Help center · Updated September 3, 2026
How HDIS ratings work, how to describe the system you listen on, and how to take part in the community.
Start with the task you are trying to complete. The detail stays one click away.
Find a title, pick the format you heard, and publish your first sound rating.
What you rate, what the categories mean, and why headline scores behave differently.
Describe the room and gear behind each rating, and choose what stays private.
Save titles for later, and curate rankings worth sharing.
Posts, comments, reactions, follows, and the activity feed in one place.
Sign-in, visibility, notifications, reporting, and account deletion.
Document a room or rig over time through a public or private build log.
Explore the catalog and the community, or jump straight to one thing.
How contributions are recognised and Trusted Contributor status is earned.
Search for a movie and open its page. Anyone can browse; rating needs a Google sign-in.
Pick what your disc, app, receiver or cinema actually played — not the best format the movie was released in.
Six sliders, all optional. Leave any of them blank when your system cannot reproduce it.
A short review about standout scenes, or the system you were listening on, helps everyone reading it.
Example rating
The overall score is the average of the sliders you filled in — the server computes it, you never type it.
A rating is tied to three things together: the movie, the specific audio format you heard, and the system profile you watched it on. The same movie in the same format on a different system counts as a separate experience — a TrueHD Atmos mix on a nine-channel rig and on a soundbar are not the same event.
Each category is a 1.0–10.0 slider. Leave any of them blank when your setup cannot reproduce it — no height speakers means no Height score, and that is a first-class answer rather than a gap. Your overall score averages only the categories you completed, and the server computes it; you never enter it directly.
A movie's overall HDIS score uses ratings from the highest audio-format tier anyone has rated it in. Lower-tier ratings stay visible in the per-format breakdown but do not pull the headline number down.
| Tier | Formats |
|---|---|
| Tier 4 | Dolby TrueHD Atmos · DTS:X · Dolby Digital Plus Atmos · IMAX · Auro-3D |
| Tier 3 | Dolby TrueHD · DTS-HD Master Audio · LPCM |
| Tier 2 | Dolby Digital Plus · DTS-HD High Resolution |
| Tier 1 | Dolby Digital · DTS |
The ladder is capability, not compression: Dolby Digital Plus Atmos is Tier 4 and lossy, because it carries a height layer, while LPCM is Tier 3 and lossless, because it does not. Custom formats added through “Other” sit at Tier 1.
Example: if the Tier 1 ratings average 6.5 and the Tier 4 ratings average 9.0, the headline score is 9.0. An Atmos mix on a proper rig should not be dragged down by someone's compressed stream of the same film — the lower rating is not wrong, it is a different experience, and both stay visible.
Choose what your disc, app, receiver or cinema actually played — not the best format the movie was released in. New movies start with no formats attached; the community adds them by rating.
The same guidance is one click away while you are rating: the Which audio format should I pick? button sits beside the format picker.
Typed the name slightly wrong? You can rename a custom format afterwards and it simply goes back for review. Master-list formats cannot be renamed.
A custom format that passes review keeps the Custom label and becomes pickable by anyone rating that movie — it appears under “Custom formats on this movie” in the picker. Verified means checked, not promoted into the master list.
Trusted Contributors, Moderators and Admins can verify or reject pending formats. Editing a verified format returns it to pending, so the next reviewer re-confirms the change — a verified entry is a community endorsement, and any change deserves a fresh look.
After rating you can attach a written review. Other members endorse good ones with the Helpfulreaction. You can edit a rating later and the movie's aggregate recomputes automatically; substantially rewriting a review resets its Helpful count, so a well-endorsed review cannot be quietly swapped for something else.
A system profile describes the setup you watched on: speaker configuration, receiver, speakers, subwoofer, room details, total build cost, photos, and optionally an itemised component list. You can keep up to 10 home theater profiles — useful if you have a main rig and a bedroom setup, or if you have upgraded over the years and want to re-rate old favourites on the new gear.
Each profile is public or private. Public profiles get a shareable link and appear on the Home Theaters hub and in search. Private profiles are visible only to you and stay off your public profile — the public/private toggle is the single control for how visible a rig is.
Marking a profile private does not pull it out of Equipment Stats. Those pages report anonymised, aggregated gear popularity — never who owns what — so your gear still counts toward community totals without exposing your setup.
The first time you mark a rating as “at a theater”, HDIS creates one non-deletable Movie Theater profile. You only ever get one, it does not count toward the ten-profile limit, and it is excluded from equipment statistics and the “Best on My System” dropdown — the gear belongs to the cinema, not to you.
