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 November 1, 2005 Some Basic Home-Theater TipsThe transition from old-fashioned TV watching to home theater is being attempted by more and more people, but many find making the change a daunting process. It is a daunting process, but with a little planning and experimentation, it’s not an impossible one. Here are some pointers for the newcomer. With any sort of system, where the equipment and the people go are important considerations. These positions are a complex matter with an audio/video system, and your room’s physical attributes will profoundly affect what sort of equipment you buy -- which, in turn, may influence the level of performance you can achieve. So before you do anything, determine where your home theater will be. For most of us, the areas available for this -- living room or family room, say -- are quite limited, and impose different demands. A full-blown home theater involves a lot of equipment that’s not always easy to hide. If you intend to use the room for other purposes, you may not want it to look like an electronics warehouse. One consideration might be where your present stereo system is set up. You may decide to upgrade what you have now, although that’s not always best from a technical point of view. Or you may prefer to do your music listening in one room and your video watching in another. Bear in mind, however, that if your kids are watching an action drama in the basement, your Mozart in the living room is bound to suffer. Whatever room you choose, determine next where the main viewing position will be, because that will dictate where you can put the video screen. Obviously, it must be centered in front of the main seat and face it squarely. Usually, the shape of the room will restrict where you can put the furniture, and the distance between viewers and screen is likely to be more or less fixed. That, in turn, narrows the choice of screen sizes appropriate for that room: a 27" screen 20’ away will be just as unsuitable as a 60" screen only 4’ away. One of the major advances in consumer electronics has been the upgrading of the humble TV set to the status of video monitor. Strictly speaking, it’s the inclusion of line-level inputs and outputs that makes a television a monitor, but more recent improvements go way beyond that. As a result, the variety of displays on the market is huge, and the choice of the right one for you is not always easy. Perhaps the first thing to consider is screen size. For a given room, the range is relatively narrow: there’s little point in a screen that’s too small, and one that’s too large can be uncomfortable to watch. If theatrical practice is your guide, the minimum screen size fills an angle of 30 degrees from your seat; that’s the equivalent of sitting in the very last row of a theater, but it’s a reasonable starting point -- you’ll probably want something larger. The narrow angle of the flap on a no.10 business envelope is about 30 degrees, so you can use that as a guide. Tear the flap off an envelope and, sitting in your regular spot, sight along the edges of the paper and note where the lines would hit the wall against which you plan to place the monitor, or have someone stretch a tape measure between the two points. The distance between them is the minimum width of the monitors you should consider. Television screen sizes are always specified as diagonal measurements, but you can convert your minimum horizontal requirement to diagonal by multiplying by 1.25 for a conventional 4:3 screen or 1.15 for a 16:9 screen. Thus, if you need a screen at least 40" wide, you should look at ones with diagonal dimensions of at least 50". The size you come up with will also largely determine the type of set you buy. Up to 35" or so, most sets are conventional cathode-ray tube (CRT) direct-view models, although flat-panel LCD and plasma direct-view displays are becoming more popular as their prices come down; the savings in space is a real attraction. Beyond 40", all are projection sets. Usually these are one-piece rear-projection models that look and operate like large ordinary TV sets, but for very large displays front-projection setups are available, with freestanding projectors that can be mounted on the floor or ceiling. Projectors can use high-output CRTs (good picture but not very bright) or the newer liquid-crystal display (LCD) or Digital Light Processing (DLP) panels (the brightest). Each type has its fans; your choice may have more to do with price than with performance. Increasingly, large-screen sets are "HDTV-ready," which generally means that the older primary consideration of horizontal resolution is nowadays mostly irrelevant. There may be differences among high-definition sets, but virtually all of them perform superbly. On the other hand, sets from different manufacturers can exhibit quite different color balance, contrast, and so forth, so prepare to do extensive showroom watching before you choose. But don’t assume the dealer has adjusted the set properly or optimally, or even knows how to. Get him to give you the remote control and show you how to adjust the picture; if you can get it the way you like it or think it should be, the set is a candidate. If not, not. Try particularly for good skin tones; if those are true, everything else will fall into place. And if the dealer’s showroom is as brightly lit as a drugstore, audition sets elsewhere -- you’ll probably be watching at home in a mostly darkened room, so that’s how you should view your potential choices. It makes little sense to lay out a lot of money on sophisticated display equipment to reproduce only the sort of quality available on VHS tapes that you’ve had for years. Still, you may want to watch those from time to time, and now may be the time to replace your old VCR while you still can. At the very least, you should buy a four-head VCR, in which the separate heads are optimized for the different tape speeds. And hi-fi sound is a must. But DVD is now the only real choice for any videos you might want to rent or buy. The selection is staggering, but not necessarily the prices: you can get a respectable DVD player for the cost of a few discs. If you intend to only watch movies and recycled TV shows, you can go for a simple player. If your home theater will be a multimedia center, however, "universal" players abound that can handle the high-resolution audio formats DVD-Audio and SACD, MP3 files, JPEG pictures, and other such goodies. Such players cost more, but it’s important to buy something that can handle whatever you plan to throw at it. Most of us spend most of our viewing time watching conventional television programs, sometimes recording them, sometimes not. Either way, consider your options for higher-quality video signals. There’s no denying the advantages of cable TV in terms of selection, for instance, but conventional cable signals are often less than pristine. Ultimately, everything is likely to be digital, and that will improve matters immensely. Even now, most cable companies do offer a digital tier, which lets you see images that are roughly of DVD quality. Digital satellite systems offer that technical quality on all channels, at least theoretically; some start out as analog programs, however, and still look like it. Home theater is still in flux. We’re only part of the way there in terms of the final digitizing of television signals -- although there’s lots out there to see if you really want to -- and the video industry is still wrangling about a standard for high-definition DVDs. But things have come a very long way in a relatively short time, and the rewards are great right now, even if you might have to upgrade in the future. ...Ian G. Masters
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