The primary qualifications for a Professional Listener are normal hearing and the desire to listen to as many systems as possible to gain insight. Of course, helter-skelter listening is not recommended. You must have a portable selection of reference recordings on hand. This might be a couple of favorite Blu-rays but it’s usually convenient to also have some high-quality musical recordings on a thumb-drive as well. Some might think it odd to use stereo music recordings to review the sound quality of a home cinema. This sounds like a throw-back to two channel days. However, using music it’s much faster to find a specific track or section of a track than wading through the menus and chapters of a Blu-ray. This is especially true when time on a jobsite is precious and it’s not uncommon to repeatedly listen to several different cuts several times. The problem of listening to a two-channel recording on a multi-channel system is easily and quite impressively solved by the decoding done in Dolby Surround or DTS: Neural X. Such decoding lights up all the speakers in home cinema from a two-channel track. Of course, immersive soundtracks are only available on Blu-ray or the like. Examining the delicate placement of sonic objects throughout the room will also require reliable immersive reference recordings.
