Testing your surround sound home cinema with anything other than a movie may sound as preposterous as learning the guitar without holding one, but hear me out.
When, in my early days at What Hi-Fi?, I walked in on a colleague one morning, sitting on a sofa, staring at a playing subwoofer out in our test room, with no screen or speakers in action to accompany the sub’s booming sound, I thought I’d better slip out quietly and put that odd behaviour down to a dodgy breakfast. I later learned, however, that they were actually in the middle of testing that subwoofer; it was plugged into an amplifier and a music signal (well, its lower frequencies) was pumping through it. No dodgy breakfast – just an effective method of getting to the heart of the sub’s talents, pre-movie testing. Duh!
