How to Get More Out of Your Home Theater Without Paying a Dime
If your home theater hasn’t been set up by a professional, chances are you won’t get the best video and sound quality from your existing setup. These simple settings will take very little time, but they will make a huge difference.
Blast From The Past is a weekly feature on Lifehacker in which we bring old but still relevant posts to life for your reading and hacking enjoyment. This week we will be doing a little bit of refinement on our home theater system.
You can build a good looking home theater system with an HD TV and a good set of speakers, but having this equipment doesn’t mean you have an optimal viewing experience. While it can take all the time (and all the confusion it can cause) to set up your TV, audio receiver, Blu-ray player, and home theater PC , you may not have made small changes that could make a big difference in shipping. high quality audio and video that you paid for. If you haven’t thought about the smallest details of your system for a long time, here are some things you might want to go through to make sure your theater is performing in top shape.
This guide assumes you already have a home theater of some sort and have already thought about it: that is, you are using all the correct cables , you have a decent HDTV, and perhaps you even have a surround sound system. This is not about setting up your first home theater system, but about making the sound and sound of your existing system much better.
video
You’ve spent a lot of money on this new high definition TV, and while it may seem infinitely better than the old tube you had in its place, you probably won’t get the best picture out of it, especially if you’ve just brought it home. from the store and threw it into the closet. Here’s how to set up your HDTV for the best video possible.
Set the optimal viewing distance
This is what you probably (hopefully) thought of when you bought the TV in the first place, but if you haven’t, you should consider whether your TV is at the optimal distance and viewing angle from your seating position.
You can find many different opinions about the optimal viewing distance, but the easiest way to determine the optimal viewing distance is to take your TV’s diagonal size in inches and multiply it by two . This is roughly how many inches you should be away from the TV, or how far your TV should be from you. Keep in mind that you want to measure the distance from your TV to where your eyes might be, not in the front or back of your sofa.
However, it doesn’t really need to be measured in exact inches (after all, it’s not practical for all living rums). However, you will definitely want to make sure your TV falls within one of these charts . Check out the table on the right for RCA recommendations (if you prefer a more immersive experience, THX ranges may be more your style). Also remember that if you’re going to play around with moving your furniture, we recommend mapping it to the map first so you don’t have to move it 10 times before you find the best setup.
Calibrate your TV
You may not be aware of this, but your TV will most likely not be tuned to deliver the best video quality when unpacked – you will have to calibrate it yourself. While you can do it manually, the best way to do it is to use a DVD-based calibration tool. You probably already have a THX Optimizer DVD (almost any DVD with the THX logo has it ), but you can also download the AVS HD 709 Calibration Disc for free. For $ 2, you can buy a pair of blue filter glasses to help you perform even better with the program. If you’re a fan of the Criterion Collection , all of their DVDs also come with calibration tools.
If you’re not keen on the free options, for about $ 20, you can get a more fully featured calibration DVD that explains the process better. Favorites include the Sound & Vision Home Theater Setup CD , Avia Home Theater Guide, and the Digital Video Essential Home Theater Optimizer . (S&E is probably best for beginners.) They also help you calibrate the sound (which we’ll come back to later), so it’s very handy. Check out our TV Calibration Guide for complete step-by-step instructions.
Many people also recommend using a colorimeter to calibrate your TV. This is not required, but if you have a local photography store that rents them, you can rent one for significantly less than what is listed on the label .
Another thing to worry about is that your TV will look different at different times of the day (and even with different inputs). Many TVs should allow you to create different color presets, and PC World recommends calibrating your TV once during the day and once at night, and creating presets for both so you can switch between them and get the best picture possible. no matter what kind of light comes through your blinds. Simply put, if you usually watch TV at the same time of the day — for example, at night — you might be better off calibrating at night. For more information on calibrating your TV, I highly recommend checking out the complete PC World manual – it has a lot of helpful information.
Sound
The other half of the home theater equation is sound. Chances are, even if you have a surround sound system and have thought about your speaker setup well, it is still not optimal. However, with these settings, you will find that you can get much better sound from your system in just a few minutes.
Place the speakers correctly
You would think that you can just put speakers on either side of the TV and you should be fine, right? Not so fast: For the best sound, you really want to take distance and angle into account.
