The Captive Audience Problem
Cinema is unlike any other listening environment. At home, you have a volume control. In a cinema — especially a festival screening or a short film programme — the audience has no control whatsoever. Whatever level your film plays at, they experience it for the full duration. This is why cinema audio standards are more demanding than any other distribution context, and why getting them wrong is immediately and publicly obvious.
What Is LeqM?
LeqM is an averaging loudness measurement developed by Dolby specifically for cinema. It uses 850-millisecond windows weighted towards the frequencies most likely to cause listener fatigue — glass breaking, explosions, high-impact transient sounds. It measures not your loudest moment but your sustained average loudness experience across time. The target range for a cinema mix is a LeqM of between 74 and 79.
The Dolby 7 Standard
Cinema audio processors have a master fader. The correct operating level — matching the level used in professional film mixing — is Dolby 7. At this setting, a reference signal measures 85 decibels per channel with a further 20dB of headroom for peaks. Your dubbing mixer works at Dolby 7. The cinema is supposed to play at Dolby 7. When both are correct, what the mixer hears in the dubbing suite is what the audience hears in the cinema.
The 5.1 Channel Collapse Problem
Adobe Premiere has a long history of silently collapsing 5.1 audio to stereo during export with no error message or warning. An editor receives the 5.1 mix from the mixing house, brings it into Premiere, syncs it to picture, and exports. What they deliver to us is stereo — with no indication that anything went wrong. Verify your export by playing each channel in isolation. If you only hear two channels, the export failed. Better still: send us the audio directly from your mixing house rather than routing it through Premiere at all.
Channel order matters: Cinema's standard 5.1 order is Left, Right, Centre, LFE, Left Surround, Right Surround. Premiere's internal order is different. If channels are in the wrong order in your file, dialogue will come from the surrounds and atmosphere from the front. We listen to each channel in isolation on every 5.1 job before encoding begins.
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