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Sound & Vision June 2000 • Vol.8 Issue 6 Page(s) 106-111 in print issue	Add To My Personal Library
Home Theater Rockin’ Your Castle

In this age of cocooning, when we return from work or school (if we even leave the house), we draw up the moat and make our home into our castle. And more and more of us are building a special nook in our castles, where we can watch a film on a big-screen television with movie theater sound or simply close our eyes and relax, surrounded by our favorite music.

That's what home theater is all about, combining audio and video equipment into an integrated system that will give you and your guests the big picture.

But when people think of home theater, many still picture a room dominated by an enormous big-screen television and enormous, free-standing speakers the size of the heads on Easter Island, blasting booming bass and rumbling on-screen explosions.

The good news is that both the size of the components and their price tags come in all shapes and sizes. You can enjoy both home theater and your home, without totally surrendering a room, or your pocketbook, to the black boxes.

Whether you like "American Beauty" or "American Pie," "The Sixth Sense" or "The Seven Samurai," you can put together a home theater setup to match your tastes and budget.

What You'll Need. In creating a home theater, "It's important to balance the investment between the video and the sound," says John Edwards of Los Angeles' Sunset Studio, a leading home theater installer. Just as you wouldn't create a system by surrounding a 13-inch television with totem pole-sized speakers, don't blow your whole budget on a $4,000 television and have nothing left for a quality receiver, amplifier, speakers, and input devices, such as a VCR or DVD (digital versatile disc) player.

Home theater should be a carefully chosen combination of video and audio components, put together in a room set up to achieve a theaterlike experience.

Pulling together a group of aging stereo components won't do it, as today's digital components are designed to play nicely together, particularly the digital decoder you'll need to unlock all the music and sounds of today's movies.

Don't forget to check at Amazon.com when looking for the electronic components, such as a DVD player, of your home theater system.

The minimum for a home theater setup is generally considered to be a 27-inch (measured diagonally) or larger television, a surround sound speaker setup with receiver, amplifier, and decoder, and a high-fidelity VCR or DVD player. You could add a 72-inch flat panel or screen projection television, 50-inch high speakers, a satellite TV system, and a La-Z-Boy/Barcalounger-type chair with a handy refrigerator built in. All it takes is money.

Room With A View. Before you start buying equipment, think about where you're going to put it. Too often, the room is the forgotten component in home theater. No, we're not talking about creating a dark den with black light posters and lava lamps; we're talking about creating a home theater that will fit, in terms of decor and sheer physical size, into your home.

If you're thinking about a 60-inch television and totem pole-sized speakers, you may want to consult a tape measure to determine whether it will even fit through the door (or up the stairs). More importantly, you'll want to check with your spouse, to find out if you really have permission to take over the den with huge speakers and an enormous TV box that needs to be viewed from 15 feet away.

For many people, a simple and discreet solution might be a smaller system with unobtrusive speakers, attached to a 32-inch or smaller television in the family room. Cabinets and armoires can hide away most of the theater's components, giving you unobtrusive access to music even when the television is off. Or if you want to be ostentatious, you could decorate your movie den with plush seats, advanced lighting, or even a velvet rope.

No matter how big or small you go, there are a few basics to watch for in setting up your home theater.

•Too many bare surfaces can cause reflections that add harshness to the sound; throw rugs, carpet, and drapes help cut down on those surfaces.

•Center the seating area between the walls on either side of the room; the walls on which you mount the surround speakers.

•The closer a speaker is to intersecting room surfaces, such as corners, the stronger its bass output. This is great for subwoofers, but your other speakers should be three or four feet away from the walls.

•Most speakers will perform best when they are mounted at the listener's ear level (when the listener is seated).

•Speakers mounted in walls or furniture may require extra sealing, baffling, or damping to minimize reflections.

•Keep tinkering with the speaker placement until you find what's optimum for your listening room.

A small home listening room is usually quite a bit friendlier to good sound reproduction than a large theater. Typical home furnishings help prevent echoes and reverberation, while a family-size audience can mean low background noise. Just insist that they don't talk, chew gum, or take phone calls during screenings.

