5 Annoying Things About Setting Up a Home Theater.

June 18, 2012

Over the past couple of years, I've put a lot of time and money into my home theater. It started with a surround sound system, because after all, I'm a musician--I should be listening to music on the best equipment I can afford. Of course, it feels silly to have half a dozen little speakers screwed to the walls all over the place, and my grandma's old 13-inch CRT television. I went shopping for a 32-inch anything and came home with a 42-inch plasma.

Hey, it was on sale. And if you give a mouse an HD TV, he'll need a blu-ray player and HD satellite service to go with it.

In a previous article, I wrote a little bit about hedonic adaptation. It's the idea that when you get something nice and new, it feels good for a little while, then you get used to it and want something even better. Every time I watch a blu-ray, the little voices in my head remind me how awesome my setup looks and sounds, because I don't want to fall prey to hedonic adaptation. I can't afford to, I'm out of money. And while throwing some speakers around the room and smacking a flat screen on the wall is good enough for some, I want to make sure I'm getting my money's worth. There are a few aspects of the home theater experience that seem to bring out the OCD in me (and a lot of other people too). For example:

1. HDTV Calibration

When most people buy a new TV, they take it out of the box, plug it in, turn it on, and if they see a Kardashian, they're done. Maybe If the picture's too bright they turn down the Brightness, or if people are purple, they mess with the Tint, but not much more. Unfortunately, watching a TV on its factory settings pretty much guarantees the worst picture. See, a TV's factory settings are designed to make the TV look good under the bright lights of a Wal-Mart, not in your living room with the lights off. Those settings are called 'torch mode' because they will burn out a TV much faster than if it was properly calibrated.

It doesn't help that most of the controls on a TV are not named in a way that makes any sense. 'Brightness' actually controls darkness, while 'Contrast' controls brightness. To complicate matters, most new TVs come with dozens of settings that, at best, should only be messed with by an experienced TV tech, or at worst, screw up the picture even more. And don't bother searching the internet for your particular TV's 'optimal' settings. You'll find so much conflicting information, you'll end up more confused than when you started. Here's my advice, based on my experiences with my own TV:

1. Use a warm color temperature. Everything might look yellow at first, but once you get used to it, you'll be shocked at how realistic things start to look (especially sunlit outdoor scenes).
2. Turn off all picture enhancers. These will vary depending on your brand of TV. Most of them just mess with the picture. On my Samsung plasma, I also turn the cell light all the way up, sharpness all the way down, and set the color space to 'auto'.
3. Trust your eyes... The THX Optimizer is a very user friendly calibration tool that comes on many DVDs. You probably already own it. It's especially good for getting brightness right. Contrast is much more subjective. If your eyes or head hurt after watching TV for a while, it's too high. Color and Tint can be adjusted accurately with blue-filter glasses (which you can buy), or if your TV has a blue-mode (in which only the blue pixels are on). Otherwise, you'll have to eyeball it. The easiest way is to try to get flesh tones looking natural. People have an innate sense of what human skin is supposed to look like. Keep in mind that every TV show, channel, and movie is mixed differently, so find a happy medium. I can live with Suze Orman looking orange as long as Stephen Colbert looks right.

4...But not too much. At first, I adjusted my Plasma TV to look like my old CRT, because that's what I was used to. And it looked great. When I changed my settings to what was more correct, it looked strange at first, but once I got used to it, my old settings looked completely flat and washed out. A poorly calibrated HDTV will just look like a good TV, but a well calibrated HDTV should look like a window into a real little world on the other side of the screen.

5. Set it, and forget it. At some point, good enough has to be good enough. There is no perfect in TV calibration. Get it close enough, and leave it alone, or you'll go crazy.

2. Connections

Nothing annoys me more than when somebody spends $1000 on an HDTV and blu-ray player, then connects them with a little yellow video cable. Why even bother?

I know, it's their TV, they can do with it as they please. They just could've bought an old VCR from the Goodwill for a lot less, is all I'm saying. To assist people who just don't know any better, here's the rundown on video connections.

1. HDMI stands for high definition multimedia interface. It's by far the best connection type. Not only does it carry the widest range of resolutions, but it also carries surround sound and control signals too. It's digital, so there's no signal degradation (not even with cheap cables, so get them at Five Below and save a ton of cash).

3. Aspect Ratio

They say the camera adds ten pounds, but the TV can add another hundred. When old standard definition TV shows are shown on widescreen TVs, the picture is often stretched to fill the screen, resulting in instant obesity for all characters.

