08-11-08: Mitch4tThen you saw it in a real IMAX theater. And while the image quality in letterbox was good, I noticed quite a drop in resolution compared to fullscreen IMAX shots. And I could be wrong, but I think the letterbox portions were shot in 70mm.
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The IMAX screen I saw was six stories high. You could tell when the IMAX shots were on the screen.....the on-screen image filled the entire screen. The 35 mm portions of the movie of course were letterbox style, still outstanding though.
Concerning your question about plugging the DMP-50's 5.1 outputs into the Sunfire, AFAIK the analog inputs are a bypassed analog pass-thru, so you also bypass any of the Sunfire's internal digital processing. So if you want to send that 5.1 signal to 7 or more speakers, you'll need to do it with Y-adapters.
And once again, I need to follow a poster's link to his System pics and equipment list before I start pontificating on how to fix it. Your viewing/listening area is huge and unbounded. In that case, you could use extra speakers or wall in your viewing/listening to get boundary reinforcement.
Still, I don't think we can equal the soundtrack performance of "Dark Knight" at home until we have an uncompressed audio surround source. As Steuspeed said, except for rocket launches, IMAX surround is essentially 5.1. But they have an uncompressed audio source and use both prodigious power and highly efficient horn-loaded speakers to achieve an exceptional dynamic range. And they have a subwoofer enclosure you can walk around in.