Movie-lovers live for the moments when a hero finally reveals the greatness within. Vincent Gambino cross-examining his first witness in My Cousin Vinny. Neo seeing the code behind The Matrix. The Man in Black admitting that he's "not left-handed either." The audience knows as the hero unlocks their full potential that they're about to experience something special. Revelation requires the right circumstances, though. John McClane is just a schlub until Hans Gruber seizes control of Nakatomi Plaza.

Benoit Muñoz, marketing manager at Trinnov Audio, has a hero on his hands: the Altitude audio processor, an obsessively engineered device built to deliver immersive audio greatness even in very challenging acoustic conditions like private cinemas. Muñoz finds demonstrating the Altitude with current blockbuster clips unsatisfying. The device has always been ahead of its time: Built with orders of magnitude more processing power than other audio processors, the Altitude has the headroom to accommodate future breakthroughs in active acoustics and audio formats for years to come. In fact, Trinnov was working with IMM sound, the inventors of Atmos, prior to their acquisition by Dolby—or as Muñoz puts it, "We were doing Atmos before Atmos."

Like Elijah Price in Unbreakable, Muñoz was driven to create a challenge that would test the mettle and reveal the true potential of the Altitude line. In other words, he needed cinematic moments specifically engineered to highlight the power of immersive audio. So, he built them.

Since 2020, Muñoz has been directing a series of cinematic trailers designed to stretch the boundaries of display and sound systems alike. Recently, ProjectorCentral reached out to Muñoz for a Q&A about this passion project, and how its mission now reaches far beyond product demonstrations to celebrate the art of immersive cinema.

ProjectorCentral: Where did the idea for these trailers get started?

Benoit Muñoz: I joined Trinnov nearly a decade ago. At the time, immersive sound was just entering the home theater market—but all the biggest players had already moved past the "golden age" of producing trailers. There were some purpose-built immersive sound trailers available, but they were quickly becoming dated, and they generally centered around promoting one particular format.

That's not Trinnov's mission; we tend to be quite agnostic with respect to audio formats, and the Altitude has supported all immersive formats from the very beginning. So, as we prepared the demo playlist for Integrated Systems Europe (ISE) 2020, I seized the opportunity to try something new. The show coincided with the world premiere of Trinnov's DTS:X Pro decoder. Working with a limited budget—and a great deal of help from industry friends and partners—I created a special clip to demonstrate the capabilities of this new format.

This first trailer, "Experience," was short—only 30 seconds long—but we knew it was the start of something special. True to our format-agnostic approach, we also created dedicated mixes for Atmos, Auro-3D, and DCP and made them all freely downloadable from the Trinnov website.

ISE is primarily a show for professional AV integrators. Is that your target audience for these trailers?

Honestly, our first—and hardest to please—audience is ourselves. That's how creative people work, and this is truly a creative project. If a trailer satisfies our own deep passion for great video and sound, we know it will speak to our peers and customers.

Beyond that, though, we're aiming to create trailers that resonate with both integrators and enthusiasts. There is a lot of interplay and collaboration between audiophiles and professionals: customers regularly swing by dealer experience centers to try out what's new and talk craft. Of course, we get the most feedback from longtime industry partners—typically seasoned calibrators and integrators—but we know enthusiasts use these trailers at home as well to show the full capabilities of the home theaters they've poured so much passion and investment into building.

How do people respond when they experience these trailers firsthand?

The response from the community has been incredibly gratifying. For dealers, these trailers are the difference between telling customers how joyful and captivating immersive audio can be and really showing them.

It's fun to test the trailer among our core crew and most passionate collaborators, but perhaps the most gratifying response has come from uptake by industry partners. The finest home theater showrooms in the world have our trailers integrated into the demo scripts on their Kaleidescape players. These partners share our passion for communication, and it is the highest possible compliment to see them use our trailers to show off their systems.

What was the creative process for creating these trailers? They're each a unique work of art: where do the visuals come from, and how do you marry them with immersive audio to create an impactful experience?

There is no magic formula per se. Inspiration can come from the stunning visual work of an up-and-coming artist, new technologies coming out of our lab, or sometimes the combination of the two. That was the case of "Les Dieux" where the mesmerizing visual work of Lucio Arese became the inspiration to produce a clip that would challenge low-end reproduction. That particular trailer offers sound calibrators and integrators a clip that will put to test any system when it comes to reproducing bass.

How do these trailers demonstrate the full capabilities of a properly calibrated system?

All clips are mixed in a Trinnov-calibrated reference mixing stage, on par with the world-renowned MSM studios in Munich and Berlin where many Atmos industry reference titles are mixed. We have a great sonic reference from the start—but beyond that, we challenge ourselves to make great use of wides and tops which are often (and sadly) forgotten in major studio Atmos releases. One industry veteran called our mixes the best implementation of Atmos he has ever heard.

How can readers try these trailers in their own home theaters?

Our trailers are available for free on our website. Most can be downloaded in Dolby Atmos, Auro-3D and DCP, so you can show off your theater with your preferred audio format. These trailers are created by cinema-lovers, for cinema lovers, to celebrate the outer limits of technological capabilities. We love to share them with the enthusiast community.

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