Home Theater Systems

Many people never bother looking into purchasing a home theater through sheer fear of the decisions that may need to be made in the process.

Many among these aren't even sure of exactly which components are included in a home theater or which ones are needed in order to create an effective and entertaining home theater.

For this reason, many people simply do not bother going through the process of looking at their options when it comes to these wonderful systems on the market today much less ever bother actually purchasing one.

By Squidoo

So on the way of finding the home theater speakers best

Home Theater Speakers Best

So on the way of finding the home theater speakers best, decide how many speakers you need. Always find that many small speakers provide surround sound while large tower speakers are good for stereo effects when you search for the home theater speakers best.

One must find a point that, home theater speakers best, will be received even with small speakers that also work better with a single sub woofer. To get the home theater speakers best out of the other it may need to have five speakers for surround sound.

You may also prefer one surround sound system to another when you search for the home theater speakers best. The most popular surround sound systems that will suit your home theater speakers best today are Dolby Pro Logic, Virtual Dolby, and Q Surround.

By Squidoo

Acoustic Treatments for Your Home Theater

Focusing on ways to improve your hi-fi listening experience through affordable, DIY acoustic treatments. I've made DIY bass traps and Acoustic Panels based on the designs of Jon Risch and comments on the Audio Asylum Forums. This lense will teach you how to make affordable acoustic treatment for your listening room with materials readily available at your local home and fabric stores.

Remember: treat room acoustics acoustically, not electronically (unless it's for frequencies below 120 Hz where your brain cannot tell the difference between your loudspeakers and subwoffer and your room).

From : squidoo

Dedicated home theaters

A home theater with video projector mounted in a box on the ceiling.

Built-in shelves provide a place for movie decor, DVDs, and equipment. Note the component stack on the right, where the audio receiver, DVD player, secondary monitor, and video game system are located.

The same projection screen as at top, without image.

Some home cinema enthusiasts go so far as to build a dedicated room in the home for the theater. These more advanced installations often include sophisticated acoustic design elements, including "room-in-a-room" construction that isolates sound and provides the potential for a nearly ideal listening environment. These installations are often designated as "screening rooms" to differentiate from simpler installations.

This idea can go as far as completely recreating an actual cinema, with a projector enclosed in a projection booth, specialized furniture, a piano or theatre organ, curtains in front of the projection screen, movie posters, or a popcorn or snack machine. More commonly, real dedicated home theaters pursue this to a lesser degree. Presently the days of the $100,000 and over home theater is being usurped by the rapid advances in digital audio and video technologies, which has spurred a rapid drop in prices. This in turn has brought the true digital home theater experience to the doorsteps of the do-it-yourself people, often for less than what you would expect to pay for a low budget economy car. Current consumer level A/V equipment can meet and often exceed in performance what you would expect to experience at a modern commercial theater.

Home Theater Seating

Home theater seating consists of chairs specifically engineered and designed for viewing movies in a personal home theater setting. Most home theater seats have cup holder built into the chairs' armrests and a shared armrest between each seat. Some seating is movie theater-style chairs like those seen in a movie cinema, which features a flip up seat cushion. Other seating systems have plush leather reclining lounger types, with flip-out footrests. Additional features like storage compartments, snack trays, tactile transducers (nicknamed "Bass Shakers"), or even electric motors to recline the chair are available, depending on the model.Backyard theater

Backyard theater

In places that have the proper outdoor atmosphere, it is possible for people to set up a home theater in their backyard. Depending on the space available, it may simply be a temporary version with foldable screen, a projector and couple of speakers, or a permanent fixture with huge screens and dedicated audio set up poolside. Due to the outdoor nature, it is quite popular with BBQ parties and pool parties.

Some specialist outdoor home cinema companies are now marketing packages with inflatable movie screens and purpose built AV systems.^[1]

Some people have built upon the idea, and constructed mobile drive-in theaters that can play movies in public open spaces. Usually, these require a powerful projector, a laptop or DVD player, outdoor speakers and/or an FM transmitter to broadcast the audio to other car radios.^[2][3]

Do you have the audiophile 'disease'?

Posted by Steve Guttenberg

Back in 1957, Time magazine reported on "audiophilia," a disease that afflicted the "middle-aged, male and intelligent" and found them to be compulsive and fascinated with bizarre sounds. Hey, that describes me!

My wife happened to find the article, "Audiophilia," online with no author listed. The article reported that a new neurosis was discovered, audiophilia, an excessive passion for hi-fi sound and equipment. The Audiophiliac was amused.

I admit it, we audiophiles are an obsessive bunch who endlessly fuss over our hi-fis, but no more than car freaks fiddle with their fuel injectors, or computer geeks agonize over bits and apps. Each group has its nut jobs, but they're at least passionate about what they do.

They're involved in something, striving to make it better, to get ever closer to some ever-elusive goal of perfection. If audiophiles take some satisfaction in that, what's the problem?

