Having a home theater is one of the ways to make your home ten times more interesting. Apart from that, home theaters will generally return about 65% of their purchase price. Here are a few of the things you need to know about home theater installation before you make the investment.
What You Need to Set Up a Home Theater System
To set up your home theater system, there are several components you will need. These include the following:
- Home theater receiver and TV
- Antenna, cable, or satellite box
- Disk player that supports DVD
- Media streamer
- DVD recorder
- Loudspeakers
- Subwoofer
- Connection cables and speaker wire
- Sound meter
The Home Theater Connection Pathways
After gathering together all the important components, you will need to think about how you will connect everything together. Think of all the connections as roads that deliver goods from producers to distributors. For instance, you have all your source components like cable boxes and media streamers. These are the starting points. On the other hand, you have your TVs and loudspeakers as the delivery points. The task you have with connections is to get the audio and video signals from their sources to the display and sound outputs.
Connecting Home Theater Components
A basic home theater for your home will have a TV, AV receiver, Blu-ray or DVD player, and a media streamer. For your sound output, you must have at least five speakers. Make sure there is a subwoofer for 5.1 surround sound on your speaker set up.
The Home Theater Receiver
This is the component that will handle most of your source connectivity for your home theater installation. It also helps you to switch, decode, process, and amplify audio. Most of the audio and video components that are part of your home theater will run through the home theater receiver. To send video from the receiver to the TV, you need a connection from the AV receiver’s television monitor output to a video input on the television.
This is a very simple connection, and nowadays, all you need is a simple HDMI cable. You will then need to find a way to get sound from the TV to the home theater. For this, you can connect the television’s audio outputs to the TV or Aux audio inputs on your AV receiver.
These are the basics for setting up your home theater. Before you switch everything on, make sure that every connection is made properly. It is also advisable to lower the volume before you attempt to test the home theater installation.