If you recently purchased a home theater system or a set of loudspeakers, you may want a number of guidelines on correctly setting it up if you don’t wish to hire an installer. There are several problems that are frequently made. I am going to offer a number of pointers in order to help make your set up a snap.
The next components are generally included in your home theater system: 5 to seven satellite loudspeakers, subwoofer and a central element. This component is also called surround receiver and works as the main control of your home theater system.
Make sure that you place this receiver in a location which is rather centrally located in order to minimize the amount of loudspeaker wire which you have to run. You don’t inevitably have to put the receiver right next to your TV. Select a place which is not far away from your audio source or television set because you are going to need to connect the receiver to your source. The receiver requires an audio signal to output surround sound. Normally it will accept an optical surround sound signal. You can attach this input to your TV by using a fiberoptical cord. This cable is generally included with your system. You may also get it a most electronics stores. After you have established the audio link to your television set, you can now go ahead and connect your speakers. This step requires a little more work. If you have cordless rear speakers you will not require as much loudspeaker cord and the setup is going to be a bit less complicated. First of all, calculate how much speaker cable you will need. You are going to need to keep in mind furniture as well as carpets and add some extra length to your calculations. This way you will have sufficient cable for all of the twists and turns. Select the gauge of the loudspeaker cord depending on how much power you intend to drive your loudspeakers with. The higher the wattage the thicker the speaker cable. Your subwoofer is going to usually come with a built-in amplifier and connect to your receiver via RCA cable.
Whilst connecting the loudspeaker cable, ensure that you attach the cord with the right polarity. Every speaker has a color-coded terminal, normally red and black. Most loudspeaker cable will show one strand in a different color. This is vital because it will help guarantee the right polarity of the loudspeaker terminal connection. Simply attach the different-color strand to the speaker terminal which is colored. Next, while attaching the speaker cable to your receiver, ensure that you connect the cord to every speaker terminal at the receiver in the identical manner. This will keep the sound going to every loudspeaker in the correct phase and optimize your music experience.
Cordless rear speakers will usually incur an audio delay during transmission. This delay is also referred to as latency. Typically the latency ranges between 1 and twenty ms. For best result, it is optimum if all of the speakers are in sync. If you have a system that uses wireless rears and wired front loudspeakers, i.e. you have a mixture of cordless and wired speakers, you ought to try to delay the music going to the wired speakers by the latency of the wireless speakers.
Check with the manufacturer if your surround receiver can be set to delay the audio of specific channels. If you are using wireless rears, you want to set the front-speaker and side-speaker channels to delay the audio. Home theater systems which were not intended for cordless rear speakers may not come with this ability. In this case you might wish to look for a wireless speaker kit that has very low latency, ideally less than one ms. This is going to keep all of your speakers in perfect sync.