Theater ratings can optionally tag a venue (“AMC IMAX Downtown”). You can save up to 20 venues and reuse them. A venue is display metadata: it shows next to the rating but does not affect uniqueness or aggregation. Two ratings of the same movie in the same format are allowed when one is on a home profile and the other is in your Movie Theater profile.
Beyond the summary fields you can break a build down piece by piece — up to 100 components across electronics, speakers, video, room and support categories, each with a brand, model, quantity, unit cost and notes. The same category can appear more than once, so three subwoofer rows are fine.
HDIS totals the priced rows into an itemised total and shows it against your headline Total Build Cost. The two are independent: your Total Build Cost stays authoritative even while the itemised rows are incomplete, so you can itemise gradually without your budget looking wrong in the meantime.
A public, active profile can also be shared to the activity feed with Share to feed. It is reputation-neutral.
Add movies you care about to My Watchlist. New ratings, reviews and discussions about those movies then appear in the Watchlist tab of your activity feed.
Create a list with any title and description — “Best Tarantino Atmos Mixes”, “Movies That Made My Subwoofer Cry”. A custom list can be pinned to a specific system profile or left profile-agnostic. Lists default to public, with a privacy toggle when you want to hide one from search and other members. A public list joins the community feed once you add its first movie.
The HDIS differentiator. A “Best on My System” list is tied to one specific system profileand ranks your top 10 movies on that exact gear. You pick the profile first — the whole point is that the answer depends on what you watched on. It appears on your public profile and on that system's detail page.
Open a list and use the Add Movie box to search by title. New items land at the bottom; drag the handle to reorder, or reorder from the keyboard.
Each item can carry a note of up to 500 characters — “the helicopter pass at 41:20 is the whole reason this is here”. Add one when you add the movie, or use Add note / Edit note later. Editing a note never moves the item, so you can fix a typo without losing its place in the ranking.
Use a Question when you want help or a recommendation (“Best Atmos demo to show off a new sub?”); use a Discussion for an open-ended topic (“Why do so many streaming mixes bury dialogue?”). Posts can carry up to three curated tags, inline images, and an optional linked movie.
Posts, movie discussions and project updates all support a single level of replies — replies do not nest further. Choosing Reply inserts an @mention automatically. Mentions resolve for people already in the thread or in your follow graph, which keeps them useful without letting anyone ping a stranger out of nowhere.
Follow someone from their profile to pull their ratings, reviews and posts into your feed. Follower and following lists are public. Four tabs decide whose activity you see:
Then sort by New, Hot (gaining traction now) or Top (most engagement over a 24-hour, 7-day or 30-day window), and filter to posts, reviews, ratings, discussions, project updates or lists.
Your public profile organises contributions into Overview, Posts, Reviews, Systems and Network, and the Overview leads with your primary public system. Every profile also has a guestbook where members can leave a note; it allows one level of replies, it is on by default, and you can disable or re-enable it at any time from your own profile.
Helpful recognises useful reviews, posts, comments and project updates. Click again to remove your reaction; you cannot react to your own content. The author earns the reputation, not the person reacting, and a reaction deliberately sends no notification — it would be noise. A major rewrite clears existing reactions.
Any contribution can be flagged for moderation. Keep replies constructive, avoid unnecessary spoilers, and address the listening experience rather than the person.
Anyone can browse movies, reviews, lists and public profiles. Sign in with Google to rate, review, post, follow people, build lists or manage system profiles. HDIS does not store a password.
Your member profile and your contributions are public. Individual home theater profiles, lists and projects have their own privacy controls — making one private removes it from your public profile, from search, and from the browse hubs.
The bell in the header carries in-app notifications, and you choose which categories also send email on the notification preferences page: guestbook comments, discussion replies and mentions, post and project activity, new followers, audio-format status changes, and site announcements.
Three things always appear in-app regardless of email settings: badge awards, the result of a project cap request, and moderation actions — content removal, strikes, suspensions and role changes.
Flag abusive content from the contribution itself, so moderators receive it with its context attached.
To delete your account, email privacy@howdoesitsound.io from the address tied to it. We soft-delete on request and hard-delete after 30 days; the full terms are in the Privacy Policy.
A project is a timeline build log — a title, an optional description, and dated updates. Use it to document a new theater build, a treatment overhaul, or a slow upgrade path. It can link to a system profile, active or retired, but it does not have to. Publishing a project earns +3 reputation, once.
