HOME THEATER/ HOME ENTERTAINMENT SPEAKERS
Surround yourself with 5 or 6 speakers. The left, center and right front, the rear left and right. The subwoofer.
And a very important warning!
Rule 1: Turn off the sound in the TV itself. It will compromise your surround sound by smearing the image. Okay to use temporarily, but not with your outboard-of-the-screen speakers.
Why?
They can’t sound as good as outboard models. They won’t have the fidelity, dynamic range (loudness) or bass. They won’t provide the surround sound imaging.
There are many types and kinds of Home Theater speakers:
For example (and this is just an overview, not in depth)
Speaker Types:
Bass Reflex: There’s a hole in the box to let the bass out in a special way
Horn loaded: Can be very loud and dynamic. There’s a metal flaring dealie on the midrange and/or tweeter inside the box.
Electrostatic: VERY lifelike. Not good for bass usually, without a cone woofer helping, or a sub.
Planar: Highly regarded – worth a listen. The plane of the speaker acts as a membrane. (These are dipolar.)
Acoustic Suspension A sealed box with no holes. The air inside dampens (controls) the woofer as it moves back.
Dipole: Two full-range speakers in a single cabinet, wired out of phase with each other and aimed toward the front and back of the room, washing the walls in sound.
Speaker Placements:
Free standing: On the floor, perhaps on stands, perhaps on spikes
Wallmount: On the wall - but remember there are wires
IN the wall: The point of no return
Hanging from the ceiling: Again, how will you run those wires?
IN the ceiling: They should point at your head or be close enough that you hear the higher frequencies which are directional.
Wireless: Little transmitters send sound to speakers which must be plugged in for AC power.
I feel a newsletter about speakers coming on. Subscribe free to the GreatHomeTheater Update.
I know, you want to know WHICH SOUNDS BEST. I can’t tell you – there are too many variables. I will tell you what I’d do. The BIGGEST reason I can’t be sure for YOU is that your room makes all the difference in the world. Rooms resonate at certain frequencies based on their dimensions. They also echo based on the surfaces of and within the room. Where you SIT makes a difference. And your tastes, how loud you want it, etc. Not to mention – do you want to listen to music in this room when you aren’t watching your fancy schmancy screen?
But I said I’d give you some good advice, and I will. You just need to know some things and that’s what I’m doing. The last thing I’d want to do is confuse you. That’s why cinemas-de-recherche.org actually tells you what to do, if you’d rather have that level of advice.
THE LEFT AND RIGHT FRONT, THE CENTER FRONT SPEAKER
These speakers will carry the bulk of the audio chore. They should be as close to full range as possible, and should have very good midrange (tone) capabilities for speech clarity. Since almost all dialogue will be on these speakers (most in the center channel), these are key to a great home theater entertainment experience.
THE LEFT AND RIGHT REAR SPEAKER
Ideally, all your speakers will be part of a system, meaning a designer designed them and ‘voiced’ them to work to their optimum in the positions described. To that, left and right rear are generally ambience enhancers; for example, the scene is in the BATCAVE. You hear the cave reverberations around you. This is sometimes subtle, but it sure does work to suck you in. More: You are watching a street scene. Cars are driving around and behind you. Better: SAVING PRIVATE RYAN – the bullets are ricocheting around you. (This film had amazingly lifelike sound.) You are there. Your left and right rear speakers can be bass shy, compared to your front speakers.
A sidebar about film sound:
VERY FEW of the sound effects in a film are real ‘as it happens’ actual recording… almost all of them (even footsteps) are put in later. This is for reasons of control – sometimes something doesn’t sound like it looks – or for practical film-making considerations - noise on the set, etc. The more a filmmaker can isolate each element, the better he/she can balance and FIX it in post-production, when the whole film is assembled from all its parts.
I was in a studio while the mixer was trying different gun shot sound effects out. The gun on screen, a snub nose .38. The actual sound used, a howitzer (cannon.)
So, that’s why they call it movie magic. They weren’t really shooting live ammo at Tom Hanks.
THE SUBWOOFER – the pulse of your home theater experience.
Why do they call it a sub? Does it have to do with the Navy? No.
Generally, your other speaker boxes will have several speakers inside them; if two, a woofer and wide range tweeter; if three, a woofer, a midrange, and a tweeter. Woofers are low notes, mids are in the middle, and yes, tweeters are for high notes.
The SUB woofer goes lower than the other woofers. It gives you sound almost too low to hear (and sometimes you feel rather than hear). The ear is less sensitive to bass than to midrange tone, where it is most sensitive.
BASS AND ROOMS – a happy marriage?
Bass frequencies have such long wavelengths they can form areas of high and low pressure in a room. This corresponds to areas where it sounds like there’s too much bass over here…. And not enough over here. These are the hills and valleys of the pressure zones.
If you are building from scratch there is some mitigation possible to insure best bass response. We’ll cover that in designing your home theater.
The reason I mentioned two subwoofers is that this configuration can help even out the zones, due to the different placement of each sub. If you’re a beginner, don’t go there.
SUBWOOFER PLACEMENT
If you put your subwoofer into a corner, you greatly increase the bass, but it might not sound the best. You want purity of tone, not simply more ‘one note’ boom. Don’t you? HELLO? CAN YOU HEAR ME???? The key: experiment with subwoofer placement.
IMPORTANT INFORMATION ON HEARING LOSS:
Exposure to certain loud levels of sound can leave you with permanent hearing loss. The ear will rebound from a brief exposure, but NOT from repeated exposure. The louder, the less time before damage occurs. If you’ve heard someone wearing headphones with an IPod across the room, they are probably going to damage their hearing if they keep it up.
I haven’t taken my analyzer into a movie theater – I’d probably be thrown out – but compared to what I see as readings in my listening room, I can tell you many movies are way too loud. You sure don’t want to watch your Hi-Def TV at that volume, night after night.
You’ll see later that I recommend a 100 watt per channel amplifier. I calculate, for almost all speaker sensitivities out there in speakerland, that will be more than enough to be louder than you should listen.
Cheap free advice #1: If you want speakers to PARTY TO, dude, get HORNs. HORN LOADED speakers.
Cheap free advice #2: You can do better than Bose, in my (and others’ opinions) despite their great marketing and resultant popularity. In my opinion. Don’t sue me. If you are a Bose-O, you aren’t alone.
Cheap free advice #3: Size means little.
Cheap free advice #4: All speakers except the subwoofer, if you have one, should point at your face. Even the back ones. If they are in the ceiling and not quite “at” you, that’s okay. Life is complicated.
The receiver will try to compensate for the kind of speaker you have, and the better ones will even try to match the best sound to your room, because they come with a microphone you put where YOU sit, to set things up, and they do calculations for your space and optimize everything (you can change or modify settings, too.) Sound travels at about 1 foot per millisecond. Good receivers will hold/delay the rear sound till the front sound arrives. You get a better “bubble of sound” that way. Hey, I like that. A good analogy.
Flash: There is at least one ONE SPEAKER BOX, uh, box, out there, that is supposed to fake you out into thinking there are speakers all over the room. I hope to check it out for you. Can they do that? Well, yes, sort of, but the effect will depend on where the listener is in relation to it. You know, the magician doesn’t really saw his assistant in half, but you enjoy the trick, don’t you? You might not be picky, hate wires and think that’s good enough. If you do, I do. It wouldn’t work for me, because I like more toys than that. It’s too easy.
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