Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Best movies for show off your HT system!

Mention of Pans Labyrinth here got my curiosity up, so I had to watch it again last night. LFE was used some for special effects use, but I wouldn't rate it as useful for an LFE demo. First time I watched it with a sub-woofer.

Belive it or not, I like to use Kung Fu Panda. I find the audio and video top notch and really shows off a system well.

I found the LOTR trilogy had some pretty serious LFE scenes.

My favorites right now are

Master and Commander, far side of the world.
Cars: from the intro of the final race
StarWars I Phantom Menace: Pod Race

I like to show off good surround effects. I'm not huge on the bass. Of course, I don't have a sub yet...

snazzed

v2 version of 'Flight of the Phoenix' has always been one of my favorites for great sound in a movie ... the part towards the beginning of the movie where Dennis Quaid is chocking the wheels after shutdown and when you can hear the hot metal of the engine cooling and contracting is dead on from what a radial engine sounds like after shutdown.

Master and Commander has awesome sound effects and is an equally awesome movie, LOTR, Iron Man or most any of the newer movies will do you right with the effects.

Just bought Master and Commander and Star Wars trilogy and 23 more movies. Do you guys think that there is so much difference between Blue Ray and Dvd comparing sounds and visuals?

IMHO there's a big difference in video quality between DVD and BluRay assuming you have a full 1080p display. I actually just watched part of LOTR on DVD yesterday and realised how much that difference is as I have been watching BR exclusively for the past several months. Of course a good upscaling DVD player will help, but it can't make it equal to BR.

On the audio front I find the difference is there, but not as obvious as with the video. A good DolbyDigital or DTS track sounds pretty close to their HD audio counterpart. At least from the discs I have, I can tell the difference if I switch between the tracks, but I don't sit down and immediately notice that it's not using the HD audio track.

Oh yeah, and about Pan's Labyrinth - I recall the audio really standing out for me as pretty special. Not for the LFE, but for the amazing use of the surround field. It's one of the few movies where I was literally looking over my shoulders as the surround effects were just so realistic and engaging - not over done, just well done.

That was on DVD, so now you've reminded me I need to go get the BR version! What else to do on a rainy Saturday?

Cheers,

I think that on a well mastered movie with a lossless soundtrack, that there is quite a lot of difference between the Blu-Ray and a standard DVD. The bigger the screen you are viewing and the better your sound system, the more difference the higher res audio and video make.

I have been slowly replacing many of my favorite movies on DVD with the Blu-Ray versions. All of them look and sound better

Keep in mind that the smaller the size of your display, the smaller the difference will be between Blu-ray and DVD. The bigger the display, the bigger the difference.