Academy Award-winning film sound engineer Chris Jenkins spends his days crafting sonic landscapes for movies like Mad Max: Fury Road and The Fifth Element. The studio headphones may come off by the time he gets home, but the listening is just getting started.

Despite its name, the motion picture would be nothing without the other half of its creative equation: Sound. Behind every booming explosion, whispered line of dialogue, and iconic score is a team of sound engineers helping to orchestrate the cinematic experience. Few do so as masterfully as Chris Jenkins.

As a film sound re-recording engineer, Jenkins uses his discerning ear to propel stories off of screens and immerse audiences in the worlds of such films as Out of Africa, The Fifth Element, and Mad Max: Fury Road. In his nearly 40 years of experience, he’s amassed over 180 mixing credits and won three Academy Awards.

When he’s not helping to craft multi-sensory storytelling experiences for movie theaters, Jenkins is busy doing his part to make sure movies and music sound amazing at home as well. As a member of the Sonos Soundboard—an advisory panel of entertainment industry sound creators enlisted by Sonos–Jenkins works closely with the company’s engineers and product team, offering his professional feedback on the sound of speakers like the new Sonos Beam as they’re being developed. Through a series of hands-on listening sessions, creative advisors like Jenkins have a simple aim: To help Sonos ensure that the original emotion and sonic clarity of films, music, and other content are retained as this work makes its way from the studio mixing board to the living room.

Because he spends all day working with sound, it wouldn’t be all that surprising if he wanted to come home to complete silence, but Jenkins’s passion spans both his professional and personal lives. We visited him at his home on the outskirts of Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife, Jeanne, and two dogs, Daisy and Moose, to talk about sound and learn how he listens off the clock.