10 easy fixes for your Home Theater
Alan Lofft has 10 tips on Home Theater fixes that you can do yourself. The points mentioned by Lofft are for the dedicated Home Theater rooms. However it is also very good to use these tips in your living room when you have installed the home theater set there.
- Hiding speakers inside custom cabinetry.
- Using in-ceiling surround speakers.
- Building square home theater rooms.
- Using Equalization Systems as an electronic ‘band-aid.’
- Blowing more than 50 percent of your client’s home theater budget on a big-screen TV.
- Trying to use one small subwoofer to fill a huge room.
- Over-treating home theater rooms.
- Differentiating between subs or speakers that are “good for home theater” and “great for music.”
- Using pivoting tweeters to make up for poor speaker design.
- Using cube speakers to hide surround sound.
- Don’t spend any money on the wiring.
1. Hiding speakers inside custom cabinetry.
Speakers already have their own enclosures (cabinets), and are carefully engineered to perform at their best in a freestanding location… At the least, deep bass performance will be uneven or boomy and hollow sounding, and the midrange and treble tonal balance may become noticeably nasal or muddy and congested.
This is a good point. You will notice a big difference for the bass once you put a stand alone speaker into a cabinet. On the other hand many people do not want the home theater set to interfere with the interior. A large stand alone speaker useally has a great impact on the interior. Therefore using custom-install speaker will have a good performance and will be not visible. This would satisfy usually both parties, i.e. good sound AND good interior decorating.
2. Using in-ceiling surround speakers.
Resist the urge to use in-ceiling surround speakers because you will not get the enveloping surround effects and precise directional cues originally conceived by movie directors and film sound designers. If in-ceiling speakers worked well for surround sound, commercial cinemas and THX Dolby theaters would use them—and they don’t. Dolby Digital and dts 5.1-channel movie soundtracks are mixed with the surround speakers on each side of the mixing theater about 2ft. or more above ear level, in order to imitate the enveloping sound field created by the surrounds on the side walls of movie theaters (plus a couple on the back wall behind you).
Another point that can easy be agreed upon. The explanation speaks for itself. Again at some points it is quite difficult to do without. Then the sound quality has to suffer somewhat from the interior qualities. To harmonize surround, side and back speakers, with the interior it could be sometimes the best alternative to satisfy both parties.
3. Building square home theater rooms.
Avoid square rooms because deep bass sound waves really misbehave in square rooms. They produce “standing waves,” which result in areas of extreme bass emphasis and nulls (areas of no audible bass). Trying to fix the standing-wave problem after the fact is virtually impossible. Instead, select a rectangular shaped room with dimensions (length, width, and height) that are not evenly divisible by a common denominator. That way, you’ll minimize standing waves.
This should often not be to difficult, especially when it is in a living room, which usually is not square. Also when you have a dedicated room that has square dimensions, it is easy to change with one extra wall, in which you can build a hidden cabinet for the installation and DVDs for example.
4. Using Equalization Systems as an electronic ‘band-aid.’
Although the theory of auto-room equalization built into receivers as well as separate EQ units is a seductive one, the truth is that EQ cannot be used to compensate for bad rooms and poor speaker choices. Accurate loudspeakers, careful placement that acknowledges the laws of physics, and professional measurement and installation will always cede the best results.
OK, it may well be a band-aid but in some cases it is very difficult to put the speaker in the best spot. Then you have to put the speakers somewhere else, and the only way to ‘fix’ this is with the auto-room equalization. On the top models (i.e. Denon AVC-A1XV) of some brands I have found very good results while incorporating speakers into the home-theater that was build into the living room.
5. Blowing more than 50 percent of your client’s home theater budget on a big-screen TV.
Don’t blow a home theater budget on a super-expensive HD projector, screen, and furniture, while leaving too little for home theater speakers and amplification. In other words, match your high-definition visual image with a similarly high-quality soundscape from a fine home theater surround sound system.
