The Home Theatre

The movies are set to move from the cinema house into your living rooms। The home theatre experience is becoming a reality in many Indian homes। Here we take a quick glance at what makes that perfect home theatre setup.

Wouldn’t it be nice to watch the latest movies in the comfort of your home while still getting the theatre experience? It’s not the popcorn we are talking about - something more along the lines of surround sound and the big picture. Home entertainment just seems to be getting bigger and better, what with the advent of flat-screen TVs and DVD players, both of these well within the budget of an average household.

A number of companies offer what they call a home theatre experience. In most cases though, these setups are nothing more than a few speakers bundled with a DVD/VCD player. (The TV remains your existing model.) A real home theatre setup, however, requires more than just wiring up a few speakers and placing them in the four corners of your living room. There is a fair bit of acoustics involved in getting the right home theatre experience - this includes speaker placement and also selection of the size of your screen.

Stereo, 7.1 And More

Sound systems and speakers have come a long way from the simple phonogram. Today you have a variety of systems to choose from, be it satellite speakers placed in the corner of your room and subwoofer at the foot of your TV stand, or the elaborate multiple speaker setup that can reproduce each little sound. So moral of the story is that the more the number of satellite speakers you have the better it is, right? Wrong! Though a multiple-satellite-speaker setup will give you richer sound compared to simple stereo speakers, for a true theatre experience it is also important to have a good sound format.

DTS (Digital Theatre Surround) and Dolby Digital are two of the most commonly used sound formats across the world. DTS is a multi-channel surround-sound format used for commercial and consumer applications, that is, in movie halls and home theatre systems. It is primarily used for in-movie sound, both on film and on DVD. The basic and most common version of the format is a 5.1 channel system, supporting five primary speakers and a subwoofer. However, newer variants currently available support up to nine primary audio channels.

DTS’ main competitors are Dolby Digital and SDDS (Sony Digital Dynamic Sound), although only Dolby Digital and DTS are used on DVDs and implemented in home theatre hardware. Once you have the sound format figured out, it’s all about the speaker setup. The most commonly used setup is 5.1. This requires a left, centre and right front speakers, left and right surround speakers, and a subwoofer that produces the bass from all the main channels - or which may only do so for those speakers incapable of doing so. 6.1 channel sound is similar to 5.1, but there is an added centre-rear channel. The number of speakers in a setup can thus be increased for richer sound quality.

It is important to note that the sound channels offered to the speakers may be original, individual channels - or they may decode additional channels from the surround channels.

For the true movie-going experience, however, you’d need surround sound, and stacking up your 5.1-channel sound setup in a cluster is not the way to get it. As per the definition, surround sound is the spatial imaging of sound from one dimension onto two or three dimensions. Surround sound is generated in many ways. The simplest is to use several speakers around the listener to play audio coming from different directions. Another method involves processing the audio using sound localisation techniques to simulate a 3D sound field using headphones. More importantly surround sound is not limited to placement of speakers along a flat (two-dimensional) plane. Vertically-located audio sources should also be considered.

A very common question is, how do additional speakers yield a better home theatre experience? The centre or middle channel ensures that dialogues always seem to be coming directly from the screen. So viewers sitting at the side, too, would feel as if it’s emanating from the screen. Your additional speakers at the side relay the ambient sound and the secondary audio, such as the background score. The heart-pounding bass is, of course, courtesy the subwoofer. Once you have a sound idea about the audio setup, it’s time to take a look at the big picture.