THX overrated?

[Woochifer]

I personally don't really like THX. It, at least to me, seems to cut some of the highs. Or, it seems a little flat compared to DTS. Some people like it. Knowing that now, I probably would not make that a requirement in choosing a receiver. Mine does have THX but I bet I have use it only once or twice.

JSE

That THX re-eq feature DOES cut off the highs because the original soundtracks for a lot of earlier movies were mixed with a house curve that boosted the highs. This sounded fine with low bandwidth optical soundtracks, but if those soundtracks got transferred to digital without compensating for those boosted highs, then they will sound overly bright when played back in DD. These instances are where the THX re-eq mode is useful. But, for more recent soundtracks and DVDs where the soundtrack was remixed with the corrected EQ, then it's not really needed. Otherwise, THX is basically a certification program.

Well, My Yamaha RX-V1400 is THX certified and has a THX mode. The remote hs a THX button. This defintely a different sound field from DTS or PLII . Actually I think it's just a variant of EX called "THX surround EX". Here's a link that discusses it. Look about halfway down the page.

http://www.timefordvd.com/tutorial/SurroundSound.shtml

If I am confused on this, let me know.

JSE

When DD EX was first made available to home consumers, the "official" version of it was only available on THX-certified receivers/processors. However, non-THX receivers could still do the back surround decoding with DD EX soundtracks, they just couldn't call it "EX" without the THX label included as well. I think it was two years ago that the "EX" label could be extended to non-THX receivers. It's really all basically the same thing.

The THX button is basically the re-eq function, and I'm pretty sure that the EX decoding can be done without the THX mode active.