I'm not sure what to make of the Time piece, whether it was tongue-in-cheek or what. The discoverer of the disease, Dr. Henry Angus Bowes, clinical director in psychiatry at Ste. Anne's Hospital for veterans at Ste. Anne de Bellevue, Quebec, noted that some audiophiles turn up the volume up until it reaches the physical level of pain. Ouch! There is an extraordinary fascination with recreating the actual sounds of instruments. Yeah, so?

Do you have the disease? More important, is there a cure? Maybe we need a telethon.

DIY Home Entertainment Network in 3 Easy, Nonbankrupting Steps

By Daniel Dumas

Illustration: Nathan Jurevicius

Years of BitTorrenting and lossless CD-ripping have finally paid off: Your PC is packed with enough high-fidelity digital entertainment to trigger palpitations in the snobbiest mediaphile. Meanwhile, you've got that 1080p tyranno-vision LCD and eardrum-pounding 7.1-channel sound system just aching to play it all. But how to meld the two? It's time to build a home network. Don't fret — it's a lot easier than you think. Here's how.

Step 1: Get Storage Device
Stop stockpiling media on your PC — its anemic hard drive will crash harder than a sugar junkie if you cram it full of HD content and force it to run a bloated operating system. Get a network-attached storage device to serve as a central media repository for every computer in the house. Good ones create backups of your data on multiple built-in drives, so even if half of them somehow fail, season four of The Simpsons will remain intact.

Step 2: Set Up Streamer
Scolded by your S.O. for spending too much quality time with the game console? Share the love! Both Xbox 360 and PS3 can stream media from a PC to a TV (a Wii can, too, but it takes some clever tweakery). No console? The recently retooled Apple TV should do the trick. Its slick new UI, movie rental options, and ability to operate sans PC is a home-entertainment breakthrough. Caveat: Unlike the consoles, Apple TV's lack of native support for DivX/Xvid means it's useless for all those Torrent files without performing a warranty-busting hack.

Step 3: Link It All Up
You can shoot music all over a Wi-Fi network with nary a digital hiccup — but hi-def video files approach 6 GB per hour of footage, making wireless streaming a jittering nightmare. Best to connect your machines with good old-fashioned copper, like a CAT6 Ethernet cable, which at 1,000 Mbps is nearly five times faster than the fleetest 802.11n connection. Then grab a gigabit switch — basically a traffic cop for your network — and route all of your connections through it. You can even allot more bandwidth to movie files so the picture won't stutter.

A Technical Introduction to Audio Cables

Author : Adam Blake
What is so important about cables anyway?

One of the most common questions asked by consumers faced
with purchasing cables for their audio or home theater
system is, What is so important about cables anyway? They
can cost as much or more than some of the hardware in the
system and to many it is difficult to understand why wire
isnt just wire.

Loudspeaker cables on the other hand, carry a large amount
of energy. All of the energy required to move the speaker
cones and make sound must come through the loudspeaker
cables. Because of the high-energy requirement in these
cables the current is relatively high (currents can reach 10
amps or more).
The very basic reason why audio cables are important is
because they change the signal going through them. There are
two different, fundamental ways that an audio cable can
change the signal. The cable itself can change the signal,
or the cable can allow outside sources of energy to change
the signal.
In order to understand how these two situations can occur,
some basic background electrical knowledge is needed
Signals in all types of wires are conveyed by the
combination of voltage and current. Every signal has some
amount of voltage and some amount of current. The larger the
difference in voltage between two places, say the beginning
and the end of a cable, the larger the amount of current,
and vice-versa. The direct analogy to voltage and current is
the flow of water through a hose. The amount of water
flowing through the hose is analogous to current. The water
pressure in the hose is analogous to voltage. The higher the
amount of water pressure, the more water will flow through
the hose. The higher the amount of voltage, the more current
will flow through the wire.
Every cable has a set of electrical properties that can be
measured using standard electrical testing equipment. The
three most basic properties are resistance, capacitance and
inductance. While a detailed description of these three
different electrical properties is outside the scope of this
article, a basic description of the relevant effects of
these three properties can be given.
- Resistance opposes current. The higher the resistance the
greater the amount of energy that is removed from the current
and turned into heat.
- Capacitance opposes changes in voltage. If a voltage is
increasing, capacitance will cause the voltage to increase
more slowly. If a voltage is decreasing, capacitance will
cause the voltage to decrease more slowly.
- Inductance opposes changes in current. If current is
increasing, inductance will cause the current to increase
more slowly. If current is decreasing, inductance will cause
the current to decrease more slowly.