See It On The Big Screen. The video choices possible for home theater illustrate the range of prices and sizes available. If money and room size (ideally, you should be about 15 feet from a 50-inch television) are no object, why not consider a giant projection television, such as Toshiba's TW56X81? This 56-inch monster, on its speaker pedestal, not only offers the letterbox, or 16:9 aspect ratio (nearly twice as wide as it is tall), wide-screen dimensions of a movie screen, but it's ready for HDTV (high-definition television), with an extra-cost HDTV decoder.

Wath the NFL Monday Night Football broadcast on an RCA HDTV.

HDTV provides a far sharper picture, with more lines of resolution than today's televisions. Currently, only limited numbers of television shows are broadcast this way, although many football games and much of the CBS prime-time schedule, for example, are being broadcast in HDTV. More importantly, the price of these dream HDTVs is still prohibitive. The Toshiba TW56X81, for example, costs $4,899, plus around $700 for an HDTV tuner/decoder.

Our advice: buy a lower-cost system and enjoy it now. As the number of HDTV programs rises and the cost of HDTV drops over the next few years, you can think about upgrading.

The good news is if you haven't shopped for a television in a while, you'll be surprised how far your dollar goes. In the large projection TV category, Best Buy recently advertised a Philips Magnavox 55-inch model, with component inputs for getting the most out of peripherals such as DVD, for $1,399.

In the direct-view category (where you're looking directly at the picture tube, instead of at an image projected from the rear of the television), Sony's KV35S43 offers a 35-inch screen model with easy inputs for devices, such as VCRs or game systems, for $999.99 at Best Buy. And if you're really on a budget, you can score a 27-inch or even a 32-inch television for less than $500; in March 2000, Fry's advertised a 32-inch Sharp stereo color television with remote for just $399. The set even comes with front audio/video inputs, making plugging in your VCR, DVD player, amplifier, and speakers that much easier.

Movie & Music In A Box. The video input for your home theater can come from over-the-air or network television, cable television, satellite systems, such as DIRECTV, or a VCR or a DVD player. You can also use one of the hot new PVRs (personal video recorders) from Tivo or Replay (about $400) to actually find and record up to 14 hours of your favorite shows on their built-in hard drives.

Replay is a personal video recorder (PVR) that lets you record up to 14 hours of your favorite television shows to playback at a more convenient time.

These new products actually let you instantly "rewind" a show you're recording, if you've missed a few minutes. The PVRs also use their built-in modems to search the Internet for TV listing services for shows that you like, building your own network of shows you can watch when it's convenient. There's a monthly fee of about $10 to $15 for this service with both Tivo and Replay.

For most people, though, the two most important home theater inputs will be a DVD player or the venerable old VCR. When it comes to easily recording television, you just can't beat the old VCR, especially with its make-it-easy features, such as on-screen programming, auto clock set (no more blinking 12:00), and VCR Plus for simplified taping.

A new VCR won't set you back much either; Best Buy sells a Sony SLV-N50 hi- fi model with convenient front A/V (audio/video) jacks for easily plugging in Nintendo, Dreamcast, or PlayStation, for example; auto clock set; and Commercial Pass, which gives users the prized ability to skip through commercials on their recorded shows, for just $129.99.

But the VCR is starting to relinquish its crown as the video playback mechanism of choice. While DVD recorders won't be widely available until 2001, DVD's playback advantages over VHS tape include higher resolution, the ability to instantly go to any point on the disc, and a more compact design.

Worldwide spending on DVDs will surpass spending on videotapes by 2003, and there will be DVD players in 625 million homes by 2010, according to Baskerville Communications.

The price of DVD players has also dropped substantially, and their ability to play audio CDs, as well as movies, helps home theater users cut down on the clutter of peripherals and wires that's known as "component proliferation." For example, the Pioneer DVC302D Carousel DVD Changer (Circuit City, $349.99) offers a three-disc DVD/CD changer for continuous music or movie play and includes a built-in Dolby Digital Decoder for surround sound to faithfully reproduce the movie sound effects. If saving money is important to you; however, you can find single-disc DVD players for less than $200.

