Dark Knight Rises is without question, my favorite Batman movie of all time. It has great action and more importantly a solid storyline. I use this Blu-ray as a torture test for subwoofers as the opening plane scene and first flight of the Batwing during the police chase really works out a subwoofer like there’s no tomorrow. Bane’s voice was much improved on the Blu-ray transfer over the original theatrical release. The SP-C22 did a commendable job showing this off, though I did feel the vocals were a bit sibilant. I left the grille on and didn’t angle the center channel up as high to tame it. The system sounded well blended as a whole. The SP-BS22-LR’s were serving well as surround duty (bass-managed to small) and the SP-FS52 towers did exceedingly well running full-range to supplement the bass for the little SW-8MK2 subwoofer. The sub did provide a good deal of tactile feel but it just couldn’t produce the last octave of bass present in this movie. I did detect a lot of port chuffing when I was driving the sub hard, but don’t forget my demo room is almost 6,000ft3. Let me make this perfectly clear; in a small room this sub would behave much better.
I cued up other multi-channel recordings like Animusic HD and really had fun sampling the tracks on this disc using the Pioneer system as a whole. Cathedral Pictures is a particular favorite of mine and the Pioneer speakers did a commendably good job of recreating the pipe organs and percussive effects with clarity and poise. The sub provided a good deal of punch to help enhance the experience. I’ve never had such an enveloping and well-balanced surround sound experience from a 5.1 system in this price class. Although I like to find faults in products, I had to keep reminding myself how well this system performed for its asking price.