Douglas and Melanie Graham The now five HPS-4000 sound systems at the 1938 Carib Theatre in Kingston, Jamaica are dedicated to Douglas and Melanie Graham, majority owners of the Carib and the Palace Amusement Company (1921) Ltd. The theatre was originally designed by an architect from Boston, Massachusetts. In 1982, Palace’s Managing Director Douglas Graham visited me at my booth at the annual convention of the National Association of Theatre Owners. He described a huge theatre that he had in Kingston, Jamaica. The sound system was mono and the business was poor. The Carib was so big that he had been advised by industry veterans that no motion picture sound system was powerful enough to fill it. After we talked for a while, we agreed that I would visit the theatre. When I first walked into this room, I saw that it was indeed huge. It was 180 feet long, 85 feet wide, 60 feet high and had a balcony. After some time I submitted a design for the what would become the most powerful motion picture sound system ever built with an acoustic power equal to some 20 symphony orchestras. As a side note, it was on the plane to Jamaica that I first loaded the Allen Surround Array™ formulas into a hand held computer. I used this to design the Carib’s two surround arrays. This made the Carib’s sound system the first movie theatre sound system to be designed by computer. The installation was so successful, it forced the theatre up the street to go out of business and allowed Palace Amusement to open new theatres in Jamaica for the first time in decades. Since that first trip to Jamaica in 1982, Douglas and his wife Melanie have welcomed me back many times. I am always treated like one of the family and I have found my association with them and their staff one of the most rewarding experiences I have enjoyed in this business. I am pleased do be able to dedicate the HPS-4000 sound systems at the Carib Theatre to my friends Douglas and Melanie Graham. For further information on Palace Amusement Co., click here. For the article about the Carib Theatre, click here. For the article about the Carib Theatre by Douglas Graham, click here. For an article about the Carib revisited, click here. For an article about the rebuilding of the Carib following a major fire, click here. John Allen