Starting off in the world of home theater can easily become overwhelming. We thought you should be armed with the necessary information to simplify what can easily become an overly complicated and expensive process.
Contents:
- Three Things You Need to Know Before You Get Started
- Room Size Considerations for Your Home Theater
- Focus on Quality
- Buy Real Speakers from Real Speaker Companies
- Get The Right Size Receiver
- How to Set Up Your Home Theater
- Adding a Center Channel
- Advice on Built-In Speakers for Home Theaters
- Nail All The Basics of Home Theater
The key thing to remember: building a home theater can be incredibly fun and rewarding. But it works best if you approach it with the understanding that you don’t need to buy it all at once—it’s actually more fun that way—and you’ll make better decisions as you go along. It also allows your budget to deliver more quality and buy less confusing gear that—to be honest—you may not be truly sure what to do with or how to get the most out of it right from the start.
Here are the keys to building a home theater system that I would share with a good friend looking to get started—showing the evolution from most basic to a fully-sized, high functioning, and high quality (on a budget!) 5.1 home theater:
Three Things You Need to Know Before You Get Started:
First step is to be clear on three key pieces of information:
- The space you’re using for your theatre; small, medium, or large.
- How loud you truly plan to run your theatre.
- How much do you care about the quality of music reproduction when your theatre isn’t being used to watch movies.
Room Size Considerations For Your Home Theater
Is your space on the smallish side? Whether a modest apartment, a city pied a terre, or a simple flat screen hung in a master bedroom, not all theaters need to feature 5 (or more ) speakers and a matching number of amplifier channels. Knowing your space is crucial. If it’s a small flat in a big city, you likely won’t require any more than two channels, two speakers and a quality subwoofer. If your flat panel isn’t larger than a 70” screen, you may not need a center channel—even though center channels are considered a key ingredient. Why? Because most modern small two-way speakers produce a large, dynamic and articulate sound that can easily fill the center space between them. This is usually referred to as good imaging, described as the ability for two speakers to fill in the space between them with a 3-dimensional aural stage. The more you know!
Focus On Quality
When in doubt, go for quality and fewer speaker channels, rather than numerous channels with all the complexity that entails. Ninety-five percent of the people buying large multi-channel receivers have little-to-no idea what to do with all those channels, and wind up leaving them set to “small” with zero adjustment to the delays per channel. If you don’t know what any of that means, you may well find the multi-channel world of advanced home theater frustrating—and we promise you’re not alone.
What’s important to remember is that, when questioning what your audio setup should look like, two high quality speakers, a high quality AVR, and a quality subwoofer will form the bones of a very good theater.
Buy Real Speakers from Real Speaker Companies
People whose primary goal is to make speakers tend to make nice sounding speakers, while huge corporations who make (and lose) billions off of TVs each year tend to make awful-sounding stuff. Beware of famous name brand TV and electronics brands offering loudspeaker and subwoofer combos at super cheap prices. These often offer a wireless “subwoofer” that makes no bass below 60 Hz; where real bass begins.
Theater-like sound is the whole point of home theater, so these cheap offers of audio junk ought to be avoided at all costs. Companies that make fine TVs or AVRs should sell you a fine TV or AVR. Don’t waste a penny on their loudspeakers or subs out of convenience; the real theater experience is what we’re creating.
Get The Right Size Receiver
So, if you find you’re in the small room theater camp, using a smaller/lower powered receiver makes sense since much of the sophistication in AVR’s comes from the complex Dolby-based decoding of multi-channel sound. Personally, I’m more in the camp of allowing my system to grow so I would go with a decent, but relatively inexpensive Yamaha or Onkyo AVR (Arcam if you have a much larger budget). Note that in recent years, it appears that Marantz and Denon receivers no longer permit full range when in theater mode, which limits the natural dynamics that are such a big part of the fun when you watch movies.
RELTip
If you value music and movies—and know you will never have the room to expand into a true multi-channel digital theater (5.1 and larger)—Yamaha makes a 2-channel receiver called the R-S202 that sells for around $149 USD and around £200 in the UK. Huge bargain, as a quick glance inside suggests that the bones of this unit may originate from their classic entry level receivers of the late ‘90’s—which means well-built Class A/B amplifier channels and big power supplies. But to be clear, buy this only if you do not plan to explore true multi-channel theater in the future, and just want quality sound for your movies and music at an incredible price.
How to Set Up Your Home Theater
Now it’s time to set things up. Try carefully positioning the speakers, pointing them almost at your prime listening position—a great starting angle is with the inside edges of a rectangular speaker box pointing at a location about 18″ (half a meter) behind your head. Move the speakers away from the rear wall behind them, and separate them by at least 7 feet (2 meters) for smaller speakers and considerably further for larger speakers—easily up to 10 feet (3 meters) between inner edges of your speakers for larger full range speakers.
