I am presently in the process of opening my first showroom. While the equipment availible is endless,weeding through and finding good demo material is a different story. Any suggestions?

I recommend you check out the Pixar’s Short Films Collection, which is available in DVD and Blu ray. The disc includes many of the short films Pixar does, including “Jack-Jack Attack” from “The Incredibles,” “Mater and the Ghostlight” from “Cars” and “Mike’s new Car” from “Monsters Inc.” among others. These films are family friendly five or six minutes clips that tell a story with super A/V qualities.
In the world of music The Eagles “Hell Freezes Over” DVD is popular, Diana Krall “Live in Paris” is popular, and the “Legends of Jazz” on Blu ray are used a lot in demos.
The key to a good demo is finding material that appeals to you client and then efficiently showing those movie and music clips. Many installers are now using hard drive-based components to efficiently scroll through their demo materials. Some are using Media Centers, others are using Apple TV or proprietary servers from companies like Codex Novus, ReQuest and Kaliedescape.
There are lots of CDs that can be used and to you may want to consult with some of your manufacturer partners to find out what they recommend.
I also suggest to dealers to use music that people know so you can appeal to their emotions. Audiophile discs may sound great, but nobody outside of the audiophile world buys them or know who these artists are.
Some popular recordings from artists that people know include albums from Lisa Loeb, Dave Mathews, The Eagles, Steely Dan, Black Label Society and Jamie Cullum.
In the world of audiophile labels, companies like AIX Records and Chesky Records make clean, dynamic recordings of many jazz and classical musicians.

At my old job, we had 2 audio systems that we needed to push with huge amounts of margin. What we did was hook up our best tvs to them, the Sony BDPS500 and Panasonic 30k, and those sound systems. On one system we put the Mariah Carey blu-ray, which was her birthday concert IIRC, and the second demo we put on Pearl Harbor and looped it through the scenes where the planes attatck Pearl Harbor. Those drove sales on those and we had a 600% increase in sales on those particular models.

Good luck

I’ve found Wall-E to be a great piece of demo material. Particularly the “star dance” scene where Wall-E and Eve are flying around in outer space together. There are both dark and light parts, and many little tiny details, like the dust from the fire extinguisher…

If you’ve got a 120 Hz TV and a non-120 Hz TV next to each other, this scene will really show the difference.

Good luck with the new showroom! That’s got to be exciting!

Its pretty hard to find, but DTS puts out a sample disc every year at the various trade shows that has a little education on DTS and surround in general, music clips/videos, and movie clips. All in HD and DTS-HD Master Audio. I use it a lot and really like it.

Diana Krall: Live in Paris has some pretty amazing audio.

The Pixar shorts are great and very engaging. The live music stuff is also pleasing. It’s important to have something that delights and involves your potential customer. Ask the questions that lead you to the proper demo material for that individual. The demo material in and of itself will never be all things to all clients. Have 6-8 choices depending upon the customers “hot” button. Make sense? Good luck with your showroom- this is an exciting time

Hey Castle Hill A/V,

Not sure if you’ve already read these articles, but they could be of use:

35 Demo Choices From Industry Experts

5 Tips for a Killer Demo

Hope the show room is working out.

Here are some more recent demo material articles, in case anyone was looking:

6 Great Blu-ray Demos

5 Rockin’ Bass Guitar Demos

7 Awesome Drum Demos

6 Awesome Guitar Demos

I was just on the road showing a video package and video processing through our scaler/processor. The Pixar Shorts disk was very well received and offers a variety of torture tests. I appreciated having it.

Thank you every one for the suggestion. it will be helpful for me. Thank you for kind information.