My parents are clueless about this. They say that they don't care, as long as there's a picture on the screen, but it still irritates me. They absolutely refuse to touch the format button. My dad says he doesn't understand why everything isn't put into the proper aspect ratio by the TV automatically, and I can kind of see his point. My rebuttal is always, "How hard is it to push a button?" and his response is, "I shouldn't have to." I don't think I've been in a doctor's waiting room with an HDTV on which everybody didn't look like a blob. Please, just push the format button, please? For my sake?

4. Speaker Placement

So you finally have your TV connected, calibrated, and looking great, but you're only halfway there. The internal speakers in most TV's are horrible, so some kind of sound system is a requirement for a decent home theater. Good old fashioned two-speaker stereo still has its holdouts, but most home theater buffs go for surround sound. 5.1 is the most popular kind of system (5 speakers and 1 subwoofer), but systems with 6, 7, and 9 speakers (and multiple subwoofers) are available. Some systems have more speakers behind the viewer than in front. Figuring out where to put all those speakers is a subject of considerable debate.

1. The Center Speaker should ideally be placed at ear level directly in front of the sweet spot (the ideal listening position, or best seat in the house). The problem is, unless you're a mutant, your ears and eyes are at about the same height, which puts the center speaker right in the middle of the TV screen.

Movie theaters use acoustically transparent screens that don't muffle the sound of the speakers behind them, but in a home theater you'll have to settle for putting it either right above or below the TV.
2. The Right and Left Speakers should be placed at ear level on the (duh) right and left. If you mostly listen to music, then the distance between the speakers should be equal to the distance between you and the midpoint between them (picture a triangle with you and the speakers as corners, and where the base and height are the same). For movies, this may be too far apart. Since sounds in movies that are mixed hard right or left usually come from objects just off screen, putting the speakers right beside the TV screen works pretty well. If you're alone, you have my sympathy, and you can point the speakers at the sweet spot (this is called toe-in).

If you watch TV or listen to music with friends, face the speakers parallel into the room.
3. The Surround Speakers are more tricky to get right. Generally, they should be slightly behind and above ear level ('slightly' being very subjective). You don't want them pointed directly at your ears, because you're not supposed to 'hear' surround speakers most of the time. They create ambiance at atmosphere. Resist the temptation to turn them up so you can hear them better for the same reason. They should be subtle.

5. Positioning the Subwoofer

Even though it seems like it should be simple, this has got to be, by far and away, the most difficult and annoying part of setting up a home theater. The subwoofer works through a neat little auditory illusion. See, our ears are great at determining the source of a sound, but only for higher frequencies. Our ears are very bad at figuring out where low sounds are coming from.

This isn't really a problem because almost all low sounds have overtones, higher frequencies that are layered on top of the lower frequencies. These overtones are largely what make different instruments sound different, a quality called timbre. In a home theater, it's the reason you can have a dozen little tiny speakers everywhere, and just one subwoofer. Even though all the low frequencies come out of the subwoofer, your ears perceive the little speaker on the other side of the room as the source of the sound because that's where the high frequencies are coming from.

That's the theory, anyway. When it works perfectly, it creates the illusion that the subwoofer isn't making any sound--that all of the sound is coming from the other speakers. In practice, it can be extremely difficult to find a place to put the subwoofer where you can't tell it's the source of the low frequencies. It's called being able to localize the subwoofer, and it's incredibly distracting when you're watching a movie and all the explosions are coming from a little black box in the corner of the room.

It's a game of inches. I'm always surprised by how moving the subwoofer a little bit in one direction or the other can completely change how everything sounds. It's a lot easier if you have a friend move the subwoofer around the room while you sit in the sweet spot and listen, but if you don't have a friend you'll have to run back and forth yourself. Some people recommend putting the subwoofer right below the TV so, even if you can localize it, at least the sounds are coming from the right direction. I think this is the lazy approach. Trust me, there is somewhere in that room where the subwoofer will seem to disappear, and you can not and will not stop until you find it. Every time you hear a sound coming from the subwoofer, your eyes will immediately be drawn to it. It will taunt you, calling you a quitter. It can end up being an all day project. And just because you can't localize it from the sweet spot doesn't mean it's right anywhere else. If you're watching a movie with a bunch of other people, someone in that room is listening exclusively to the subwoofer.

This article is by no means comprehensive. If you decide to setup a home theater of your own, you'll run into a million other little details I haven't mentioned here. Don't worry, though, it's all worth it.

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