A home theatre setup is far more than having a good HDTV. Homeowners crave to get that cinematic feeling right in their own homes and a lot of that experience boils down to quality sound. If you want to start the process as a beginner, it really helps to understand the functions of each component that goes into your setup so here’s a small guide to ease you into things:
The Starter Pack
Off-the-box cables will usually have you sorted in one go and if you’re looking at a basic setup, there’ll be no need for tools or breaking a sweat. All you’ll need to make things work is a receiver placed near a power source and audio-input source.
Positioning
When it comes to your home cinema speakers, you’ll usually find speaker configurations of 5.1 or 7.1. To break this down, when it comes to 5.1, you’ll have two front speakers, two rear speakers, one central speaker and one sub-woofer. In a 7.1 system, you’ll find the same setup with the exception of an extra central speaker.The speakers will have markings like FL (Front Left) which will indicate where exactly they should be placed and this is quite an important step if you want to achieve a proper sound experience.
Connections
Your next focus would be to hook up the speakers to the receiver unit. Clip ons are a popular method that involves a naked wire being kept between the two clips for each speaker. However, more modern setups are likely to have dedicated speaker connectors like spade lugs (metal clips at the end of the speaker cable), which can be screwed on to the connector. Each connector will correspond to a specific speaker so make sure you don’t jumble your cables because this could actually cause damage (for example, if you mix the connectors of the subwoofer and the loudspeakers).
Audio from Devices
In this day and age, obviously the feature of being able to send audio from ANY device is a must but this depends on how sophisticated your setup is and how compatible your connectors are with the input source (which in this instance could be anything from a smart device to a TV). For example, to connect your TV you would need either an HDMI cable or 3.5mm jack, or to connect your computer, you could use a 3.5mm jack, HDMI OR optical audio-input. When it comes to smart devices, you should be able to connect wirelessly with your system.
Sending Audio
These setups usually come with CD/ BLU-RAY Player and thus are able to send audio and video to other devices in the room such as a TV. You’d mainly need an HDMI to make things work.
It might seem incredibly confusing once you first open those boxes to see a fully dismantled system with so many cables adding to the mix. But if you take the time to learn what each does, assembling and knows what belongs where becomes far easier and you’ll have a system up and running in no time!