Your home theater should also be able to work with the television off, to put a little music in your life. Your new DVD player will let you play audio CDs through your home theater's amplifier and speakers. While you can find audio CD players for as little as $100, (and Best Buy recently had a 100-CD Sony CD changer for less than $200), the latest wrinkle in CD audio is recordable CDs. Philips has the CDR770BK ($399.99 at Circuit City), which lets you not only play CDs, but also record your own CDs, with up to 80 minute music mixes.

If you're more into MP3 and downloading your music from the Web, Apex offers the AD600A DVD player ($179.99, Circuit City) that not only plays DVD videos and CD audio, but also lets you play MP3 music that you've recorded onto a CD in your PC. The device has a built-in MP3 decoder, so you don't even have to decompress the music. It's good for up to 12 hours of music (and one heck of a party) from one CD.

Decoding Those Audio Acronyms. When you go to see a film in a movie theater, typically there are a number of loudspeakers strategically placed to surround the audience. Each pumps out different kinds of sounds: music, dialog, and special effects, such as gunshots, jet engines, earthquakes, and so on. Dolby Laboratories is the acknowledged leader in this area. Its Dolby Digital sound, which surrounds the listener with six channels of sound, was first used in movie theaters in 1992, and most 35mm (millimeter) films made since then include a six channel digital soundtrack.

Movie soundtracks recorded using Dolby Digital audio coding, are now available on DVD-Video discs, laser video discs, direct broadcast satellite systems, and digital broadcast television. While you can hear Dolby Digital programs over a regular stereo or Dolby Pro Logic system, you'll need a multichannel Dolby Digital decoder to get its full 5.1-channel sound, which is composed of five full-range channels: left, center, right, left surround, and right surround, plus a sixth low-frequency effect channel (to feel the rumble of an on-screen earthquake.)

DTS (Digital Theater Systems) is a Dolby competitor (think Avis to Dolby's Hertz) that offers its own six-channel (5.1) encode/decode system. DTS also sells a line of DVD videos that use its compression technique; although, these titles will only play in 5.1-channel sound on a system that has a DTS decoder. Dolby Digital is clearly the industry leader, but many home theater buffs choose receivers that can handle both Dolby Digital and DTS formats.

Today's home theater equipment is designed to let you unlock this sound experience. To achieve this, the equipment needs to do two things. The first is to pry six-channel digital sound out of a movie at home viewed from a VCR or DVD player. To achieve this, you need a Dolby and/or DTS decoder. (Dolby and its competitor in film sound, DTS, don't sell products but license their technology to equipment manufacturers.) Typically, manufacturers build decoders into the receiver designed to drive a home theater speaker system, but you can also get a Dolby decoder in some higher-end DVD players.

The second key to achieving true home theater sound is to be surrounded by six-channel sound, as in a movie house. That's why home theater setups come with five speakers and a subwoofer, and they should be placed in a "surround" pattern in your designated home theater room. The point of the five- or six-speaker setups currently sold as home theater audio is to let users play back not just the stereo sound of music, but also to hear the dialog and sound effects as they're broadcast on the big screen.

Home systems today typically have main left and right speakers (to carry the sound channels from stereo music recordings) or multichannel sound tracks, a center channel speaker for dialog and other on-screen sounds, and a surround channel (two rear speakers) designed to immerse you in ambiance and special effects by carrying sounds from bass to treble. In addition to these five speakers, almost all home theater setups include a sixth LFE (low-frequency effect) channel that lets home theater viewers "feel" the rumble of an on-screen earthquake or the roar of an oncoming freight train. The LFE channel is brought to life in a home theater setup through a large speaker called a subwoofer that provides bass effects. (In a Dolby 5.1 channel system, the low-frequency effects channel is the .1.)

Most films and some newer TV movies are currently recorded in Dolby Digital, and most DVD offer Dolby Digital sound. Some films and DVDs are recorded in the competing DTS format. Both Dolby Digital and DTS provide sound in as many as six channels, which your home theater receiver will decode to play over your speakers.

