The Louis Lumière theatre at the Palais des Festivals received a bespoke upgrade to Dolby Atmos during the past year, making it what is now Europe’s largest permanent installation of the award-winning immersive sound format. For the first time, this year select screenings during Cannes may include Atmos sound at the venue.
To create this immersive experience, Atmos requires a configuration that involved placing speakers behind the screen, around the walls and even across the ceiling in a venue. The custom installation at the Palais began last summer and even involved installers rappelling from the ceiling to rig the ceiling loudspeakers, according to Friedrich Deininger, Dolby’s senior director of cinema and partner management for EMEA and India.
The height from the stall area of the theater to the ceiling speakers is 15 meters (nearly 50 feet), while the auditorium seats 2,309 guests. To accommodate this size, 124 permanent speakers are strategically placed throughout the auditorium. According to Deininger, line array loudspeakers have also been installed on stage for coverage across the seating areas. Loudspeakers are individually mounted to either the main structure or the existing metal work in the room. Atmos sound processors have been deployed in a unique configuration and 28 amplifiers for the loudspeakers are spread across three locations in the building, to cover the large space.
After the installation, a first round of calibration and testing took place last September, with the team working around scheduled events in the theatre.
The installation comes one year after Dolby marked 50 years of technical support at the Festival, an effort that began in 1974, with a Dolby soundtrack for the movie “Callan.”
