Recently I had my dad and one of his friends over and was showing them how good high def looks over my tower antenna that I just put up. Then I said, "wait until you see blu-ray it looks even better". So, I go to my collection of blu-rays and realize that I don't know what scenes are good demo scenes in any new blu-rays. I was fumbling around and just pulled out Crank and cranked up the volume at some random scene at the beginning and they weren't all that impressed audio-wise. You see, even if the audio sounds great (and Crank definitely does) it isn't necessarily a good demo scene. Another example is Pirates of the Caribbean 1. Any scene is great for a video demo but there aren't any good audio demos in this movie. Don't get me wrong, the audio sounds great but there aren't any good demo scenes.
With dvd I used to just pop in Master and Commander chapter 4 with the dts audio and this was an amazing demo scene. But, this isn't available on blu-ray yet. When it is available then it probably will be on the short list for demo scenes.
A good demo scene has to have good use of the sub and surrounds. It also has to have good pans across the front and from front to back or back to front. Hopefully the Blu-ray also has top notch video as well in that particular scene.
I'll start the list and hopefully others can come up with better ones than me.
1. Cars chapter 25
In this scene Doc races around a dirt track while Lightning McQueen watches in the distance. You get all of above effects as Doc races around the track in the uncompressed pcm 5.1 and it sounds great.
2. Spiderman 3 where sandman is created in the particle thing-a-ma-jig
I don't know the chapter since I don't own this title. If people are prone to motion sickness you may want to skip this one for them. I only heard this soundtrack on the dvd in dolby 5.1 and was blown away. I can't wait to hear this in uncompressed 5.1 on Blu-ray. I should get around to getting the spiderman trilogy on Blu-ray soon.
- Nick
