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| It's not as complicated as it looks | Photo via Matt Hale for 10th StreetLA |
Shopping for the Perfect Home Theater System
| Before you Buy | After you Install |
| 1) Test the gear you are considering in-store; bring your mp3 player and a cable to check audio devices. 2) Adjust the settings for the devices while you test them to optimize picture quality - if you can’t get a good image in-store, you won’t get one at home. 3) Research online before buying; if you haven’t looked for reliability reviews before you shopped, check on your phone. 4) Make sure your devices comply with the Dolby and DTS surround sound standards. | 1) Set the speaker distances in your Audio/Video Receiver 2) Set the Dynamic Range on your A/V Receiver to the appropriate setting for your house/neighborhood. Lower dynamic range for apartments and small rooms, higher dynamic range for soundproof and large rooms. 3) Find and set the Crossover Frequency for your subwoofer. 4) Adjust the display settings for your screen to optimize picture quality and make the image look natural. |
First, a few ground rules:
1) Try before you buy:
Because everyone perceives sound and color differently, an “expert” recommendation is pretty much worthless. If you read a review that says the TV you’re looking at is junk and you should get one that’s $500 more expensive, go see it for yourself in a store. Any brick-and-mortar store with a good sales department should even be able to hook up a demo player for just the screen you’re considering so that you don’t have signal degradation from the 100-way splitter they’re using to put the same content on all their screens.
The same rule applies to sound systems. Just because that home theater in a box has hundreds of 5-star reviews on Amazon and only a few 1- and 2-star reviews doesn’t mean it’s right for you. You’re about to unload hundreds or thousands of dollars on this gear, so make a good investment. Take your time and try the system in-store. Power user tip: bring a RCA -to-mini-plug cable (See Fig. 1) to plug your phone or iPod into the sound system. Play a recording you know really well; if it sounds great, you’re on the right track.
2) Fiddle with the settings at the store:
Brick and mortar stores tend to max out all the settings on screens to make them look big and bright and colorful. This is not how it will look out of the box and it’s not an accurate representation of the content-maker’s intent. Adjust the settings to simulate your home-viewing preferences. Warning signs: if that brightness setting is maxed out and the TV still looks dim, steer clear; if you have fiddled with the color settings for 20 minutes and everyone on screen still looks like an oompa loompa, stop trying and steer clear. There is a lot of junk in the TV marketplace.
Adjust the sound quality of receivers and speakers when you listen to your music sample. If you can’t get sharp trebles, defined midrange and deep bass, move on. You may have to spend a little more, but you’re going to regret the moment you compromised every time you listen to your stereo after that moment.
3) Research online before shopping:
Look up specs and reviews for TV and stereo models at the store you’re about to visit. Know which ones they carry in your price range and look for key deficiencies in the things you care about: bad bass, color over/under saturation, low brightness, picture gets digital blocks during action.
4) Know your standards
When you consider which Audio/Video Receiver to get, make sure it supports Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD Master Audio in either 5.1 or 7.1 configurations. Complete systems that are THX-certified have been put through their paces by George Lucas’s technicians and certified for excellence. THX-certified speakers are known for well-reproduced bass, even at low volumes.
Setting up your new gear
Setting up your home theater is far less complicated than it used to be. In the 90s and early 2000s, You needed to have several different video and audio cables from each device running into your receiver and a duplicate set running from the receiver to your TV. I would love to tell you that you can install your new home theater wirelessly, but the technology just doesn’t exist to make that happen... yet.
I don’t want to spend too much time on the mechanics of mounting your TV and speakers. Every room has a unique set of needs and the process of mounting your hardware has more in common with home improvement than technology. You should always mount speakers so they don’t rattle or vibrate - they will ruin your listening experience and if they shake themselves off the wall, that can cause damage. Mount your “center” channel speaker as close to the center of the screen as possible. The point of that speaker is to carry the dialog of your movie, so it’s better when it sounds like the voices on screen are coming from the screen, not off to the side.
You will still need cabling, but recent inventions in home theater technology make connecting your devices much, much simpler. For your speakers, consult this guide from Crutchfield, which has an excellent summary of the choices in connecting your speakers to your A/V Receiver. Caution: Make sure that your red wires go to the red connections, and your black wires go to the black connections, at the speakers AND the A/V Receiver. If you don’t connect them correctly, they will be out of phase which cancels your bass and ruins your stereo “image.”
