Silent Cinema Explained

Silent Cinema Explained

All of the Yamaha receiver models have a feature called “Silent Cinema." This mode allows private listening enjoyment of multi-channel music or movie sound, including Dolby Digital and DTS Digital Surround, through ordinary headphones! Simply plug in your headphones to enjoy your multi-channel experience right away. This feature is perfect for those late night movies or when other noises are interfering with your enjoyment of the movie or music. It could also be used in the case of a tricky install where there is not a possibility for rear surround speakers, thus giving the user a sense of surround sound with the headphones. Now how does this work you might ask? Yamaha engineers used small microphones inside people’s ears to record sounds from different points and basically created a map of how people hear. They used that map to determine how to direct sound from headphones to reproduce speaker sounds from various directions. The result is getting surround sound from a standard pair of headphones. WOW!

SILENT CINEMA and Virtual CINEMA DSP SILENT CINEMA makes it possible to hear large-scale surround sound through ordinary headphones! This is a variation of CINEMA DSP technology that Yamaha developed to let you listen in private to movies and other multi-channel sources for hours without listening fatigue. Virtual CINEMA DSP lets you enjoy the effects of CINEMA DSP surround sound without using surround speakers (handy for use in custom installations where some rooms don't have surround speakers). It can be used with the front / center / presence speakers or even with just the two front left and right speakers.