Choose Planning, In Progress, On Hold or Completed. It is a label you control and it never changes on its own, so a completed build that later gets a “swapped the sub” update stays completed until you say otherwise.
An update can carry text, up to five photos, or both — a photo-only update is fine, and so is a text-only note. The first photo of your earliest update with an image becomes the project's cover. A substantial rewrite of an update clears its Helpful reactions; small corrections do not.
Private projects are visible only to you — anyone else who guesses the link gets a “not found” page. Public projects appear on the Builds hub and in search.
A project-level publish-to-feed setting controls whether updates flow into the activity feed, and each update can override it with Always share or Never share. Changing privacy or sharing applies retroactively: making a project public adds its past updates to the feed, making it private pulls them back out.
Public updates support one level of replies, @mentions, Helpful reactions and flags, and the owner is notified when someone comments on or mentions them.
You can keep 100 projects by default. If you genuinely need more, request a higher cap from the banner on your Projects page — a moderator reviews it, and a denial starts a 30-day cooldown before you can ask again. Deleting a project frees a slot immediately.
The Movies catalog filters by genre and by audio format, and sorts by title, highest rated, release year, or most rated. Picking an audio format switches the page to a ranking by score, so the genre and sort controls step aside while that filter is on.
When the question is simply “what sounds best in this format”, the six curated leaderboards are the shorter route. They are linked from the bottom of the Movies page:
Each one covers every format that fits its theme — the Atmos board ranks Dolby TrueHD Atmos and Dolby Digital Plus Atmos together — and reorders as new ratings land.
Home Theaters lists every public system profile. Filter by Budget (approx. USD) — under $5k, $5k–$15k, $15k–$50k, $50k+ — and by speaker configuration (5.x, 7.x, 9.x and their Atmos variants). The configuration checkboxes stack, so you can ask for “7.x or 9.x Atmos” at once, and each option shows a live count of matching rigs. Sort by cost, speaker count, recent activity, or newest.
Builds lists every public project, filtered by build status and sorted by recently updated or newest.
Results are grouped by type. The Any selector searches everything, or pick a single type to narrow it.
Each type has a minimum query length so short fragments do not return noise: movies match from 1 character; users, lists, builds and home theaters from 2; posts, reviews and discussions from 3. In Any mode the types fold in automatically as you type.
Suggestions appear under the box as you type and can be chosen with the keyboard or a click. Search opened from Movies, Home Theaters, Builds or Lists is pre-scoped to that surface until you clear the context pill.
| Action | Points |
|---|---|
| Submit a rating | +2 |
| Write a review | +5 |
| Publish a post or project | +3 |
| Someone reacts Helpful to your review or post | +1 |
| Submit an audio format with a rating | +3 |
| Your audio format is rejected | −3 |
| A flag is upheld against your content | −5 |
Promotion from User to Trusted Contributor is automatic and one-way, based on your reputation, how many ratings and reviews you have contributed, and how long your account has existed. It is checked after every reputation event.
Losing reputation later never demotes you, though a Trusted Contributor with enough upheld flags can still be suspended. Moderator and Admin roles are assigned by hand — there is no automatic path to them.
Badges are awarded without a claim step, trigger an in-app notification, and stay on your profile even if the underlying count later changes.
The sound. Focus on the audio experience — bass, surround use, dialogue clarity, mix quality. Your review can mention how the sound serves the film, but the score should describe what you heard.
Your personal overall score is the average of the sub-ratings you completed. A movie's headline score then uses ratings from only its highest available audio-format tier; lower tiers stay visible in the per-format breakdown but contribute nothing to the headline number.
The same mix sounds very different across rooms and equipment. Attaching the system lets other people interpret your rating, and it is what allows you to rate the same movie separately on different setups.
Yes. Open your rating from the movie page or your profile and use its edit action. The movie's aggregate recomputes automatically, and reputation is not affected by edits. Keep the audio format and system accurate if either changed.
Ratings are unique by movie + audio format + system profile, so a different format or system is a genuinely different listening experience. You cannot submit the exact same combination twice — editing replaces it.
A format appears on a movie once at least one rating exists in it. New movies start with no audio formats attached, and the community adds them by rating.
Email privacy@howdoesitsound.io from the address tied to your account. HDIS soft-deletes on request and hard-deletes after 30 days; the Privacy Policy has the complete terms.
Send a question, bug report or suggestion to the HDIS team — we read every one. Privacy and account-deletion requests should go directly to privacy@howdoesitsound.io, which reaches the privacy mailbox specifically.