Paris’ Club de l’Etoile has been embedded the city’s movie scene for almost a century – showing overseas and arthouse films in an exclusive environment has made it the star of the city’s VIP cinemas. In 2015, the cinema enteredthe digital audio age, with Yamaha DSP equipment chosen to ensure that soundtracks meet the expectations of its audience.
Founded during the 1920s as Studio de l’Etoile, the venue has long been set apart from other Paris cinemas. In the 1930s it was unusual in showing Japanese films, and hosted clandestine viewings of banned films during Paris’s wartime occupation. From the 1950s, its has been in the vanguard of the Arthouse movement.
In 1985 it was reinvented as a private screening facility, Club de l’Etoile, for French film professionals, but it reopened to the public in 2010. The venue now combines high-definition showings of live and recorded opera and ballet for the general public, with a new role as an exclusive hire venue for parties, product launches, press conferences, private screenings and other corporate events.
Club de l’Etoile prides itself on the best audio and visual technology for its films and has adopted the Showmax system of a non-perforated screen coupled to an audio transducer system, designed to improve audio quality by suppressing the masking effect of a perforated screen. To deliver a pristine signal, Showmax founding director Pierre Vincent specified an all-digital audio system, based on the quality and reliability of Yamaha equipment.
The venue’s video server sends 96kHz, 24-bit audio to a Yamaha DME64N digital mixing engine, via an MY8-AE96 AES interface card. The DME64N processes and routes the sound to six Yamaha TX5n amplifiers without conversion, delivering 7.1 surround-sound through the system’s three-way speakers and dual subwoofers. Programmed by Yamaha France’s David Rousseau, the system ensures that every seat in the audience is evenly served with the best possible sound, regardless of where it is in the room.
