Setting Up Your Home Theater
It's one thing to buy a bunch of
home-theater gear, but quite another to get it all working properly together. For most of
us it's a major investment, however, so there's a great deal of sense in making sure the
pieces fit.
The room: As with any sort of audio/video system,
the room is as much a component as any of the electronics, so it must be made conducive to
the use of the equipment. For one thing, since surround sound carries its own built-in
acoustic atmosphere, there is no need for the room to contribute much in the way of
reverberance, so you should make some effort to keep the sound as "dead" as
possible. Carpets, heavy curtains, and overstuffed furniture all contribute to
sound absorption.
The main enemy of the video portion is light. Overall, the
room should be fairly dark when you're watching your videos, and that's not usually too
difficult to manage at night. Just make sure no lamps cast their light directly on the
screen. During the day, it may be necessary to provide curtains to darken the room (and
they can also help with taming the room's audio behavior). In positioning the television,
make sure too that you can't see windows reflected in the screen at any of the primary
viewing positions.
The room will also have a considerable effect on where you
can put the various pieces of equipment in order to satisfy some of the principles
outlined below. Sometimes creating a map of the room with cutouts of the equipment and
furniture, drawn to scale, can be of assistance. Try to be as flexible as possible; you
may be thinking of the equipment along one wall at the moment, when actually it might work
better in a corner.
Placing the electronics: Where you put the playback
and control components in your system is less critical than, say, the speakers, but there
are some things you should try to do.
One is keep it all together so that the leads from one
piece of gear to the next are as short as possible. This will lessen the risk of
interference and hum, and may reduce the tangle of wires behind the equipment. Keeping it
up front near the video screen will mean that the only long runs of wire are likely to be
to the surround speakers. That position will also ensure that the remote control can
"see" the equipment; there's nothing more annoying than having to aim the remote
off to the side all the time.
Place components you actually have to touch -- the DVD
player, say -- at convenient heights so you can reach them easily; things that are mostly
run by remote control can be in more awkward spots as long as the infrared beam can still
reach them. And whether you use a receiver or separate amplifiers to power your speakers,
never put them in a position where the heat they produce can rise up through other
components. Hot, dust-bearing air can foul the mechanisms of tape and disc machines very
quickly.
Wiring it up: Home-theater systems always involve
lots of wires and getting them to go to the right places can be confusing. In addition to
keeping leads as short as possible, it is useful to label all cables with a piece of tape
near their terminations. That way, if you ever have to move the system or remove something
for repair, hooking it up again will be a snap. Where possible, the label should bear the
same words as the connector to which the wire is to be joined.
Do have a look at the wiring diagrams in the instruction
manuals, but be prepared to be baffled by some of the more complex arrangements. It's
sometimes helpful to use a yellow highlighter to trace out the proper wiring for
components you do have, and ignore the others. In all cases, simple logic should help
guide you to the right connections.
Cardinal rule: make sure the power to the amplifier or
receiver is off when you make or change any connection. Otherwise you may risk a blast of
ungrounded hum at an unexpected moment. That can be lethal to speakers.
Setting up the video: Whatever television monitor
you buy, it will come with factory-standard picture settings. These may produce exactly
the kind of image you want. If so, that’s great. But the factory settings are
arbitrary, and all sets have an array of controls that will let you tailor the picture to
one you like.
Chances are, for example, the set will be adjusted for too
bright a picture. This may be desirable in a well-lit room, but it often brings with it a
compromise in picture sharpness. Turn it down a bit and watch long enough to get used to
it; you'll probably like it better eventually, even though it may necessitate darkening
the room as well.
Look for natural skin tones. Local newscasts are a good
test because they usually are filled with faces and are live. If a local station
broadcasts color bars, tune them in and look particularly at the yellow bar (it should
have no tinges of green or orange) and the red (it shouldn't bloom -- bleed into the
neighboring bars). Getting the picture right is a delicate balance of color, tint,
brightness and contrast (or "picture"), but it's worth fiddling with to
get things right.
Placing the speakers: Ideally you should arrange
your room so that the main left and right speakers and your listening position form the
corners of an equilateral triangle. If that's not practical, make sure the speakers are
equal distances from the picture screen and in similar acoustic environments (if one's
against a wall and the other in the open, they'll sound very different).
The center-channel speaker should be right in the middle,
just above or below the video screen. It's becoming increasingly clear that the three
front speakers must be exactly the same distance from the main listening seat, which is
virtually impossible if all three are lined up against a wall -- the center is invariably
a bit closer. If you can't push it back, try moving the main speakers forward a bit. To
get it right, pin a piece of string at head height on your chair and stretch it to all
three speakers. The distance should be the same; otherwise, you'll localize at the center
speaker sounds that are meant to be off to one side. The result is a much narrower
apparent soundstage.
There's some disagreement as to whether the surround
speakers should be placed beside or behind the listening area. Depending on the room, both
work, but keeping them as high on the wall as possible seems to provide the best results.
Subwoofer placement can be quite critical. Output is better
against a wall, best in a corner, but there may be other factors. Trial and error is the
best way to get the most satisfying bass, but one trick is to park the subwoofer
temporarily in your chair and walk around the room listening. Wherever the bass sounds
best is where the subwoofer should go.
Adjusting the audio: Unless you're in the habit of
moving the furniture around frequently, you will probably have to make the main audio
adjustments only once. That's good, because with some surround decoders they are tricky to
do. But all decoders include test signals to help you balance levels in all speakers. You
can buy sound level meters that help in this effort, but mainly you can do it by ear. (It
will also help you identify acoustic problems: if the test tone sounds radically different
in the right and left channels, something's amiss.) When you get settings you like, write
them down so you can restore them easily. There are lots of occasions when decoding things
like ordinary CDs produce strange balances that you want to correct; it's handy to be able
to go back to the standard settings when you switch back to movies.
Managing remotes: Chances are you'll have separate
remotes for your TV, VCR, receiver, and maybe some other components as well. Often one of
these will let you control more than one component, and that can make life much simpler.
It's worth investigating whether or not what you now have will let you reduce the number
of active remotes to one or two. Or a third-party learning remote that can operate
everything may be the answer. Bear in mind that most multiple-component remotes can't
control all functions of each piece of equipment, but they'll usually do the main things;
for more complex matters, you always have the component's own remote.
...Ian G. Masters
ian@mastersonaudio.com
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