We arrived at the cinema inside Barton Creek Mall, which was still open around 5:40pm on a Sunday, and joined the pretty long ticket line, where there were multiple windows, but only one staffer selling tickets. Spotting a credit card machine, my wife smartly stepped past the entire line and bought our tickets. However the cost was $9.69 per ticket! Pretty expensive considering they weren't purchased in advance from some remote location.
Not only does Auditorium 11 have a pretty crummy design specification, during my visit it was not meeting that specification. As far as word-of-mouth goes, it does not help Terminator: Salvation to be presented in this way.
FYI we entered the auditorium too late to see any trailers, unfortunately, and the music over the opening titles was playing. But I knew there was trouble even as we walked in towards the front row to begin our ascent to the seat. The title music sounded terrible - very little bass to speak of, and in fact generally sounding like old technology, old cinema construction. It was muddy and not enthralling whatsoever. I actually still recall how good the opening titles music for Terminator 2: Judgement Day sounded at the Lincoln 6, back in 1991 - and it had a better effect on me than this! (mind you, improving over the opening titles of 1984's mono The Terminator didn't take much)
As I sat down, in pretty much the ideal spot, I realized how small the screen is... it might only be 30' across! This is one of the smallest screens in Austin, about as big as a millionaire's private cinema, or a screening room in the actual movie-making business. The seats were moderately comfortable though, with a good stadium raking to the rows. Sometimes a small screen gets you a more concentrated, less grainy sort of movie, but that didn't outweigh the other problems here. The AMC Barton Creek 14 ran almost the entire gamut of problems.
Taking picture first, the screen is small, sure, but if engineering is carried out correctly you could still enjoy the picture. Unfortunately, the print had several scratches running along what seemed to be its entire length; the picture was not actually shining at the center of the screen, there was at least a foot of Terminator: Salvation being projected onto the dark auditorium wall at the left of it; focusing and edges were relatively sharp actually, not too much complaint there. The picture was not particularly bright, which could be the cinematography but I have a feeling it isn't.
Moving on to sound, as I said this hit me as soon as I walked into the room. It never got any better. At first I thought there was no subwoofer in there or it was simply switched off, but it was clear during the early scene depicting the resistance's mission to infiltrate the cyborg facility that there was plenty of bass in the soundtrack; it manifested itself as a constant boom, unfortunately, without a lot of clarity. Sorta like what you hear outside a car when the owner has the bass turned up too much. It left me longing to hear the movie again, somewhere else. Bass never got any clearer in the movie. It was presented in digital sound, but you'd never know it from the openness and frequency response of the sound. The clue was that digital artifacting grew in seriousness throughout the length of the movie, starting now and again around 1/3rd through, ruining long brass notes in the music track by 2/3rds through, but by the time of the end credits, ending up simply broken-sounding, with the music sounding downright awful. This sound system really chewed up Danny Elfman's music and made it sound terrible. There is very little high-end response here (or it wasn't present in the soundtrack... unlikely), not very open, airy or informative. I felt like I was a person who'd been losing my hearing for many years. Surround sound was evident now and again, but was impulsive and dynamic (to the point of being absent usually), and directionally not very clear.
My wife (who is not an engineer) commented that, even to her, this cinema was so bad she was certain I'd be giving it a bad review herself.
I cannot understate the crappiness of this auditorium, and recommend you avoid it if you are interested in good audio-visual presentation. If you don't really care how good a movie looks and sounds, you won't be that offended.
Ticket cost - $9.69 (bah).
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