If you take a step into our TV and AV test room, one of the first things you will spot is our huge collection of 4K Blu-rays occupying an all-important corner.
That might seem like small fry compared to the heavy-duty projectors and full-fat speaker packages sitting only a few metres away, but these discs are crucial to help us understand how well a product performs for a final review.
Each one has stood out to a member of the What Hi-Fi? team in some way, as we only select discs that can give a piece of kit a run for its money. That might be because of its action-heavy sequences that can challenge a TV's motion handling, or its Dolby Atmos soundtrack that can put even the most premium soundbars to the test.
And it's an exciting day, as we have got four new 4K Blu-rays to play in our test room! They may all seem wildly different, but all of them have been specially chosen for a reason.
Let's take a peek behind the curtain...
Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning
You may have spotted that a few of the previous Mission Impossible entries have made regular appearances in our test room, with Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning returning again and again as a way to challenge a system's motion handling and colour performance.
After all, it would be a mean feat to find a blockbuster series with more nail-biting stunts and over-dramatic plot points.
And the final installation of the franchise – Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning – is perhaps the most over-the-top entry yet.
Ethan Hunt (played by action legend Tom Cruise) and his team must race against time to find the Entity, a rogue AI that could destroy life as we know it.
Like all the films in the franchise, The Final Reckoning offers an excellent array of tense action scenes to put a home cinema system to the test.
When Hunt is hanging off the wing of a biplane as part of the hair-raising finale, for example, this gives a sound system opportunity to show off its sense of surround sound as the two planes move all around the space.
Buy Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning on 4K Blu-ray at Amazon
Wicked
While we patiently wait for its sequel, Wicked: For Good, to finally come out this November, what better way to live out our musical theatre dreams than to test out our home cinema kit with Wicked?
For those not in the know, the film follows Cynthia Erivo's Elphaba, a young woman born with green skin. She struggles to find her place at Shiz University until she forges an unlikely friendship with Ariana Grande's Glinda. But all is not as it seems in the Land of Oz...
We have had a very brief opportunity to see how good a test disc Wicked is with the Sony Bravia Projector 7 (stay tuned for our review coming soon), and we were not disappointed. While the abundance of CGI makes its picture not ideal to test out dark detail and brightness, the Atmos sound is a great way to put a sound system to the test.
The one scene we knew we had to try out was the finale, where Elphaba belts out the musical theatre classic that is Defying Gravity. When she plummets from a great height with only a magical broom to save her, a sea of voices surround the listener to create a swirl of sound that is incredibly effective.
We won't be spoiling the ending here, but rest assured it will be making regular appearances in our reviews, particularly when it comes to sound systems.
Buy Wicked on 4K Blu-ray at HMV
Master And Commander: The Far Side Of The World
Master And Commander may have come out way back in 2003, but it has made a comeback with a 4K restoration and a Dolby Atmos mix that we hope will make the perfect addition to our disc rotation.
Starring Russell Crowe as a brash British captain of a ship during the Napoleonic War, he pushes his crew to their limits in pursuit of a formidable French war vessel around South America.
The soundtrack immediately takes centre stage here, featuring a wide range of instrumentals to create a sense of tension and excitement. During a piece named The Galapagos, the score is made up almost exclusively of strings to challenge a sound system's midrange and higher frequencies.
Then there's the very first track in the film – The Far Side Of The World – that features thumping timpani accompanied by a brass-heavy chorus that really ramps up that sense of tension. We can't wait to blast out the full soundtrack with a variety of different systems to really put them to the test.
Buy Master And Commander on 4K Blu-ray at Amazon
The Fantastic Four: First Steps
This is far from the first Marvel film to grace the test room in recent years, with Thunderbolts being one of the latest to be used as a test disc.
But The Fantastic Four: First Steps suggested itself as a worthy addition when several of the What Hi-Fi? team caught it in the cinema a few months back.
Before we get into it, the film follows (you guessed it) the superhero team of the Fantastic Four who try to balance their roles as heroes with their familial bond. In order to save the planet, they must defend Earth from a ravenous space god and his enigmatic herald.
When a skyscraper-sized Galactus comes close to destroying the team by storming through the city, a home cinema system's motion handling is really put to the test. This is partly down to Pedro Pascal's Mister Fantastic who has the ability to stretch like elastic. As he bends and rotates through bits of rubble in mid-air, the camera is constantly moving which can challenge even the most premium AV systems.
The 4K Blu-ray of the film is not quite available yet, but you can pre-order it now with shopping estimated for 20 October.
Pre-order The Fantastic Four: First Steps on 4K Blu-ray at HMV
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