New Accessories Make Building Home Theater Kits A Breeze

Multi-channel audio has become mainstream and vendors have come up with many types of basic and more sophisticated technologies like wireless surround sound speakers, virtual surround sound to simplify the installation of home theater kits. I will review the latest trends to find out which devices in fact work. I will also give some guidance for picking the ideal components.

While in the past installing a TV has been relatively easy, the appearance of multi-channel audio has made installing home theater systems much more difficult by requiring a number of external speakers to create surround sound. The most commonly used 5.1 surround sound format requires setting up a total of 6 loudspeakers. These are one center speaker, two front side speakers, two rear speakers and a subwoofer. The more recent 7.1 standard increases this number to 8 by adding two extra side speakers.

Consequently the setup of home theater systems has become a fairly complicated process. Numerous houses are not pre-wired for surround sound. Moreover, long speaker cables are often unattractive. Part manufacturers have developed various technologies to simplify the setup.

One approach is minimizing the quantity of loudspeakers by building virtual loudspeakers. This method applies signal processing to the audio and adds phase shifts and cues to the sound which would usually be broadcast through the remote loudspeaker. Because the signal processing is based on how the human hearing detects the origin of audio, the sound components which underwent signal processing can be mixed with the front speaker components and broadcast by the front speakers. The signal processing has an effect that will trick the listener into presuming that the audio is originating from an alternate location.

Virtual surround avoids the remote loudspeakers and simplifies the setup and also avoids long speaker cable runs. Then again, it also has a downside. The shape of each human’s ear is somewhat dissimilar. As a result everybody processes sound in a different way. The signal processing of these virtual surround systems is based on a standard model which was calculated with a standard ear. However, virtual surround will not function equally well for every person.

An additional method for avoiding long speaker cord runs is to make use of wireless surround sound devices or wireless speakers. A wireless product consists of a transmitter and one or several wireless amplifiers. The transmitter connects to the source. The wireless amplifiers connect to the remote loudspeakers. The transmitter will often have amplified speaker inputs in addition to line-level inputs and have a volume control to adjust it to the source audio level.

Some wireless speaker systems are designed to connect 2 speakers per wireless amplifier. A superior solution would have a wireless amplifier for every remote speaker to avoid the wire runs between each of the 2 remote speakers. Entry-level wireless systems employ FM transmission or audio compression which will deteriorate the sound quality to some extent. More sophisticated wireless kits employ uncompressed digital audio broadcast. To be certain that all loudspeakers are in sync in a multi-channel application, make certain that you choose a wireless system that has an audio latency of just a few milliseconds at most. Otherwise there will be a noticeable echo type result. Many wireless products work in the 900 MHz and 2.4 GHz frequency bands. A number of products utilize the less crowded 5.8 GHz frequency band and consequently have less competition from other wireless devices.

Another method, which is often referred to as sound bars uses side-reflecting speakers. The audio that would ordinarily be broadcast by the remote speakers is instead sent by speakers at the front. These front speakers broadcast the sound at an angle. Then the audio is reflected by the side and rear walls and appears to be coming from besides or behind the viewer. This solution works best in a square room with minimum interior design and obstacles. It will not work well in a lot of real-world scenarios with diverse room shapes however.