>>By calibrating your home theatre system to produce the proper sound for the placement of your speakers, whether they are in cabinets, in walls or on stands, properly adjusting the levels of these speakers can produce a much more enjoyable experience. Without calibrating your system there can be peaks and valleys in your sound waves producing dead and live areas in the room. The dead areas will cause the person in that area to be removed from the movie and the person in the peak areas to develop listening fatigue.
I call BS on whoever wrote the ad. The guy doing the calibrating may be competent, but the ad copy is bogus.
Calibrating the system is not going to do much for "live and dead areas" -- only speaker placement and room treatments can do that -- but it will make sure the sound from each speaker is "balanced" so you get as close to the effect that the audio engineers intended.
If you didn't have good internet resources (like us, he says with a big smile) then it would probably be worth bringing someone competent in to help you calibrate the first time. If you're not interested in learning about calibration then by all means bring in someone, but if you are at all interested then here's another vote for doing it yourself.
IMO the big benefit is not "doing it better", but (a) being able to experiment to make the sound "perfect for you" rather than "reference perfect", and (b) being able to calibrate the system *again* after you screw up the settings
