great demo scenes
we recommend the perfect scenes from movies and concerts for showing off what your new home theater can do
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
A special-effects rumble and plenty of sonic mayhem make this epic Battle of the Bands scene one of the standout Dolby Atmos demos to date
Chapter 15, 1:30:19
Sometimes what you’re looking for from a home theater demo is a complex sonic recreation of real-world environments with a bit of action thrown in for good measure. And sometimes what you need is an over-the-top sonic assault in which giant monsters made of sound waves and electricity duke it out over the heads of a screaming crowd stuck between two battling bands.
The great thing about the UHD remaster of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is that it gives you both. If you’re not familiar with the plot, it follows young bass player Scott Pilgrim, who finds the girl of his dreams only to discover that to date her, he has to battle her seven evil exes. Thankfully, in his battle with Kyle and Ken Katayanagi, the fifth and sixth of the League of Ramona’s Evil Exes—yep, she dated twins—Scott has his post-punk garage band Sex Bob-Omb backing him up.
And yes, it’s every bit as ridiculous and over-the-top as it sounds. You could just about load up the UHD Blu-ray or the Kaleidescape download, cue up any chapter at random, and have an absolute blast with the rip-roaring bass, frenetic ping-ponging sound effects, and stunning dynamics.
But that was true of the old 5.1 sound mix. What really makes the new Atmos remix something special is that it adds space and air around each hard-hitting sound effect, giving the energetic mix more room to breathe without robbing it of any energy. And no scene exemplifies this more than the battle of the bands in Chapter 15, starting around the 1:30:19 mark.
As the Katayanagi twins hit the right chords on their cranked-to-11 keyboards and flood the arena with techno-fueled dragons made of smoke and air pressure, the new remix adds an extra level of humor to the fact that they literally tear the roof off the place (since there’s now sound coming from up there). Their stack of amps also sounds taller, like a legitimate stack, the reverberations of the screaming crowd seem to come from everywhere at once, and when Scott has his fill and strums the right notes on his bass to create a gigantic electrical gorilla that tears through the air and stomps the dragons into oblivion, the sonic onslaught now pressurizes the room not merely from front to back and side to side, but top to bottom, too.
Do be careful with this one. The scene has been known to send amps into clipping and destroy speakers as a result. But if your home cinema is up to the task, it’s one hell of a fun ride—doubly so in Atmos.
Dennis Burger
What is a demo scene, anyway?
Think of a demo scene as like a test-drive for your home cinema. When you’re buying a high-performance automobile, after all, you want to push it to its limits at least once. A good demo scene does the same for your theater in just minutes, revealing how deeply and loudly the bass can play and how expansive and dynamic the soundfield can be.
But, of course, when you’re test-driving a car, sheer speed and cornering ability aren’t the whole story. You want your new ride—no matter how luxurious—to excel at the basic functions of a car as well. It’s the same with your home cinema. Can you clearly hear the dialogue? Does thunder roll around the room naturally instead of jumping from speaker to speaker? Is the sound natural, effortless, and immersive or is it just a bad theme-park experience? A good demo scene can tell you all of the above and so much more.
Last Night in Soho
A demo doesn’t have to be full of explosions and mayhem to be effective and this scene from Edgar Wright’s homage to Swinging ’60s London demonstrates the power of Dolby Atmos without being overwhelming
Chapter 25, 23:22
If you’re like most people, the first thing that springs to mind when you think of Technicolor probably isn’t any of the early movies that employed the three-strip process—like The Adventures of Robin Hood or the original David O. Selznick version of A Star Is Born—nor the format’s artistic zenith, The Red Shoes. No, the film that probably comes to mind is The Wizard of Oz, specifically the scene where a drab, sepia-toned Dorothy exits her storm-strewn cabin into the magical rainbow world of Munchkinland.
If there’s any justice, Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho will one day become the surround sound equivalent of that—the first thing you think of when you think of Dolby Atmos. As with Technicolor, what makes the technological magic work here is the contrasts. For much of Wright’s horror/thriller love letter to 1960s London, the sonic tapestry is the equivalent of Dust Bowl Kansas—clear and lovely, but pretty flat and drab.
But whenever the film’s protagonist has dreamlike flashbacks to the mod era, the Atmos mix springs to life in three dimensions in a way that genuinely enhances the narrative rather than just poking you in the top of the head with a distracting aural assault. The first occurrence of this, at around 23:22 into the film—Chapter 5 if you’re on UHD Blu-ray or Kaleidescape—is by far the
most spectacular. Thomasin McKenzie’s character drops a needle on an old LP of Cilla Black’s “You’re My World” and crawls into bed, only to pull the sheets over her head and find herself transported to Café de Paris during its heyday, just like Dorothy opening the door to her cabin to find herself in the Skittle-colored Oz.
The transition between the waking modern world and the swinging Soho of her dreams is accompanied by a shift from largely stereo mixing to an enveloping explosion of holographic music and ambient-audio world-building that draws you deeper into the screen and into the world of the film, displacing whatever room you’ll quickly forget you’re sitting in.
And that’s the real beauty of this brilliant mix. It’s not the strong bass or the aggressively directional sound effects. It’s the fact that it transforms your listening space with the magic of reverberance, delay, dynamics, and decay in such a way that your brain almost forgets you’re watching a movie, no matter how fantastical it all may be. The only bad thing about it is that once you’re done with your short demo, your guests will want to keep on watching in order to bathe in the rich sonic textures of this magical unreality.
Dennis Burger
Richard on Soho
Last Night in Soho is a great place to kick off our recommendations of the best scenes for showing off your home theater, and Dennis chose an amazing scene to start with. This scene puts you right into the movie instead of just being a spectator, which makes it a much more enjoyable experience. The Atmos mix is used very creatively to establish an important moment in the story just through the sound alone. The best part of having a movie theater is having the feeling like you’ve been taken away somewhere, and this scene does that incredibly well.
Richard Charschan is a huge movie fan who also happens to be Acousticsmart’s founder & president