To dive deeper into suggested room setups, visit our Room Setup Tool.
Set the menu on your AVR speaker setup to “Large” (or “Full Range” on some brands) and try your hand at listening, first at moderate volume levels until your gear warms up and you can tell with certainty that you’re not in danger of overdriving anything. If you hear any sort of distortion or harsh sounds, turn it down immediately. You can gradually experiment with running the volume up to levels anyone would consider loud, until you’re certain your sound system is running optimally.
Adding a Center Channel
So, you’ve started a small high quality (yet affordable!) beginner theater based on 2.1 channels. Assuming you are in the camp of building towards a full-blown 5.1 (or larger) theater, the next step is to add a matching center channel. It’s crucial that it matches your main speakers, so don’t skimp on quality. It’s an incredibly important channel, responsible for dialogue intelligibility and aligning sound clarity onto the screen. If your speakers are in a price category such that the center channel is either too small or too large either in size or quality, step up and get the better center channel.
Try reducing the volume using just your ears (select “Manual” for setup, not “Room Correction”) and listen carefully to the loud hissing, which allows you to set each channel’s level. You could buy a level meter—and undoubtedly someone makes an app for that—but try listening. You do it every day, making life and death decisions with your ears, so you are built for this. Listen to the hissing sound from each of these front channels while running “Level Check” on your AVR—they will all subjectively sound different, but try to focus on achieving approximate balance.
RELTip
Front left and right main speakers with a center channel as well as a subwoofer
To heighten your home theater experience, ensure the center channel is working in harmony with the L-R main speakers, rather than competing against them. Almost every home theater I have ever experienced has the center channel set too loud. The result is what sounds like a big, loud, mono speaker with lots of noise coming from the center and almost nothing from the L-R main speakers.
Resist the temptation to adjust Right and Left speaker volumes. Listen to the center speaker relative to the other two main speakers and adjust the volume up or down as needed until it seems to match both pretty evenly. Often, the center channel will need to be turned down in volume. If you do so properly, the sound of all the scenes behind and around the main actors will take on life and physical volume as the scene becomes truly 3-dimensional. I just did so myself earlier today (bought a matching center channel to go with some legendary speakers I own) and was struck anew by how, as the center channel sinks into the soundstage created by the main speakers, the scenes come to life in an altogether far more interesting and realistic manner.
Should You Use Built-in Speakers for a Home Theater?
Many of you will consider using in-wall and in-ceiling speakers. Awesome for background music, a disaster for the front channels in a theater. Don’t do it.
Sound, particularly the spoken word (dialogue can be awfully important in movies) is critical to direction. This means for speakers to work well, the front three speakers (Left, Center, Right) must point at you. In-wall speakers can accomplish this, but generally miss the ability for both bass and treble drivers to toe-in (angle inward) towards the main seating or listening position.
In-ceiling speakers, however, are a complete disaster for high quality sound and the main Left-Center-Right speakers specifically because they point straight down. In houses with in-ceiling speakers, you’ll often hear the words: “What?” “What did he say?” “Can you turn it up?”
So, this must mean I hate in-ceiling speakers right? On the contrary, I love ‘em when applied correctly. For background music wafting throughout a home, in-ceiling speakers provide a sense of luxury that is hard to beat. In ancient times, the truly wealthy often had soft fountains gurgling and tinkling throughout a palace; in-ceiling speakers can deliver some of that same sense of ease and luxury to one’s home—but they have no place in a small luxury home theater.
RELTip
Connect a tiny REL Tzero MKIII (wired through our High Level Connection) to in-ceiling speakers throughout your home for a real breakthrough in sound quality.
In-ceiling speakers work really well for surrounds, especially side surrounds in 7.2 setups and wonderfully well for Atmos—but these are more advanced versions of theaters, and we’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves. Bottom line, use real speakers—small ones on stands (ideally 6.5″ 2-ways) or larger floor standers—for your main speakers. If you simply have no room, then consider shelf-mounting those same speakers. If all else fails, then use in-wall speakers that at least maintain some of the directional cues of a free-standing speaker—save the in-ceilings for background spread and surrounds.
Nail All The Basics of Home Theater
These are the home theater basics that provide a solid foundation to build upon. In the next installment we’ll take up the topic of surrounds and how to position them, in addition to providing some tips on alternative methods to 7.2 that achieve far more of the effect that movies are after.
Click here to read the second piece in this series, Multi-Channel Home Theater Basics (Part Two).
We’re here to help you get everything and more out of your favorite movies at home, so don’t hesitate to reach out and visit our other home theater resources:
Getting the Most out of Your HT: Tips from the World's Pickiest Setup Artists
How To Tune A Subwoofer: Learn How To Optimize Your REL The Same Way The Pros Do It.
Be A Theater Pro: 5 Tips To Build Theater Sound The Way the Pro’s Do
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