With decades of experience under our collective belts, the What Hi-Fi? reviews team has an exhaustive list of movie scenes on tap for testing all things AV, from simple soundbars to AV receivers, to full-blown Dolby Atmos surround sound systems.
Rows of Blu-ray discs (including the 4K variety) adorn our test rooms and are on standby for when we want to push a subwoofer to breaking point or stretch the processing skills of an AVR.
But what about the people behind the actual products that we test? As we did in 2025, we’ve once again reached out to major players in home cinema to find out which movies and scenes they use to benchmark their products. You’ll find them listed below.
What do you think of their choices? What are your favourite clips for showcasing your home cinema kit? Let us know in the comments below!
Jordi Brinkman – Product Marketing Manager, Consumer Audio, Harman EMEA
![READY PLAYER ONE - Official Trailer 1 [HD] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/cSp1dM2Vj48/maxresdefault.jpg)
Ready Player One – The Impossible Race
This scene has all the classic elements for a great demonstration. It features cars, bikes, trains and giant gorillas – what more could you want? Visually it’s fast and detailed, and the soundtrack matches the images, being big and bold with a massive amount of immersive sound too. But listen carefully, and behind those huge dynamics you can hear the crystal clarity of the token coins bouncing into the distance.
A Star Is Born – Shallow
This film has an outstanding soundtrack. But the standout demo track is the Shallow scene. You can feel the tension between the artists as the song builds, and the vocals and musicians on this track are just tremendous. The entire soundtrack – either Dolby Atmos or DTS HD – has been mixed so well that you really feel that you are part of the performance, and this is totally engaging.
Hans Zimmer and Friends, Diamond in the Desert – Gladiator
This disc is a real favourite of ours and works brilliantly to demonstrate our soundbars or our high-end multichannel systems. The Gladiator track just shimmers with a wide and sweeping performance of this movie soundtrack classic.
The audio mix is both striking, accurate and at times breath-taking, and places you directly in the middle of the performance – immersing you completely. It’s a compelling argument that all soundtracks like this should only be listened to with a home cinema system.
Harry Jones, Sound Experience Engineer, Sonos
Sinners (2025) – 00:55:50
What an incredible film this is; the performances, the music, the cinematography. I’m a huge fan of how this movie sounds, and we are proud to have worked with one of the re-recording mixers, Brandon Proctor, on previous tuning sessions for our products.
A standout moment for me, and many others, has to be the music scene in the juke joint. It’s also been coined ‘THAT’ scene from Sinners - understandably. The scene offers many styles of music, starting with blues and ending with a huge score from Ludwig Göransson, via West Coast hip-hop.
Along with the music, there’s some really interesting perspective panning, especially with the instruments, as the camera weaves through the dancers and onto the stage. There’s a lot of movement of the ‘full range’ elements, so for me it’s a great test of how a system gels together, and the overall integration of the fronts and the surrounds.
Joker (2019) – 00:40:05
Another film with incredible dialogue timbre throughout is Joker from 2019. The social worker scene is a stand-out in terms of tonality, and I use this scene often to understand how a centre channel is sounding.
It is a great test to be able to tell whether it’s too boomy, or indeed too bright. The dialogue is mixed with this rich and chesty quality, and there’s plenty of warm 400/500Hz present. The clip itself is fairly sparse in terms of anything else going on, but I find it to be the yardstick on centre channel performance.
28 Years Later (2025) – 00:35:15
I love the very abstract imagery in this scene, but for me it’s all about the thundering low end throughout. I’m a big fan of using big low end in cinematic presentations, so if this feels slightly on the edge of ‘too much’, it’s probably about right.
John Bagby - Managing Director of PML Sound (Paradigm, Anthem, MartinLogan and GoldenEar)
Project Hail Mary – 1:44:10, Time Go Fishing
This sequence is an absolute torture test for your subwoofer and amplifier. It layers two extremes at the exact same time.
On the low end, you have the heavy, continuous, room-shaking rumble of the spaceship’s engines humming between 20Hz and 60Hz. This demands massive, sustained power. Meanwhile, the mix sprinkles tiny, high-frequency details right on top, like clinking chains and high-pitched spacesuit beeps.