The final piece of background knowledge that is needed for
this article is what the audio signal looks like. If one
were to take the speaker cover off a speaker to look at the
speaker cone while music is playing, you would see that it
is moving back and forth. In order to move the speaker cone
back and forth, the electrical signal must push and then
pull the cone in rapid and repeating fashion. This is
accomplished by having an Alternating Current, or AC.
Alternating Current simply means that the voltage oscillates
between positive and negative. Because the voltage drives
the current, this means that the current also goes positive
and negative. In other words, the current is going back and
forth in the wire, just like the speaker cone. The subtle
variations in how fast the voltage and current go back and
forth creates the different sounds that we hear when
listening to music

How a cable itself affects the audio signal

Now, going back to the ways that the cable itself can change
the signal going through it, lets consider both types of
cables separately.
As stated previously, interconnect cables carry a very small
amount of current. Relative to the current the voltage is
large. Because of that fact, capacitance is important, but
inductance is relatively unimportant. As the voltage
oscillates between being positive and negative, the
capacitance slows the voltage changes down, and causes
delays. This can cause audible distortion in the sound.
Because interconnects have very little current, resistance
is not much of a factor. Even an interconnect with extremely
high resistance will only remove an infinitesimally small
amount of energy.
The signal in loudspeaker cables is essentially the opposite
of the signal in interconnects. Both cables have the same
information, but in loudspeaker cables, the voltage is small
and the current is large, relatively speaking. Because of
the high current, both resistance and inductance are
important in loudspeaker cables. The higher the resistance,
the greater the amount of energy that will be absorbed by
the cables. The resistance will not cause any distortion,
but it will decrease the volume of the sound. The inductance
on the other hand, can cause distortion. As the current
oscillates between being positive and negative, the
inductance slows the current changes down, and causes
delays.

How a cable lets outside sources of energy affect the signal

As stated previously, the second fundamental way of altering
a signal passing through an audio cable is to introduce
outside sources of energy. This outside energy is typically
termed noise. By definition, if any energy is absorbed by
the signal, the signal has been distorted.
There are many potential sources of noise around audio
cables. Some of the more common sources of noise, such as
radio frequency waves, are familiar to most people. When
wiring up a radio, frequently a consumer must attach an
antenna. Antennae are intentionally designed to channel
radio frequency energy into a stereo. Just like an antenna,
it is entirely possible for an audio cable to pick up radio
frequency energy. If you are not intending to listen to the
radio, this is not a welcome effect.
Electronic components, electrical cords, sound waves, and
even the sun, are all capable of creating noise. Electrical
cords create electromagnetic fields around them that can
transfer energy to a cable. Sound waves create mechanical
vibrations that can be transformed into electrical energy
that is added to an audio signal. Because there are so many
different types of noise, there are many methods used to
prevent a cable from picking up noise. Shielding, twisting
of conductors, and mechanical damping are all common noise
protection methods in cables.
While noise affects both interconnects and loudspeaker
cables, generally the effects are far more significant in
interconnects. This is because the signals in the
interconnects have far less energy. Since most forms of
noise are inherently low energy to begin with, this means
that it is far easier for them to modify the low energy
interconnect signals than the high-energy loudspeaker cable
signals.

Macro vs. Micro

The parameters discussed so far have been primarily macro
effects. These are for the most part the top-level
parameters that effect cables. These parameters as well as
others not discussed here also exist at a micro level.
Taking capacitance as an example, a given cable will have an
overall capacitance that can be measured. This overall
capacitance is a macro level parameter. The same cable can
also be analyzed as 1000 separate but connected pieces. Each
piece will have a local capacitance. These local parameters
are micro effects and can have their own impact on the
signal separate from the macro effects.
The impact that the micro level parameters have on an
audio signal is usually less than the impact of the macro
level parameters. However, they do still make a difference
in the signal transfer. The various ways that audio
companies choose to either mitigate or ignore these micro
level details is, in part, responsible for the vast array of
different cable designs. From cryogenic treatments and
precious metal wires, to fine silk insulation and fluid
filled cable jackets; extreme cable designs abound.

Will I hear the difference?
The fact of the matter is that cables do alter the sound
going through them, and that it is audible. You do not need
to be an expert, or an audiophile, to hear the difference.
To demonstrate this point, simply listen to your stereo. If
you close your eyes, does it sound like the music is being
played live right in front of you? This is what audiophiles
strive for, and unless you have a very high-fidelity system,
your answer to this question will most likely be no. You may
have a hard time describing what exactly does not sound
right about your system, but you know that it doesn�t sound
like a live performance.
Of course, the reason why the music does not sound live
cannot be blamed solely on the cables. The degradation of
the sound occurs in every component of your system. However,
the point here is that even a casual listener can detect the
subtle distortions that can prevent music playback from
sounding live. Improving the quality of your audio cables
will improve the sound quality of your system.
It is fairly safe to say that no matter what cable you use,
the modifications to the sound will be small. Audio cables
will never cause a listener to hear a piano when a flute is
being played. However, it is the small detail that makes all
the difference between good and bad quality sound. That is
why very strong opinions are formed about various cables.
As audio systems continue to improve in accuracy, listening
to a live performance in your living room gets closer to
reality. Cables are an enabling factor for advancements in
audio reproduction and can play a remarkably important role
in your system.

Written by: Adam Blake CEO / Co-Founder Pear Cable, Inc.
www.pearcable.com
For a more detailed explanation of cable design theory that
Pear Cable thinks is relevant, see the cable design white
paper available on pearcable.com

About the author:

Adam Blake is the CEO and Co-Founder of Pear Cable, Inc., a manufacturer of high-fidelity audio cables. http://www.pearcable.com