Home / HAA Calibration Wizard / Listening for Clarity

Listening for Clarity

  • Periodically unintelligible dialogue and missing detail: There are very few sounds a movie director places in a movie that are not intended. The dialogue is a prime example but subtle things like chimes in the distance, a soft whisper, the long echo of gunshot or a church bell are often critical pieces of the drama.
  • Clarity is the prime acoustical goal because its perfection depends on the successful attainment of all other goals. Of paramount importance is dialogue intelligibility in movies, but one must be able to understand musical lyrics, detect quiet background details, and sense realism for acoustical sounds
  • Helter-skelter listening is not recommended. You must have a portable selection of reference recordings on hand that you are intimately familiar with.

Reference Recordings

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.

Top