home where it was known as ProLogic. There's a dead horse outside being flogged right now... oh, it's a Warner Bros. executive thinking he can get some more life out of his old horse he called 'Matrix'. John.

@@moviecollector5920 Thanks for the info on the Marantz I had an old quad amplifier fed by this SP50 used it conjunction with VHS and Laserdisc. Completely forgot about the nuts and bolts until memory trigged by seeing the Marantz . Funny how you forget things

@@mikewilding3199 I've used that SP-50 for years with my portable 35mm projector as the adjustable input levels meant I could even the two channels up accurately. It's been in the home cinema since the FP20 projector arrived as the sound input into it generates far better sound than into the Pioneer THX amp. This is probably because the levels from both my 35mm projectors are wrong owing to not having correctly grounded cables. Ben wants to take a look at the portable sometime to see if he can get full range Dolby sound from that too. That one doesn't have a digital sound cell, just the analogue, but it would be great to get better sound from it for when I use it at a film fair or proper film collector convention. John.

It's an HID 150 Derek. That's only 150 watts but it's surprisingly bright. The compromise is that the colour temperature is slightly off but I knew that before asking Noel give one a try as I already have an HID 150 in an Elmo GS1200. It tends to bleed the colour out a little. John.

Thanks, John. A feature on lamp upgrades are very far and few between. I'm looking at upgrading the lamp in an FP3!

SDDS is too massive to fit on these FP20's. It has been done of course but that's in cinemas where that's what they're for. Fitting this in as it is was a bit of a trick but it's worked out alright - not perfect but alright. A friend did offer me the full SDDS kit but without the room for it it would have just been a paperweight. I liked Sony Dynamic Digital Sound too but I'm not sure all the SDDS soundtracks were really eight channels. I suspect the majority were six but fudged somehow. Six track magnetic is probably the most impressive sound I ever heard until more recent years but the improvements have largely been down to better amplifiers and speakers. John.

Movies in sdds 8 channels yea I think there were only 80 somethng nowadays I don't even really remember what it sounds like I remember watching The Matrix on it though and I remember it seeming like it sounded louder than DTS at the time. The best I have ever heard Dobby digital on 35mm was one of the THX theaters at the grumman's Chinese Theater it sounded perfect easily better than today's DCI sound I was like wow this sounds better than DCI Digital Cinema. That was about 11 or 12 years ago when I went to Hollywood. I don't remember 6 track magnetic sound although I do think I heard the IMAX version one time version one time whenever I was a kid of course it sounded impressive by the time I saw a 70 mm feature they had already switched over to DTS but of course on another note this video was the highlight of my evening I love people going over this kind of equipment I wish I had some to mess with myself I would say the closest thing I have to this that is cool is my Sony Dolby Digital ac3 modulator that I recently purchased for my laser disc player just for fun because I hear most of those mixes we're not remixed for the home I know I have twister and the AC3 Dolby Digital track seems to be better than the Blu-ray remix track anyway keep up the cool work thank you so much for making a cool video like this I look forward to many more in the future as always

@@JunkerDC I have that same Twister LaserDisc with AC3 track but I'm finally now thinking that I'll have to get an LD player with AC3 out on it so I can compare the upcoming 4K release to the original sound. I was never particularly impressed with SDDS sound. The Empire used to run many films with it but the difference between the various new digital sound systems wasn't obvious. However, that was the best sound system around so I suppose everything sounded fabulous. Best of all was six track magnetic though. That was why Star Trek VI was the best thing I'd ever heard until quite recently now that the BFI IMAX has managed to surpass the quality achieved at The Empire with films like TENET and DUNKIRK. It's a shame THX isn't around any longer because those cinemas were always the best but the ever diminishing audiences mean it's not worth investing in the dying industry of movie exhibition any longer. We'll all be the poorer for it if we let cinema die completely. John.

Morning Jim. It's sounding pretty good... not quite as good as the BFI IMAX though so I still have a way to go. John.

@@moviecollector5920 At least things are a little easier these days:(;).

Thank you Craig. I've been recording bits for this for a long time now. Started last year. John.

Whoa! You've found a reel of Rollerball with four track magnetic sound!?! Well, I have got to see that when I finally visit Steve. That's one of my all time favourites and I would love to hear (and see) that particular 35mm reel. Hopefully the CP500 will last a very long time given that it's not working all day seven days a week in a commercial cinema. It might only end up doing a couple of dozen shows a year once I get over the initial excitement [and disbelief] that it's all finally working properly. Right now I want to get that print of Alien on two big reels and also Spider-Man 2. The others can all wait a while. Thank you for all your help and all the freebies. John.

Oh, that looks beautiful. I think part of the reason I tend to get such high error rates in general is because the FP20 digital reader is reverse scan. It's possible the backside of the film tends to get more damage than the front... but I may be talking complete cobblers because many of the trailers I have read an error rate of 4. Evidently the features had a harder life. John.

@@moviecollector5920 ray dolby in a interview said that between the spocket hole was the best place for less wear. Sometimes the projectors spocket can cause vibration and you will get little higher error rate.

@@allensphotographyvideo I had another test of the forefinger width bottom loop theory this afternoon and a reel that previously had stubbornly refused to even register that there was Dolby Digital on the print not only played DD all the way through but had a consistent error rate reading of 5 and 6. It looks like I've managed to solve this little conundrum. But I do suspect the reverse scan results in higher error rates. As long as all the prints play the DD sound though then that's all that matters. The occasional failover to Dolby SR should be unnoticeable. By the way, I left a comment on one of your videos earlier. Looks like you have another subscriber to the ever growing number. John.

Thank you for that Johnny. I am well aware of the failure rate of Dolby processors but this one is fully functional. As it's not in use in a commercial cinema I hope it will surprise you and last a long, long time doing just the occasional show. John.

That's an interesting theory...just not based in reality. The CP500 had a reasonable run and I did get them to work reliably. I'm not saying that they were perfect. Slot J14 was touchy on timing. The front panel display will often get lines through it and they did have the Dolby trademark power supply issues that almost all of their processors had, over the years.

@@sguttag Fortunately there are still plenty of them around Johnny so if yours ever does pack up you will be able to find a replacement quite cheaply now. I have a colleague with three of them so we should be okay even if I do overuse it to the point it's completely knackered. Don't worry about them - easy to replace or repair now. John.

@@moviecollector5920 yep...we have a stack of them in our shop to ensure those that we support in the field can remain there for the foreseeable future.

@@sguttag We dumped them within months. Good for you if you got them working. I'm not sure what reality you're in. Ours was having a working product that didn't drop out every 5 seconds. We and almost everyone I know, both in the US and UK, jumped on the 650, which came out not long after the 500. The 650 is still solid and still is. There is also a power supply issue with the 650, 750, and 850. Like the 650, the 850 was in a cinema and a studio version. I am depressed by the 950, which is pure junk.

Agreed Mubai. Why I wasn't able to sort all this out for myself ages ago is a bit of a mystery now!!! John.

You can't buy these off the shelf Victor. The 500 model was supplanted years ago anyway and that's the only reason I came to own one. John.