On a lesser system, the heavy bass will swallow these delicate details, leaving you with a muddy, vibrating mess. A great system keeps them perfectly separated. You’ll feel the deep, physical engine rumble in your chest while still hearing those crisp, metallic clinks cut through with absolute clarity.
Venom – 50:30:00, Eddie’s Apartment Fight
This scene is a killer test for texture and midrange control. It flips instantly from Eddie arguing with himself to an absolute mess of close-quarters chaos.
The star of the show here is that deep, layering Venom voice. On the right system, it has this rumbling, dual-tone texture that feels like it’s vibrating inside your own skull and sends chills down your spine. At the same time, you have these wet, gooey, ripping sounds whenever the symbiote shoots out a tentacle.
On a weaker set-up, the voice loses its menacing weight and gets completely buried under the generic thuds of furniture shattering and bodies crashing into drywall. A good system keeps that creepy alien voice front and centre, sounding thick and terrifying while the apartment gets torn apart around it.
Midway – 1:34:55, Attack on the Carriers
If you want to push your surround sound or Dolby Atmos set-up to its absolute limit, play this scene. It is pure, chaotic adrenaline. Fighter planes scream overhead, anti-aircraft guns thump, and debris flies in every direction. The sound design is incredibly fast, panning audio aggressively in a full 360-degree circle around your room.
This is a test of spatial precision and amplifier recovery speed. You want to hear a plane zoom seamlessly from front-left, over your head, and out the back-right without any gaps in the sound.
Because the explosions are so rapid-fire, your system has to recover instantly to deliver the next hit. If your gear is too slow, the chaos turns into a muddy blur; if it’s fast, it feels terrifyingly real.
Eric Kingdon, Technical Marketing Consultant, Sony
James Bond No Time to Die – Chapter 4, 20.00, Car Ambush
In this scene, the dialogue/music should remain clear despite the chaos! Gunfire travels precisely around the soundstage. Car engine and sound ‘impacts’ deliver controlled, but powerful low-frequency bass. The church bells, with great height, separation and detail, create a strong vertical position in the soundfield.
Ready Player One – Chapter 2 , 12.00, Car Race
The scene delivers a wide soundstage, with objects rapidly moving around the listener. It’s also a great test of dynamics and imaging, with a strong sense of height and lateral movement. It delivers a good immersive experience, with excellent smaller details such as when the coins ‘float’ into the car!
Sinners – Chapter 7, 55.45, Music Awakening
The guitar playing has detail plus presence, while the vocals remain focused and natural. Musically, it’s a fine test. Actually, it’s a good test for virtual speaker processing too. As the camera rotates, the soundstage opens up, enveloping the listener. You get the excellent room ambience, with the crowd reactions and musical ‘layers’ demonstrating a feeling of atmosphere, space and immersion. It’s quite immersive in both a musical and visual sense.
Olivier Semenoux, EU head of GTM & Product Management, TCL
6 Underground
For checking Atmos detailed sound, we use movies on Netflix and we typically use 6 Underground as this is one of the best scenes for testing a Dolby Atmos system, which will “detail” and “separate” sound objects clearly into the space.
In the opening Florence car chase scene, cars whip from front to rear, helicopters pass overhead and tyre screeches, ricochets and debris all move convincingly around and above you. It's a proper stress test for how clearly a system can separate and place individual sound objects in space, rather than just throwing noise at you.
Roma
This is the opposite kind of test, and in some ways the harder one. It's subtle rather than spectacular. In the scene just before the fire starts around half way into the movie, we can hear creaking doors, a dog barking from different distances, insects, church bells, all placed with real precision before the flames slowly wrap around you.
Atmos systems that sound impressive with action scenes don't always handle ambience this well, so it's a good way to hear how honest a system is.
Costa Rica (YouTube, Jacob & Katie Schwarz)
This is one of the clips we go back to most for judging genuine 4K HDR performance. It has everything we look for from bright highlights in the sun and the reflections off the water at the beach, deep blacks that still hold detail rather than crushing and fine texture in things like the skin of the snake.
The colours are rich without tipping into oversaturation and there's a real range of detail from the bright clouds right down into the dark shadows. It's a genuinely demanding real-world test that shows the best quality for a display.
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