Without good audio, your home theater experience is incomplete and isn’t much more than just eye candy. Add some quality sound, and your movie experience ends up being a lot more immersive. It feels like you’re right there inside the movie, instead of just observing from the outside.

Unlike Bollywood, it’s counterpart in India, Hollywood tends to crank out only a handful of musicals each decade. Three such musicals are available on HD DVD, and one of them makes particularly great use of your player’s audio technology. That special movie is The Phantom of the Opera (Special Edition). Phantom is based on Andrew Lloyd Weber’s very successful Broadway musical, and the disc features Dolby TrueHD audio. TrueHD is a “lossless” audio format, which means that you get to hear things exactly the way they were recorded in the studio master. All HD DVD players are required to support TrueHD, but not all movies have been using it. Luckily, Phantom of the Opera happens to be one of the growing list of discs featuring a TrueHD soundtrack. Assuming that you’ve got a good enough sound system, be prepared to be very impressed by Phantom’s music and sound effects.

Prince’s Purple Rain, coming on July 24, will also feature a TrueHD soundtrack.

While the next two movies do not feature TrueHD, they’re still going to give you a great musical experience. Ray is the biography of singer Ray Charles. Jamie Foxx’s performance in this movie earned him an Academy Award for Best Actor in 2005.

Jamie Foxx also happens to be on another musical HD DVD disc, Dreamgirls (Two-Disc Showstopper Edition), which is based on a Broadway musical of the same name. This time, it was Foxx’s co-star Jennifer Hudson, who won the 2007 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, and the movie won another award for Sound Mixing.

People have their own musical tastes, and if your tastes happen to include any of the movies and musical styles mentioned above, then you might want to give these movies a try. At the very least, you’ll have some good material to show off your audio. And if you’re still building that audio system up, then you now know about a few discs to use in your tests.