Home THX Program Overview

In 1985, Lucasfilm's THX Division began researching the reproduction of movie soundtracks in the home. Hollywood had announced that more people were watching movies on video than in movie theatres. Was it possible to get the same experience at home? THX engineers assembled a high performance home theatre sound consisting of matched high-end speakers, a Dolby Pro Logic decoder, high powered amplifiers, and a laser disc player. They listened to familiar soundtracks on the system and compared the quality of that sound to the mixing theatres. To their surprise, the home system sounded very different.

The difference in sound quality and character between the Home Theatre and the Mixing Stage was surprising. Home audio components are generally of very high quality and precision. What was happening?

The Translation From Cinema to Home

Movies are mixed in movie theatres called dubbing stages over equipment and under standards carefully specified. The soundtracks created are designed to be played back in movie theatres using the same type of equipment and under the same standards. No wonder it was difficult to get the same sound over the test hi-fi system!

Home THX was created to solve this problem. First, circuitry had to be designed to accurately translate the sound from the movie environment into the home, correcting the tonal and spatial errors that occurred. Second, refinements in speaker designs had to be researched since most hi-fi equipment is designed to reproduce only 2 channels of sound in a home, and not the 4, 5 or more channels present in a movie soundtrack.