How to Get the Most From Your Home Theater - Without Spending a Fortune
So you’ve scraped and saved, now you’ve finally gotten together a semi-respectable home theater system. You want even more, but the idea of spending another few thousand on new front speakers doesn’t cut it. What can you do?
There are ways to get the most out of what you have without breaking the bank. There are several areas you can look at to ensure your theater is set up correctly and performing at its best.
Cables and Interconnects –
It’s imperative the signals are transferred from your source components to your speakers, going through various components along the way, with the least amount of degradation. Make sure your audio, video and speaker cables are all of good quality and that none are old and corroded. You can use contact enhancer to be sure the connection is really good.
Contact enhancers increase the contact area of metal to metal connections, such as you find with a typical RCA connection. Because of the surface imperfections, most connectors actually make fairly poor contact. As low as 5% of the surface area is actually in contact with each other. Contact enhancers fill in the minute gaps between the two connectors.
One such product is Quicksilver. It uses a silver-based solution, just like some of the finest specialty A/V cables. You’ve really got to check this stuff out, it can make a noticeable improvement for not much money.
Make sure to use the highest level of A/V connection your system supports. i.e. if you can use a component or DVI video connection from your DVD to your display device then do it.
Calibration – Your video display will definitely not look its best without proper calibration. Manufacturers have a dismal record when it comes to calibrating sets at the factory. Most are TVs designed to look their best on the showroom floor, not in your home theater. In fact, a CRT based rear projection TV can have its life dramatically shortened by improper calibration.
The contrast is invariably set too high to make the set stand out in the showroom environment. This sells more TVs but causes premature tube wear. (That sells more TVs too, I guess) Proper video calibration will correct the problem.
I have used Joe Kane’s Digital Video Essentials for years and the Video Essentials laser disc before that. It is a great tool to help you get the best out of your home theater. It has all the needed video test patterns and explanations on how to properly use them. Pick one up here:
http://1touchmovie.com/DVDOnline/Digital_Video_Essentials.html
Acoustic Improvements –
These encompass a whole host of different things, from acoustically treating the interior of the room, to quieting down your projector. Whenever you
lower your noise floor, you effectively increase your dynamic range. In addition, acoustic treatments can dramatically improve dialogue intelligibility, bass response and imaging.
One of the best in the “bang for the buck” category is to put a 1” or 2” thick, acoustic panel on the two side walls of the theater to reduce the “first reflection”. The first reflection is the sound that leaves the front speaker and takes a longer path to your ears by bouncing off the side wall on the way. Since it takes a longer path, it takes more time and arrives later than the direct sound that went straight from the speakers to your ears. The net effect is a loss of dialog intelligibility.
Another, even cheaper, tweak is to optimize your subwoofer placement. For years people have been told “Bass is non-directional. You can put your sub anywhere”. That is, simply, BS. While low bass is fairly non-directional, the tonal quality and amount of bass is tremendously affected by subwoofer placement.
A simple trick is to place the sub at the listening position (at ear height), then move around the room (at sub height) until you find the place with the best bass quality. If possible, that’s where you put the sub.
Keeping the ambient noise level in your home theater is critical to maintain the "suspension of disbelief" you've tried so hard to achieve. In addition, lower ambient noise will enable you to hear the softer portions of the movie's sound track without turning up your home theater's volume so loud. This has the effect of increasing the available dynamic range (the difference between the loudest and softest sounds your audio system can reproduce).
One cheap tweak is to build a hush box around your projector to minimize noise from it. Make sure you use adequate ventilation to maintain proper cooling. That cannot be emphasized enough. As a partial measure, without having to build a whole box, you can place acoustic absorption material on the ceiling above the projector. If your projector is close to the ceiling, this will kill the noise that normally bounces off the ceiling and into the listening room.
I hope this gets you started down the path to even more enjoyment from your home theater and saves you some money at the same time.
About the Author
Steve has 15 yrs in electronics. He is a CEDIA certified designer with ISF and THX certificates. Experience includes: installer and programmer; system designer; business unit director for an a/v importer; sales rep for a CE distributor; and principal of a $1.5M+ CEDIA firm. He's now senior sales engineer for Digital Cinema Design in Redmond, WA. See him at The Home Theater and Automation Guide
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