Even if you’ve never heard of THX before, there’s a pretty good
chance you’ve heard of Star Wars creator George Lucas. And as with so
many things connected with the technical advancement of cinema in the
late 1970s and early 1980s, the ‘birth’ of AV quality assurance group
THX is directly down to Lucas’s drive to improve the experience of going
to the cinema.
It all began a week or so after Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back had been rolled out to cinemas.
Lucas decided he wanted to install a state of
the art audio mixing system at his new Skywalker Ranch, and hired
renowned audio technician Tomlinson Holman to design it. Realising that
designing a cutting edge mixing desk would require in-depth knowledge of
the whole movie audio creation chain, from filming on set to playback
in cinemas, Holman was permitted to spend a year exploring the state of
play in the movie audio world.
What Holman found shocked him. For the
simple fact was that many commercial cinemas hadn’t significantly
improved their audio visual facilities since the 1940s. So poor were the
experiences many cinemas offered that they couldn’t even get close to
reproducing accurately the visions of the film directors of the day -
directors which included, of course, George Lucas.
Having
subsequently designed the still world-renowned mixing facilities at the
Skywalker Ranch’s Stag Theater, Holman and Lucas started to get cinema
owners and Hollywood Studio executives asking how they could get their
own cinemas and movies achieving the same AV standards delivered by
Lucas’s new state of the art facilities. This eventually led Lucas and a
team of technical experts to develop a standard against which movie
facilities outside of the Skywalker Ranch could be measured, with those
that made the grade receiving a certificate to confirm their prowess.
This group created to run this certification process was called THX in reference to both George Lucas’s first film, THX 1138, and a combination of Tomlinson Holman’s initials and an ‘X’ abbreviation for the audio term known as ‘crossover’.
While
THX undoubtedly had a huge part to play in improving the experience of
going to the cinema, though, the key thing about THX from a modern
consumer electronics point of view is that over time it extended its
quality assurance principles to products designed for use in the home.
Initially THX focussed on the home audio world,
putting speakers and AV receivers through barrages of specially
developed tests to ensure they achieved a sufficiently high standard
before allowing them to claim ‘THX Certification’. THX now, though, also
operates in the display world, testing TVs and projectors submitted to
it to ensure they can get close enough to reproducing faithfully the
pictures mastered onto Blu-ray and DVD discs.
In other words, if you buy a home AV product - or even a Blu-ray or DVD
- with the THX logo attached to it, you can feel confident that it will
be able to reproduce a film-maker’s vision with exceptional accuracy.
In fact, THX-certified display devices will also have a THX picture
preset designed to deliver the most accurate picture settings.
It
should be noted that THX doesn’t operate a policy of testing every AV
device ever made. And nor does it test products purely out of the
goodness of its heart! Instead AV product makers have to pay THX for the
certification process, so not surprisingly it’s usually only sought for
high-end products. What’s more, some brands simply don’t want to pay
for the certification at all and so don’t seek it, even for products
that might very well have been capable of passing the THX test barrage.
While
this means, though, that you can’t just automatically assume that THX
Certified products are always the only great products around, THX
certainly remains arguably the best-known independent third party
assurer of AV quality operating in the AV world today, and continues to
have an important role to play in letting consumers know which products
really can let you see and hear exactly what a director wanted you to
see and hear.
By John Archer
TV/Video Expert
