Kinoton Installs Dolby Atmos in Warner Bros. Screening Room

Kinoton recently equipped the screening room of Warner Bros. Entertainment GmbH in Hamburg with the revolutionary Dolby Atmos surround sound technology. Just this past summer, Warner had upgraded its screening room to a state-of-the-art professional 4k D-Cinema solution from Kinoton.

Technicians of Kinoton’s Northern German branch worked with Dolby to configure the Atmos system for the screening room. The speakers were optimally placed to suit the room’s topology and acoustics. Like for all Atmos installations, the Dolby Atmos Cinema Processor CP 850 was deployed. In the Dolby Atmos system, additional surround speakers on the ceiling and side walls plus subwoofers on the rear walls dynamically envelop viewers in the sound. Now Warner not only benefits from a perfect picture with full 4K resolution, but is also able to assess optimally reproduced sound.

Dolby Atmos is backwards-compatible and also supports the Dolby 7.1 and 5.1 audio formats. A cinema equipped with Dolby Surround 7.1 or 5.1 can distribute the sound to groups of speakers via seven or five channels. Each group can reproduce output music, background noises, or dialog as wished. The Dolby Atmos system surpasses this by sending a separate signal to every single speaker. This makes it possible to install a large number of additional front, surround, and ceiling speakers and position sound sources anywhere in the room—just as the director intended. The sound of rain or flying helicopters, for example, can be reproduced even more realistically. This approach gives audio engineers a familiar interface while extending their creative possibilities, preserving the director’s intentions, and ensuring an excellent cinema experience for all viewers no matter where in the auditorium they are sitting.