Home Theater

Newest Technologies Make Building Home Theater Products A Snap

Setting up multi-channel audio like a home theater system has always been quite complex and manufacturers recently have created unique products and technologies such as wireless speaker kit products or virtual surround sound to help simplify this procedure. I will review the latest trends to find out which devices actually work. I will also give some guidance for picking the ideal components.

Traditionally, setting up a TV would be speedy because they would already provide built-in stereo speakers. This, though, has all changed with multi-channel sound. Nowadays external speakers are used to create a surround sound effect. The most commonly used 5.1 surround sound format requires setting up a total of 6 speakers. These are one center speaker, two front side speakers, two rear speakers and a subwoofer. The more recent 7.1 standard raises this number to 8 by adding two additional side speakers.

Consequently setting up a home theater has turn out to be rather hard and long speaker wire runs are normally undesirable for aesthetic reasons. Component vendors have come up with a number of technologies to simplify the installation.

The first approach is creating so-called virtual speakers by applying signal-processing to the audio and introducing phase shifts and special cues to those audio components that would usually be broadcast by the remote loudspeakers. The signal processing is engineered according to how the human hearing determines the location of a sound. The audio signal is then sent by the front speakers. Because of the signal processing, the viewer is deceived into assuming the audio is originating from virtual remote surround loudspeakers.

The advantage of this technology is that only a couple of loudspeakers are required and no long speaker cable has to be run all through the viewing environment. The downside however is that each human will process sound in a different way as a result of the different form of every human ear. The signal processing of these virtual surround systems is based on a standard model which was calculated with a standard ear. However, virtual surround will not function equally well for every human.

Wireless surround sound products are one more option for simplifying home speaker installations and normally come with a transmitter module which connects to the source as well as wireless amplifiers that will connect to the remote speakers. This transmitter will usually come with line-level in addition to amplified speaker inputs. Ideally it should have a volume control to adjust it to the audio source.

A number of wireless speaker devices are designed to connect 2 speakers per wireless amplifier. A superior solution would have a wireless amplifier for every remote loudspeaker to avoid the cord runs between each of the 2 remote loudspeakers. Entry-level wireless devices use FM broadcast or audio compression which will degrade the sound quality to some degree. More sophisticated wireless devices utilize uncompressed digital audio transmission. To make sure that all speakers are in sync in a multi-channel application, make sure that you select a wireless system which has an audio latency of a few milliseconds at most. If the latency is higher than 10 ms then there will be an echo effect which will degrade the surround sound. A few wireless products work at 5.8 GHz which offers the advantage of less competition from other wireless devices than devices utilizing the crowded 900 MHz or 2.4 GHz frequency band.

Another method, which is often called sound bars uses side-reflecting loudspeakers. The audio that would normally be sent by the remote loudspeakers is instead broadcast by loudspeakers at the front. These front speakers broadcast the audio at an angle. Then the audio is reflected by the side and rear walls and appears to be coming from besides or behind the viewer. This approach works best in a square room with minimal interior design and obstacles. It will not function well in a lot of real-world scenarios with different room shapes though.

SketchUp 7.1 Home Theater

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