The older Dolby ProLogic, also known as Dolby Surround, format offers only four sound channels. It folds four sound channels into the two audio tracks of regular stereo program sources, then decodes it back into four channels (left, center, right, and surround). It's rare to find current home theater equipment that only supports Dolby Surround, but many older VHS and all DVDs, and many TV shows are recorded in this format, which you can enjoy over new Dolby Digital 5.1 equipment.

The final ingredient in the alphabet soup that is home theater audio is THX. Owned by Star Wars meister George Lucas and Lucas Film, THX is an optional enhancement to either Dolby Digital or DTS that processes multichannel sound to achieve near-movie theater acoustics.

For more information on these sound technologies, as well as set up ideas, visit Dolby Labs (http;//www.dolby.com), DTS Online (http://www.dtstech.com), and Lucas Film THX (http://www.thx.com).

Hardware: Speakers & Receivers. Audio, often overlooked by neophytes, is extremely important to the home theater experience. The good news is you can step up great sound without necessarily spending big money.

Like a computer system, you can choose to buy a complete home theater audio setup or mix and match components. The advantage of a package is that all the equipment, including the cabling to hook up speakers to the receiver, is typically supplied. Packages are a good way to put together a budget home theater setup for less than $500 for five speakers, a subwoofer, and a receiver.

For example, Harman/Kardon (http://www.harmankardon.com) offers a powerful package, including a Dolby Digital receiver with remote, five 40-watt speakers, and a 75-watt powered subwoofer at Circuit City for $699.99.

Buying and matching components, on the other hand, gives you the opportunity to pick out a powerful receiver and a separate speaker set. The receiver is the heart of your home audio setup and serves both to receive FM and AM signals and to distribute the signal to the speakers.

Receivers these days come with lots of bells and whistles. Some receivers include front-panel input jacks to easily connect a videogame or camcorder, while others include an on-screen display, letting you control the receiver with an LCD (liquid-crystal display) touch pad on the receiver (sometimes, a touch pad on the remote). Some receivers feature a bass-boost to make deep sounds louder. Conversely, others include midnight mode, which quiets loud sounds when watching a movie late at night in your thin-walled apartment building.

Our best recommendation: make sure the controls are easy to figure out, adjust, and use; complexity will only impede your enjoyment. You may also want to look for a receiver that will support the upcoming DVD audio standard, as many think DVD audio discs will replace CDs in the near future.

Receivers are available in Dolby Digital-only format (around $400) or with the ability to receive and playback both Dolby Digital and DTS (you can find them priced between $400 and $1,000.) If you're a money-is-no-object type of audiophile, you can quite easily pay up to $2,000 and well beyond, for a product such as the Pioneer Elite VSX-29TX A/V receiver, with THX sound, a powerful amplifier, seemingly thousands of inputs and outputs, touch screen LCD remote controls, and other cutting edge features.

For a more modest sum, you could purchase the Pioneer VSXD508 Dolby Digital (only) receiver, which offers 500 watts of power (100 watts per five channels) and six digital signal processor modes. Recently offered at Best Buy for $299.99, this receiver also provides center channel preamp output for a powered speaker and easy-access rear connections. Add a 27-inch television (around $400), a low-cost DVD player (less than $200), and a low-cost speaker package, such as the KLH HTA9006, with five speakers and a 100-watt powered subwoofer (Circuit City, $199), and you've got a home theater setup for under $1,200.

Let the my Simon shopping bot crawl around the Web looking for the components you have been dreaming of for your home theater system.

Again, you can spend much more, especially as you move toward powerful speakers with built-in amplifiers. The M&K (Miller & Kreisel Sound; http://www.mksound.com) S-150P speaker, for example, is designed to provide THX sound and includes three one-inch tweeters and two 5.25-inch woofers and a 180-watt amplifier in the 12.5- x 10.5- x 16-inch speaker box. This kind of power and attention to detail isn't cheap; each S-150P speaker sells for $1,799 (remember to multiply this by 5), while the 350-watt powered subwoofer is an addition $1,795, bringing your grand total (speakers only) to over $10,000.

On the other hand, you could choose Definitive Technology (http://www.definitivetech.com) elegant ProCinema 80.6, including front and rear loudspeakers, a center channel speaker and a 250-watt subwoofer, for $999, for all six speakers.

