Home Theater

Recent Technologies Make Building Home Theater Systems A Snap

Setting up multi-channel audio including a home theater system has always been quite complex and manufacturers lately have created unique products and technologies including wireless speaker kit products or virtual surround sound to help simplify this process. I am going to look at various of the latest technologies which were designed to make setting up home theater systems a breeze. I will illustrate what to look out for when making your buying decision.

Historically, installing a TV would be fast because they would already have built-in stereo speakers. This, though, has all changed with multi-channel audio. These days external speakers are utilized to create a surround sound effect. As the traditional 5.1 format needs 6 speakers: a front center, two front side speakers, two rear speaker and a subwoofer, the more recent 7.1 format adds two additional side speakers.

Therefore the installation of home theater products has turn out to be a fairly complicated procedure. A lot of homes are not pre-wired for surround sound. Moreover, long speaker wires are often unattractive. Component vendors have come up with several technologies to simplify the installation.

The first approach is generating so-called virtual speakers by applying signal-processing to the sound and introducing phase shifts and special cues to those audio parts that would normally be broadcast by the remote loudspeakers. As the signal processing is based on how the human hearing detects the origin of sound, the sound components which underwent signal processing can be mixed with the front speaker components and broadcast by the front loudspeakers. The viewer is in effect tricked into believing the sound is coming from a location other than the front speakers.

This technology minimizes the number of required loudspeakers and eliminates long speaker wires but every human will process sound slightly differently because of the form of the ear. Because the signal processing is based on a standard human ear model, virtual surround will not work equally well for each person depending on how much the viewer differs from the standard model.

Wireless surround sound devices are another option for simplifying home speaker installations and normally come with a transmitter component which connects to the source and in addition wireless amplifiers that will connect to the remote loudspeakers. This transmitter will generally provide line-level along with amplified speaker inputs. Ideally it should come with a volume control to adjust it to the audio source.

Some wireless speaker kits are designed to connect 2 speakers per wireless amplifier. A better option would provide a wireless amplifier for each remote speaker to avoid the cable runs between each of the 2 remote speakers. The most sophisticated wireless kits use digital transmission to eliminate signal degradation. To make sure that all loudspeakers are in sync in a multi-channel application, make certain that you pick a wireless system that has an audio latency of a few milliseconds at most. A large latency would lead to an echo effect. This effect would degrade the surround effect. Many wireless gadgets operate in the 900 MHz and 2.4 GHz frequency bands. Some products use the less crowded 5.8 GHz frequency band and therefore have less competition from other wireless gadgets.

Another approach are side-reflecting loudspeakers. These kits are also called sound bars. In this case the sound for the remote speakers will be sent by separate loudspeakers positioned at the front at an angle and reflected by walls as to appear to be originating from besides or behind the viewer. The effect heavily is dependent upon the interior, particularly the shape of the room and the decoration. It will function well for square rooms with no obstacles and sound reflecting walls. However, realistic scenarios frequently will vary from this ideal and diminish the result of this solution.

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