As for your components like your Blu Ray/DVD player, Cable or Satellite Receiver and MP3 Player, consider that nearly all of your audio and video sources will come from a digital source, be processed as a digital signal and convert to analog only when it is time to send them to the screen and speakers. You want to avoid making unnecessary conversions along the path from disc to screen; every time your signal converts from digital to analog, there’s a chance it will convert back to digital. This adds the potential for “transcription” errors between encoders and decoders and may diminish sound quality and we would NOT want that.
Given this reality, the best and most appropriate means to send your favorite movie from your Blu-ray player, through your surround sound and to your TV, is HDMI. HDMI stands for High Definition Media Interface and is a cable design that transmits Full High Definition video and Surround Sound along a single cable. It avoids digital-to-analog-to-digital conversions and makes installation much easier than the traditional cabling designs. If your device has it, use it. If it doesn’t, fall back to Component (video) + Digital Optical Out (Audio).
Adjusting settings to maximize sound and video quality
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| Paradise: found. | Photo/Matt Hale |
Here’s a step-by-step guide:
1) Measure the distance between your speakers and the most commonly used seating position.
Enter these distances for each of your speakers in the appropriate section of your receiver. Note that the distance is from your sofa to the speaker, not the distance from the speaker to the receiver.
2) Adjust “Dynamic Range” for the characteristics of your theater room.
Apartment dwellers and families with those who don’t appreciate random loud explosions every few minutes should select “compressed” or “low” dynamic range. This setting squashes the high-volume sounds and the low-volume sounds to the same sound space, so you don’t have a wide volume variation between soft-spoken dialog and the sounds of the cannons firing on the Black Pearl as Johnny Depp swings across the deck. Your neighbors/roommates/family will thank you.
If you have a relatively soundproofed room and friendly neighbors, set it to “full” or “max” dynamic range. This will more closely approximate a true theater experience, but you’ll have to crank up the volume to hear the quiet parts.
3) Set the “Crossover Frequency”
This one is tricky and depends highly on the nature of your speakers. Every system with a subwoofer must be configured to tell the A/V receiver which sounds should be sent to the speakers on the wall and which should be sent to the subwoofer. This threshold point is the crossover frequency. Once you set it, every sound lower than that setting will be sent to the sub.
The way I set it was to play a piece of music I knew really well, that had good deep bass and bright instrumentals. To start, set your crossover frequency to 80 Hz on your receiver and adjust the setting as the music plays. The bass should go to the sub and everything else should come from your walls. If you can pinpoint the position of the subwoofer by listening, you haven’t hit the right frequency. When the bass melts into the surroundings and provides distinctive elements of sound without overpowering everything else, you’ve got the right crossover frequency.
4) Adjust your screen
The two most important settings on your TV are Brightness and Contrast. Brightness should be set first and the easiest way to calibrate your screen is to set it with a flesh tone displayed. The flesh should look natural, not oompa loompa orange or ghostly white. Contrast should be set by maxing it out and then backing it down slowly until the parts of the image don’t bleed into one another at all. Once you hit that sweet spot, adjust the “Color” or “Saturation” setting until colors look natural, but not too intense. Sharpness should be adjusted minimally, if at all.
Once you have selected the right gear, the right hookups and the right settings, you’ll be ready to relax and enjoy your favorite movies, TV and music. As you find yourself frustrated getting all of this set up and configured (this is not a very straightforward process), remember one thing: The reason for all this work is so you don’t even notice all that gear on your wall. After all, the point of a home theater is not to revel in your technology, but to enjoy your favorite content in its purest, most accurately-reproduced form. Eventually, you’ll stop caring about the tech and start listening for nuances in your recordings and details in your favorite movies you missed at the theater. And you’ll be pleased you went through all this trouble.
What’s in a byte?
Let me let you in on a little nerd secret: It’s really easy to compare broadband connections when you break down the confusing math.
You know that binary code is a bunch of 0s and 1s, right? Well, 1 bit is one of those 0s or 1s. For example the binary number 00 is 2 bits, 001 is 3 bits, 0010 is 4 bits and so on. You just count the number of digits in the binary number. Stay with me, I’ll explain why this is important.
When you get up to eight bits, you have constructed a byte. So, the binary number:
01010010 = 8 bits = 1 byte.
When you shop for a broadband internet connection, speeds are measured in Megabits per second or Mbps. For example, a 10 Mbps connection lets you transfer ten million 0s and 1s in a single second. To calculate how many Megabytes per second can be transferred, simply divide by 8. That same 10 megabit per second connection will transfer 1.25 megabytes per second.
That means that to download all 6.95 megabytes of A-Ha’s “Take On Me” in 256 bitrate MP3, it will take 5.56 seconds on that 10 Mbps connection. Let’s call this the “A-Ha index.”
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