For me, sound is more impactful than screen resolution or aspect ratio. Subwoofer arrays powerful enough for the audience to feel sub-bass are expensive, large, and need to be placed precisely in the room. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a movie theater that had acoustics rivaling a top-tier music venue or concert hall.
I went through a period of home theatre building. What I learned from that, is that cinema sound is so badly calibrated and just downright awful in most cases.
Its one of the things that led to me no longer going to the cinema. You can get a much better and immersive sound stage at home for not much money.
I've seen non-IMAX 70mm referred to 5/70 because the image uses five perforations per frame; IMAX 70mm is then 15/70 because it uses fifteen perforations.
How much can we trust the "Reddit IMAX community"? The people heavily invested in a technology as their hobby aren't always the best sources of objective technical information; is /r/imax more of an "audiophile forum" or more of a forum of people who actually know their stuff?
Certainly we need to be mindful of biases, but you can also simply be falling into a tu quoque, ad hominem fallacy.
At the end of the day, are these 'fancy' theatre experiences (IMAX and the others out there) worth the extra ticket price to you? Certainly Christopher Nolan thinks so since he was willing to put up with the hassle of the IMAX gear for months on end (including airlifting them up to top of mountains), but what will you get out of it watching is something on you can answer.
Of course the largest complaint I tend to hear about Nolan films is the audio mixing, not the visuals.
>"Certainly Christopher Nolan thinks so since he was willing to put up with the hassle of the IMAX gear for months on end (including airlifting them up to top of mountains), but what will you get out of it watching is something on you can answer."
The 70MM IMAX showings at Lincoln Square are still completely sold out 4x/day for the next month. People are filling the theater at 6AM on a Saturday to see it. The market has clearly spoken.
The eyepieces (and editing views) on that equipment shows the other aspect ratios so they know what will be in and out for the other 99%. Anyway plenty of art is only consumable by the 1%.
Passionate hobbyists are often a great source of technical information, and usually more objective than industry sources. The thing to watch out for is people who have become so absorbed by their hobby, they start to put great subjective weight on distinctions that would be without difference to a "normal" person. Audio gear, gourmet food, fine wine, running shoes... It's XKCD 915 all the way down. I also recommend Penn & Teller: Bullshit! S03E12 ("The Best") on this subject.
Good for the hobbyists, if it enhances their enjoyment, but if you're a casual, microscopic variations are going to be dwarfed by other factors.
I think we're giving too much credit to audiophiles. We're talking people who might have discussions on their forums about whether audio buffers in memory allocated with malloc or in memory allocated with C++'s `new` sounds best. Stuff which doesn't have "microscopic effects dwarfed by other factors" but stuff which has literally no effect.
Tried both, 70mm (65mm is video, 5mm is audio) is just superior in every way. There's nothing out there that compares, digital projections are still far behind.
I was referring to regular 70mm, in which 65mm is for the picture and 5mm is to allow for the sound channels. I am not surprised - squeezing even more out of the film, that IMAX would just put audio separately.
I have never seen that in real life though, only regular 70 mm film of which 65 mm is definitely used for the picture and audio channels for the rest. E.g Lawrence of Arabia
What do you prefer if you have tried both. Because those are the only mostly accessible options around the world.
Sound is also something to consider, because depending on the Theater they might have wildy different sound setups even different audio standards.