If you're in the market for a mid-to-high range system, the best advice is to understand your budget and your listening ability and visit a local high-end dealer to hear some options. If you have $10,000 or more to spend on equipment, you may also want to talk to a professional consultant about system choices and installation.

Where To Go. Whether you plan to spend $1,000 or $10,000, shop around; prices and models change every day. If you have access to the World Wide Web, you may also want to shop online, at services, such as The Consumer Electronics Source (http://www.etown.com), AltaVista Smart Shopper (http://www.shopping.com), buy.com (http://www.buy.com), or Value America (http://www.valueamerica.com) or by using a price-checking shopping bot, such as mySimon (http://www.mysimon.com).

Whether football or opera is your game, a home theater can make you feel a little more at home in your castle.

by Michael Goldstein

Fighting The Cable Monster

Although simplified instructions and color-coded cables are making set up easier, sometimes home theater seems to be mostly about jacks, plugs, cables, and wires and making connections.

If you look at the back (or increasingly, at the front) of key home theater components, such as the receiver or DVD player, you'll see what looks like a pegboard full of holes. These range from basic cable and antenna jacks, standard on all televisions and VCRs, to composite audio/video jacks, where video goes into one input jack and audio into the other two. Even higher quality connections are achieved through the S-video jack found on most televisions, DVD players, and satellite TV receivers, and the component video jacks and outputs found on digital sources, such as DVD players and some of the large TV sets.

There is also a move to different (and more expensive) kinds of cabling, such as fiber-optic audio jacks and coaxial jacks to connect audio from sources such as the satellite-TV receivers. The trend is toward putting the amplifier into the speaker, and connections are increasingly becoming digital, such as the fiber-optical connections. So if you're investing in a home theater system, do you really need to buy Monster Cables or special grade/ brand cables, such as Vampire Wire for wiring speakers and making other analog and digital connections?

The back of your receiver may look like this.

According to Cliff Roth, author of "The Low Budget Video Bible" (800/247-6553), "There are very subtle, very slight variations in how signals move from one cable to another." He adds, "The high-end cable business is a high profit business for the audio retailer. If you're not spending at least $10,000 on a new home theater setup, you really won't hear the difference. You'd be better off saving your money and spending it on upgraded home theater equipment."

Whether you go for the upgraded cable (you will have to buy some cable; many manufacturers are pinching pennies by not including it), there are some accessories that are must-haves. When you're forking over your hard-earned cash on a new home theater setup, don't forget the surge protector; it's cheap insurance to protect your home theater investment.

If they think about them at all, many people think of surge protectors as being just for computers. Today, the reality is that a home theater can cost much more than a computer system. Plugging your equipment into a surge protector, such as the Monster Power Home Theater Surge Protector (MP AV700RP; $49.99 at Best Buy) can safeguard thousands of dollars worth of electronic equipment from potentially ruinous power surges, spikes, and lightning strikes.

If you're setting up a low-cost (less than $1,500) system, you're pretty much on your own; it's not worth the time of a professional installer. Fortunately, set up for home theater is often fairly simple, with detailed instructions and advice from the salespeople usually available. Additional advice is also available for free online: try The DVD Destinator (http://www.dvd.com) and Dolby Labs (http://www.dolby.com) for set up and speaker placement information. If you decide to throw in the towel or have special room demands that make hiring a professional a must, try Custom Electronic Design & Installation Association—Cedia (http://www.cedia.org), to find an installer in your area.

HAVi: Home Audio's Future

As home theater grows increasingly digital, the need for different components to be able to talk to one another grows. That's what HAVi, the Home Audio Video Interoperability System developed by Sony, Philips, Thomson/RCA, Hitachi, Matsushita, Sharp, Grundig, and Toshiba is all about.

With an unlimited income, this room could house your castle's home theater. However, you don't need unlimited funds for a powerful home theater.

HAVi is a Consumer Electronics industry standard designed to ensure interoperability between digital audio and video devices from different manufacturers that are connected over a network in the consumer's home. (For more information on advanced connections, see "The Role Of IEEE1394.")