This is so true. A $999 home-theater-in-a-box is not a good fit for a $3,000 display. Often people spend a lot of money on the screen and forget about the speakers, surround amplifier and DVD. My suggestion would be to at least spend the same amount of money on the image as on the sound part. So when you have a budget of $ 4.000 spend $ 2.000 on the projector and screen or on a LCD/plasma TV and spend the other $ 2.000 on the amplifier, 6 speakers and DVD player/recorder.
6. Trying to use one small subwoofer to fill a huge room.
If the Home Theater room is larger than usual (4,000 cubic feet or bigger, or bigger than 1200 square meters) or has vaulted ceiling, you should definitely consider running an extra subwoofer. Big rooms really devour deep bass; so two subs will generate enough sound pressure to fill the place. They’ll also give you smoother distribution of extended bass over several different listening locations.
If the room has dimensions of for example 20′ x 14′ x 8′, or about 2,100 cubic feet, or (6 x 4 x 2,5m) 640 square meter, one subwoofer should be enough. A subwoofer with an internal amplifier equal in size to the full output of your receiver and a 10in. or 12in. driver should deliver solid deep bass extension for music and movie soundtracks. Full output means here; full power for one channel + 1/8 power x the number of other channels. So if you have a big home theater room adding an extra subwoofer could make a real difference experiencing the movies.
7. Over-treating home theater rooms.
Don’t get carried away with the notion that you have to install special bass traps and sound-deadening materials in your new home theater room. Well-engineered loudspeakers designed for home listening have their tonal balance adjusted so they’ll sound smooth and natural when heard in living rooms that are typically furnished.
Rooms that have shapes that are mentioned in point 3 could require sound-deadening materials to fix the problems with standing waves. Often decorating with soft furniture and curtains is enough for a good sound in your room. The formula for a fine-sounding room for your music or home theater is to have a reasonable mix of domestic furnishings that reflect and break up sounds as well as providing some absorption.
8. Differentiating between subs or speakers that are “good for home theater” and “great for music.”
A smooth, accurate, and transparent loudspeaker or subwoofer doesn’t distinguish between different types of sound. It does not know which electrical signals are reaching it from the amplifier, DVD player, CD player, or turntable, whether it’s the sound of a summer rain storm on a movie soundtrack, an explosion in a war picture, the dynamic musical shadings of a full orchestra, or the full-bore impact of a rock band.
Ha, I agree completely with this point. Some audio fanatics tend to disagree with this point, but I consider this more to be their issue and not mine.
9. Using pivoting tweeters to make up for poor speaker design.
An excellent speaker has the dispersion patterns for its midrange/woofers and tweeters optimized so that listeners within a fairly broad angle and at different locations in the room will receive a balanced mix of bass, midrange, and treble sound. Moving a tweeter destroys the dispersion pattern of the speaker, producing “hot” areas of too much treble and too little midrange for some listeners and the reverse for other listeners.
10. Using cube speakers to hide surround sound.
They may look cute and almost disappear into the room’s decor, but those tiny satellite speakers can’t move enough air. They’re OK at quiet background levels, but the little 2in. cones inside get rattled when things start to rock and roll. And a subwoofer will not fill in all the important upper bass and lower midrange sounds that the 2in. cubes can’t handle. Any speaker with a claim to authentic high fidelity, even a fairly compact model, must divide the sound spectrum into at least two segments, the bass/midrange for the woofer, and the treble for the tweeter. Remember to scale the size of the speakers to the size of the space that needs to be filled.
This point is really the biggest issue for me. Often clients ask about a home theater and have really small sized speakers in their mind. It is very difficult to change their mindset to bigger speakers that require some space in the room. It helps only with demonstrating and comparing two speaker sets. With this real life experience it is up to the client to decide to have a great compromise on sound quality if they do not want any larger or in-wall speakers in the living room.
Bonus tip:
11. Don’t spend any money on the wiring.
This mistake also requires some explanation. Often people use the standard cables that are supplied with the set or speakers. Consider to spend 10% of your budget on quality cables i.e. inter-connects and speaker-wiring. A quality cable can really lift the sound quality of your set. So spending some extra money here, will be its money worth for the rest of the set.
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