People tend to calibrate their audio systems to match what they hear at the cinemas.

Can loudspeakers designed for music reproduction perform equally well in a home cinema system? Ask three “experts” and you will probably get three different opinions.

The real answer to this depends on your expectations. Most audio enthusiasts want speakers to sound natural; neither bright nor dull, forward nor recessed, fat and boomy nor lean.

Natural sounding speakers seem to be a logical goal for the music enthusiast. After all, we have an excellent reference; we can attend live concerts (unamplified) and hear the real thing. Speakers that sound tonally and spatially similar can be considered accurate.

However, we don’t have as obvious a reference for home cinema. I think I am safe in assuming that we are all too young to have heard real dinosaurs and most of us have never heard large explosions or the sounds from within a submarine. But if it sounds spectacular, we think to ourselves it sounds great and presume it must be accurate.

A prime example of this is the movie Gladiator, when the tigers enter the stadium; their roar overpowers the other sounds of mass fighting. In reality, subwoofers work overtime during this sequence as a tiger would need the vocal chords of a blue whale to roar at such low frequencies and at such high volumes.

Many assume the sound you get at the cinema is the goal we are striving for in a quality home cinema system. I believe this is selling ourselves short; we should aspire to much better sound than that. Provided you are familiar with live orchestral music you can use this as a reference when watching your next movie. Many films have some orchestral music in the soundtrack. When you hear orchestral music, close your eyes and concentrate on the sound. In most cinemas string tones invariably sound scratchy and strained and the bass usually lacks definition. Overall the sound lacks the smooth fluidity of a real orchestra.

It may seem strange that cinemas don’t usually have great sound, since a cinema can spend far more on a sound system than most of us mere mortals. But think of a cinema system as a Mack truck.

A Mack truck is designed to pull a heavy load, but it is certainly no sports car. Speakers used in a large cinema are designed to play loud to fill a large area with sound. To achieve the necessary high volumes, cinema speakers need large high temperature voice coils and large cone size on bass and mid-range drivers, high efficiency tweeters (usually horn loaded) will also be required. These extreme measures allow high volumes to be generated, but adversely effect sound quality.

A good home system is more like a sports car, or even a family sedan. While a sports car won’t pull a semi-trailer it is going to be far more nimble and fun to drive than a Mack truck. So, a good home cinema system will sound far more open, smoother and detailed than a public cinema’s sound system.

Another difficulty faced by the designer of public cinema systems, is knowing how many theatre goers to cater for. Since human bodies soak up treble, a system designed for an empty cinema will sound dull when the cinema is full. Most of these systems are designed assuming the cinema will be full and so will sound bright when a cinema is empty. Designers of domestic speakers do not have this difficulty. Domestic lounge rooms or even dedicated home cinema rooms usually have between one and six people at any one time. On the odd occasion that we entertain more than this number, we put up with the system sounding a bit dull.

There are a number of speaker systems on the market designed specifically for home cinema. When reproducing movies, they are invariably bright, dynamic and quite exciting. In time this sound can become quite fatiguing. Such sound is generally considered good for movies, but too harsh and unrefined for music.

I believe that most people are far less discerning of sound quality when watching movies, than when listening to music. In my humble opinion, if a speaker is not good enough for music, it is not likely to be good enough for home cinema. To put it another way, a speaker that sounds good reproducing music, will sound excellent in a home cinema system.