Dolby has some pretty good diagrams to help you, but the point is simple: Try making an equilateral triangle with the left and right front speakers as two points and your ears as the third point. This means that if you are 8 feet from your TV, your speakers should be 8 feet apart (that is, about 4 feet from the center of the TV). Tilt them 22 to 30 degrees as shown above, and make sure they are as close to ear level as possible, maybe fl. If you have a 5.1 system, place these speakers appropriately. Don’t get too hung up on the angles of the speakers – a little maneuver is just fine if you have other furniture along the way.
Setting up a subwoofer is a matter of itself. Your subwoofer can usually be placed anywhere as long as it is not in a corner or other confined space. Try a few different places to see where it sounds best. If you really want to go crazy, you can try the previously mentioned “subwoofer crawl,” in which you place the sub where you normally sit and then get on all fours and crawl around the room listening for sounds. the best sound. When you find a place with the best sound, swap the locations of the subwoofer and it should maintain approximately the same sound quality.
Adjust the volume and crossover of your subwoofer
In a sound system, your receiver needs to know when to send sounds to the subwoofer and when to play them on the main speakers. To make sure it’s set up correctly, you’ll need to tweak a few things: your system’s crossover frequency , subwoofer volume, and speaker size setting . It’s actually pretty straightforward – if you want to really dive into it, Audioholics.com has a great guide to bass management , but we’ll cover the basics right here.
It works like this: your speakers have a “crossover frequency” that determines whether sound is sent to the speakers or to the subwoofer. If you have a dual speaker setup, the crossover frequency setting will be on your subwoofer and you can adjust it as described here . If you have a surround sound system, however, you will want to turn the crossover frequency of the subwoofer off and control it using your receiver’s main menu. If you cannot turn off the crossover frequency of your subwoofer, increase it as high as possible – the effect will be much the same.
So, to set up your subwoofer, do the following:
- First I installed the crossover. This is the frequency at which your subwoofer begins to produce bass notes. Typically you want your crossover to be installed where your speakers start to roll off – for example, my speakers cannot go much below 80Hz, so my sub’s crossover is set to around 80. You can find this in your speaker specs or just slow increase it until the sound in the speakers “rounds out” (so that the speakers and the subwoofer are not playing the same notes).
- Then adjust the gain. This is an important part that I have done wrong, very, very many times, but it is also the simplest. Start playing the song and turn off the subwoofer until you can no longer hear the subwoofer. Then turn up the gain just enough so that you can begin to hear it begin to fill in the bass. That’s all it takes.
- Finally, if you have a phase switch, switch it between 0 and 180 degrees and see if you can hear the difference. One may sound better than the other, depending on your room and equipment. You can find out more about which phase here , but in practice it’s pretty simple: pick the one that sounds best.
(The text above is taken from our guide to subwoofer volume .)
Finally, set the “size” of the speaker on the receiver (if it has the appropriate setting). Most surround sound settings have a “small” or “large” setting for each speaker. Any speakers set to “large” will not transmit their low frequencies to the subwoofer – this means that your speaker will spend most of its power trying to output those low sounds. Regardless of how large your speaker is in real life, it doesn’t really matter: you are probably best off setting all speakers to “small”. There are, of course, different views on this subject (if you really want, you can set your main left and right speakers to “large”), but just setting them all to “small” is as easy as it gets, and your system is almost guaranteed to sound great.
Adjust speaker volume
The final step is to adjust the volume of each speaker in your surround setup (if you only have two speakers, you can skip this step). Sit in your listening or viewing area and adjust the overall volume to the level you’re used to. Your receiver should come with a test tone for setting volume levels – turn it on and let it play through every speaker in the system. Adjust the volume of each channel until they all sound the same. If you really want to get a good calibration, the aforementioned video calibrated DVDs will also calibrate your audio, so you can do both in one fell swoop.
There are a few things you’ll want to watch out for when doing this. Make sure you don’t raise the rear speakers too high. Ecoustics explains this common mistake:
The surroundings are not meant to blow you up with accurate direction indicators, except for certain hard-blended sounds that happen offscreen during gunfights, fights, chase sequences, and the like. Most of the time, you might wonder if surround sound is on – until, say, a rainstorm, an outdoor scene, or perhaps a phone call off-screen suddenly reminds you of just how much realism a surround sound system is capable of.
Feel free to experiment – if dialogues seem too quiet compared to explosions and other sound effects, there is no shame in increasing the center channel a little (despite what many home theater enthusiasts would tell you). Start with basic guidelines and customize to your liking.
Many of you may have already set up your home theater systems for this, so if you have some experience, please share your thoughts with us. What worked for you? What didn’t you do? Which settings mattered more than others? Mute comments.