WHAT'S A HOME THEATER?

Home Theater is a way to show movies and other programs in your home that’s as much like watching them in a movie theater as you can afford to make it. Or, to say the same thing from a different perspective, the people who make movies and other shows engineer the picture and sound for specific viewing and listening conditions, and a home theater is an attempt to reproduce those conditions as accurately as possible, so as get the experience that the creators intended.

Whether your system is “true” Home Theater or not is a matter of opinion—there aren’t any fixed rules. The key is really whether you’ve tried at all to reproduce the movie-theater experience, or just placed the equipment in the room to keep it out of the way.

What’s so special about a movie theater compared to a TV in a typical home?

• There’s a big screen.
• There are multiple speakers, not only at the front, but along the sides, too.
• The seats face the screen.
• It’s dark.
• The picture is sharp and bright.
• The sound is realistic, and pretty loud.

By contrast, in a typical home, the TV is off to the side (because the couch faces the fireplace or a couple of chairs), the sound comes from the TV’s tiny speaker, there’s too much ambient light, and so on.

Hmmm… it sounds easy to fix things up: rearrange the furniture, get a DVD player, turn down the lights and draw the curtains, and maybe even pipe the DVD sound through your Hi-Fi system instead of the TV.

Right! By all means, do all of that. But, do not go shopping for more equipment until you’ve read the rest of this book, because you need:

• The right TV—they’re too expensive to just overbuy to be safe. (A bigger TV doesn’t automatically make a better TV.)

• Five matching speakers, placed just right, or else the sound will be very uneven and distracting.

• A piece of equipment called an audio/video receiver that controls the other components and amplifies the sound.

• Everything wired together with the correct cables, or you won’t even get features you paid a lot for, such as a high-resolution picture or digital sound.

Just how much it will cost to get “real” Home Theater equipment?

As of Spring 2002, for $2000 you can get a complete system (TV, receiver, DVD, speakers) that will stun you with the quality of its picture and sound. But, at this price, you have to know exactly what to buy; you could easily put the whole $2000 into a big projection TV and end up with a lousy picture and terrible sound. Spend, say, $10,000 and you can still end up with poor choices, but at that price it will at least look and sound great. (There’s lots more about different size budgets and how to spend them in Chap. 7.)

Why DVDs are Essential to HOME THEATER

Throughout this book, when I’m talking about program sources, I’ll refer mostly to DVDs. Occasionally I’ll mention HDTV (high-definition TV), videotape, audio CDs, and other sources. But if it sometimes seems as if Home Theater is for just playing DVDs, there’s a reason: DVDs are today’s only widely-available source for high quality picture and sound.

Theonly other choice is HDTV, but it’s not a practical choice for most people because of its limited availability and even more limited programming. (Much more limited than the 10,000 available DVD titles.) True, HDTV will be practical someday, but there’s still another reason for emphasizing DVD in this book: If you’re careful, everything you do to optimize your Home Theater system for DVDs will make it ideal for HDTV as well.

Asfor other audio/video sources such as standard-definition (i.e., not “high”) cable or satellite, videotape, laserdisc, etc., they are vastly inferior to DVD (I’ll explain why later) and, anyway, they’ll play as well as they can on a DVD-oriented Home Theater system—there’s no need to go out of your way for them.

If audio-only sources such as CDs are especially important to you—that is, if you listen attentively to CDs while sitting facing the speakers—then you might want to beef up the surround system a bit and pay more attention to the two main speakers, and I’ll explain how to do that in Chap. 3. Otherwise, your DVD-oriented HOME THEATER system will play CDs just great.

As for why DVDs are so good at reproducing Home Theater video and audio, I’ll get to that later.