Recommendations on movie scenes for subwoofers

Here's my vote for testing sheer bass impact in a movie- After you've dialed in your system with the recommendations above, invite some friends over to watch "The Whale Rider".

It's a very good movie and a slightly sad story about a little girl who is sad and there's hardly any LFE at all... You may start feeling a little embarassed that your system isn't being "put to the test" but you will be lulled into this sweet and sad story so you won't really mind and then you will forget all about subwoofers and that sort of thing... and then out of nowhere late in the film there is an underwater scene where a very large beached whale starts to wake up and gets pissed-off and when it tries to swim away slams it's tail on the ocean floor... KA-BOOM! It practically lifts your house off the foundation. You can almost see the walls flex in your theater room when this hits. They absolutely nailed this scene in the sound mixing and the bass is so clean and overwhelming you actually feel it more than hear it.. Awesome. -jz

U-571 or the drum/bean sequence in House of Flying Daggers. That will also give you a great surround demo.

Still one of the best continous huge bass lines is in the movie Blade II. There is a scene shot in a vampire dance club that pounds the subwoofer for several minutes with huge bass. As already mentioned, War of the Worlds, when the aliens first emerge has quite a long scene to work out your subwoofer to help dial it in.

The scene in Finding Nemo(I have kids) where Darla taps on the aquarium glass.

The opening scenes in "Master and Commander" are great for checking out your sub. The creaking floorboards and creaking ropes floating around the room are suddenly overwhelmed by the cannon shots followed by the strikes of the cannon balls hitting the ship. As my son would say: "woof"

The opening battle scenes in "Gladiator" get the job done as well, as does the "The Fifth Element"

There is some pretty good low frequency information happening in parts of "Blade Runner" too....

If you are into it, the "Drumz/Space" section of the Grateful Dead DVD "Truckin' Off To Buffalo" will energize your room.

Definitely "U-571". You should feel like you are in a submarine with those depth charges going off all around.

Take a look at the SVS website they give lots of movie ideas with the tracks to listen to. www.svsound.com

try u571 will test your sub if its good or not

That's simple, go to your "Monsters Inc" DVD and look for the
chapter where Boo is crying and Mike and Sulley are doing everything possible to not only stop the crying but evade the
searchlights of the ominous helicopter. While the baby (Boo)
is crying there's an electrical current thing going on that
with the proper sub setup is frankly very hard to equal in the
sub-sonic frequencies. I'm using two SVS PB12-plus/2 subs, that's four 12" drivers and 900 watts per sub of electrical
sonic dyamite. This chapter close to reference level will set
off my ADT security system.

Thanks for the recommendations!

I have a DTS demo DVD. It has clips from various movies, such as Hero, Master and Commander, Kill Bill Vol 2, and some others which I cannot remmeber. If you still want some more bass, get War of the World w/ Tom Cruise in it. When the first tripod machine emerged, I had to lower the vol. as dual subwoofers shook my room so much that I afraid the glass on my French door would not hold.

Sumiko, the distributor of REL Subwoofers has a set up guide for subwoofers on their website.
http://www.sumikoaudio.net/rel/manuals/REL-SET-UP.doc

I've found it very informative and easy to understand. I'm not sure if it's the best for other sub manufactures, but its a good place to start. They do recommend track #4 on the "Sneakers" soundtrack (Columbia CK53146) because of its repetitive bass lines to make setup easier.

Hope this helps

You might try the scene in Day After Tomorrow when the ship floats thru the city. This will give a sub a good test for integration.