Avatar, Interstellar, The Rolling Stones and Breakfast at Tiffany’s: I took a look at the Blu-ray reference library used by the world’s biggest AVR maker to develop its home theater gear

The interior of a home theater listening room with a Bowers & Wilkins 801 D4 speaker in front of a shelf full of Blu-rays and CDs.

I recently visited the Japanese factory where Denon and Marantz make the hi-fi and home theater gear, and the best part of the seeing the facility was getting a demo of the reference home theater listening there, with its 9.4.6 channels of Dolby Atmos sound delivered via $250k of Bowers & Wilkins speaker.

While snooping around the room, the shelving in the corner that houses their disc library naturally caught my eye. Marantz's engineers had already told me that they consider Gravity to be one of the ultimate stress tests for AVRs (you can read why in the piece I linked above), but what else do they keep on hand for testing AV receivers and other gear?