Speaker Setup

Now you have your new home theatre, the time to set it up has come. Most of the packaged systems will be colour coded and to be honest there a ton of places that talk about optical and HDMI set up. The part I want to drill into all of you to try and get right is speaker placement; it can make as much difference to your listening experience as the speakers themselves. One of the most frustrating things to me is seeing people that have a 5.1 setup with all 5 speakers sitting in front of their TV. You will get a lot of sounds out of sync, sounds blending together and it all just doesn’t sound as nice as it should.

The picture above is the ideal way to set up your 7.1 speakers; they should all be ear height and the same distance from your ears. It’s as simple as that, most users have no need for sound insulation and all the fancy trimmings that you can buy. That is money you could spend on getting better speakers.

Installation

Something that people overlook is the installation of your home theatre. Don’t want wires on your floor? Then you will need to hide them under skirting boards or even go through the ceiling. If you aren’t willing to do that well you only have a few options available to you. You could easily set up a 3.1 system with the 2 front speakers and the centre speaker. Or the even easier option is you could just buy a sound bar. I would recommend staying away from the sound bars; they just bounce sound off your walls to trick you into hearing 5.1. But the problem with that is it needs to be in a square room to really work properly.

A lot of the systems I listed also have an Auto Tune feature; this involves placing a microphone (Included) on your seating position and the receiver playing a lot of random sounds to configure the settings. For armatures this is the best option because you get lovely sound limed to arrive at your ears at the same time. But even this doesn’t surpass having each speaker equal distance from your ears.

Please, please make sure any system you buy has the right connections for your consoles, DVD players, computers and the like so you can avoid any major headaches or heartbreak when initially setting up.

WOW, that was long wasn’t it? I hope I have cleared up a few things for you and given you some great options for a new home theatre. If you end up buying one, just make sure you wife knows. I don’t want to be blamed for your mistakes. If you want some more questions answered or you believe I got something wrong please hop on the forums and tell me.