Filed under: General
I HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE…..David Murphy, Krix Loudspeakers
I was invited to Japan just last week, to attend the AES (Audio Engineering Society) Japan Conference being part of my role as Vice President of the AES. I was fortunate enough to visit the NHK Research Laboratories at Setagaya-ku, Tokyo, Japan, (NHK is the government Japan broadcasting organisation, similar to the BBC).
I saw a demonstration of their proposal for the future of television and cinema. In brief, there is a proposed standard that the picture be 2,000 or 4,000 lines resolution, and the sound is 48/96kHz, 24 bit PCM (Pulse Code Modulation ie no data reduction like MPEG!), and 22.2 audio channels (to gladden the hearts of loudspeaker manufacturers!). The picture I saw was 7680 x 4320 from a projector, the viewing angle was about 100 degrees, and while ordinary HD-TV (1920 x 1080) is equivalent to 35mm film, this was claimed to be more than twice equivalent to 70mm film.
I was VERY impressed, to say the least. The screen was large, about 4 metres high, and solid because the very fine pixel spacing would interact detrimentally with the perforations that cinema screens have to let the sound through. The centre channels were synthesised from speakers top and bottom of the solid screen. And the picture quality was to die for! For the demonstration they showed short movie clips they had made themselves.
The first was of hang gliders in Hawaii, and the view from the height was spectacular, you could see the individual parts of waves breaking far below, and clouds and other islands in the distance, and a life size hang glider flying around in front of your eyes. Another clip was a full frontal of a bee hive, you could see the detail of the structure of their legs, and all around was the sound of buzzing, and I mean all around. You could hear buzzes from above, left and right, behind, and circling, just as if your head was inside a real hive! A more restful scene was in a field of sun flowers, heads nodding in the breeze, again with sounds from behind as gusts of wind caught different parts of the fields. The camera slowly zoomed so that one sun flower filled the screen, and I could clearly see flecks of pollen on the flower. Amazing. Another scene was set in a stadium for a game of American football, opening with a flyover by some jet fighters (which really flew OVER), and the sounds of the crowd came from high and low, cheering the play.
I WANT ONE! The only small problem is the very limited range of programme material, and the expense……