The first HAVi products will appear later this year. Products built to this standard are designed to support digital in-home networks.They should both ensure interoperability between audio and video devices from different manufacturers and help create easy-to-use products, based on the open Java platform used to develop the standard.

HAVi also deals with the Internet, as HAVi-compliant devices should be able to address Internet data, such as HTML and image formats. This will grow increasingly important as more and more consumer devices, such as personal video recorders, Web TV boxes, MP3 music players, and other devices address the Internet.

HAVi is designed to combine existing products, such as cable modems, set top boxes, digital televisions, and Internet-televisions and future devices, such as video phones and Internet phones, which will interface with one another using an underlying IEEE1394 digital interface.

HAVi is designed for home entertainment networks, providing high bandwidth for transmitting multiple audio video streams. The new HAVi networks are touted as featuring easy plug and enjoy functionality, as the network will be capable of automatically discovering devices on the network.

What's the big idea? Devices can share each other's functionality. There will no longer be a complex setup or operation or worry about operating many separate devices and remote controls. The premise is that users will only have to enter the task they want to perform, and HAVi will do the rest.

It's an intriguing dream, one that home theater users, tired of crawling behind televisions and under stereos to connect a million wires, can only hope comes true.

Bose Lifestyle Home Theater System

For years, to create great sound, you needed great big macho boxes. The best speakers were four feet high, powered by an amplifier, and the receiver was as big as two microwave ovens stacked on top of each other. High-end home audio systems had a distinctly masculine air, taking over the living room to create a shrine to Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin.

Bose Acoutimass speakers compliment your home theater sound system.

But now, Bose has created a stereo/home theater system that truly fits your home and lifestyle. Instead of making you accommodate it, the Bose Lifestyle home theater system accommodates you. We tested a Bose Lifestyle 30 system. It's no longer available, but the Lifestyle 30 Series II, priced at $2,799 (http://www.bose.com), is quite similar. Available in black or white, the Lifestyle 30 Series II includes the silver main control unit with a six-CD changer, AM/FM stereo with 50 presets, and accommodations for four additional audio inputs, along with five Jewel Cube speakers and Acoustimass module, or powered subwoofer. The speakers and subwoofer are available in white or black.

The five Jewel Cube speakers are each smaller than your hand (4.5 inches high x 2.25 inches wide x 3.25 inches deep) yet they put out 50 watts of power each; more than enough to rock a room, but small enough to fit into any nook or alcove of your home. The sharp, clear sound can easily be directed exactly where you want it , because the tiny Jewel Cubes are actually two speakers attached one on top of the other. Each can be rotated up to 180 degrees, providing a balance between direct and reflected sound. Rich, deep bass is provided by the larger (14- x 23.38- x 7.5-inch) Acoustimass subwoofer module.

Controlling the five speakers and subwoofer is the rounded, brushed aluminum Music Center control unit. It should fit almost any décor, and at 2.62 x 15.5 x 8 inches, it's small enough to fit on a bookcase.

Although small in size and simple to set up (it comes with a poster-sized cheat sheet that helps you set up the color-coded components in less than an hour), the Lifestyle 30 is rich in features. The music center includes a six-disc CD changer, an AM/FM tuner, and a built-in amplifier capable of providing up to 50 watts of power to each speaker. For true home theater use, the music center has jacks to add a television, VCR, DVD player, or tapedeck (not included). Even adding a DVD player won't add significant bulk to this small wonder.

You can control all features from the remote control, which works over a radio frequency. Therefore, unlike a typical TV remote, it will work through walls and around corners.

To be literally surrounded by sound, set up the speakers in a circle around your couch, use the remote to maximize surround sound, and enjoy.

Does the Lifestyle 30 have any drawbacks? One; at slightly less than $3,000 retail, you probably won't be putting one in every room of your house. But buyers on a lower budget can still enjoy a Lifestyle. The Bose Lifestyle 12 Series II has five single cube speakers, an Acoustimass bass unit, and a music center with an AM/FM tuner and a single CD player, for around $1,799 retail.

The Lifestyle system will leave you with a pleasant but difficult choice. Should you hide it in the nooks and crannies of your den or bedroom or set aside a room of its own as a sonic temple?

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