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Tips on how to choose a better Surround Sound System

To help you on your way to a better audio experience, we’re going to discuss surround sound. This is one popular setup that can make listeners feel as though they’re in the middle of the action. There’s nothing like it to sweep you away and envelop you in another world.

Surround sound works through the use of multiple speakers, each of which contributes a different audio channel (or component of the original recording). The system allows listeners to hear the full gamut of sound provided by, say, a speeding car. First, you hear the car approaching, then there’s the sound of it humming beside you and finally the faint hum of it i­n the distance as it zooms past you. This is why some say full surround sound for a movielike experience demands at least five speakers: front-center, left-front, right-front, left-rear and right-rear. Film action and dialogue are separated among the speakers for realism, and background noise comes out of the back speakers.

Knowing this can help you understand some figures often used in surround sound jargon. For instance, 5.1 refers to five speakers (meant for the positions we just described) plus one subwoofer, designated by the .1. Subwoofers play very low-frequency sounds. Other common surround sound systems include 6.1 and 7.1, which include additional rear speakers. Regular stereo sound is referred to as 2.0, encompassing two speakers and no subwoofer.

By JANE MCGRATH

See Full Story at electronics.howstuffworks.com

How to improve speaker sound quality

Here are five tips to start improving your system’s performance:

1. Choose your room well. Square rooms are not good for acoustics. Audio experts say you want to build your home theater in a room whose width is 1.6 times the height and the room length is 2.6 times the room height. You’ll also want to avoid hard surfaces that reflect sound waves. Carpeting your floor greatly helps your acoustics, and so does installing furniture.

2. Place your speakers carefully. All speakers should be at approximately head height when you’re sitting, facing your listening position. You want the front two speakers and the center-channel speaker to be about the same distance from your listening position, although you can raise your speaker levels to compensate if you can’t make that happen in your room (more on that later). Your surround speakers should be on either side of your listening position, and your rear surrounds (in a 7.1 system) should be behind your listening position on either side. You can place the subwoofer almost anywhere, because large bass sound waves can fill the room from any angle.

3. Calibrate your speaker levels. Most home theater receivers come with a microphone and a program for calibrating your speaker levels. These systems compensate for imperfect speaker placement and room size. They raise or lower the levels of the individual speakers to give you a balanced, immersive sound.

By Daniel Staub

See Full Story at www.toptenreviews.com


A Guide to home speaker-buying process

Below is a guide to the ultimate speaker-buying process from beginning to end. Armed with the knowledge contained within, your next speaker purchase can be easy, fun, and downright gratifying.

SPEAKERS 101: A PRIMER

If you’ve already started reading audio or home theatre magazines, then you may have run into some terminology that you aren’t familiar with. If you already know the difference between a satellite and a monitor or a surround and a rear surround, then please feel free to skip ahead. For those who need to do a little catching up, make sure to check out our home audio glossary for a brief overview of what is happening in speaker-land these days.

WHAT WILL YOU USE THEM FOR?

You don’t necessarily need huge speakers or a full-blown 7.1-channel surround system to get great sound. Take a moment to think about what your listening habits are.

If you primarily listen to music, one pair of speakers may be exactly what you need to enjoy your music with occasional TV and movies as well.

If you are a passive music listener and don’t see yourself sitting down to appreciate the sound for extended periods of time, then a pair of quality bookshelf speakers or in-wall speakers may be the ticket. Want more bass? A small subwoofer can deliver the extra low end you are looking for.

By Parker Hall and Caleb Denison

See Full Story at www.digitaltrends.com

Find the secret to producing noise-free music

Music is a massive bunch of these squiggles all thrown in together, but it can be represented for our purposes as a single squiggle line. Now picture this squiggle line, and let’s mentally cut it in half horizontally. The upper half is just the tips of the wave, and the lower half is just the troughs. Because of the time element and the way the wave is shaped, the tips never line up vertically with the troughs.

Balanced cables, also known as XLR cables by the typical connectors used at the ends, take advantage of this fact to pull off something special: “common mode noise rejection.”

Picture sound-canceling headphones for a moment. They use microphones to listen to surrounding noise, and they inject that noise into your music, delayed half a wave. So they change a tip into a trough, and the tips and troughs of the surrounding noise align vertically.

When this happens, sound cancels out. That’s why they’re called noise-cancelling headphones instead of noise-reducing headphones — they really do nix that business right out.

By DUNCAN TAYLOR

See Full Story at www.coloradodaily.com

5 Steps to Better Bass in Your Home Theater

Photo by Spencer Selover from Pexels

This 5-Step supplemental article assumes you already have a home theatre system and simply want to improve the bass response for better impact and accuracy. This article also assumes you’ve properly set up the bass management in your AV receiver or processor and made all of the necessary connections to your speakers and subwoofers.

If you’re running only one subwoofer, it may be time to upgrade and get a second matching sub. Dual subwoofers are ALWAYS better than a single subwoofer for distributing uniform bass across a wider listening area and also coupling very low frequencies for greater depth and dynamic range.

Here are the 5 Steps Towards Better Bass in Your Home Theater Room:

  1. Subwoofer Location (preferably multiple subs) – Follow our pictorial guidelines in our Subwoofer Setup Article for suggestive placements or our Subwoofer Crawl. There are multiple locations that can work in your room so finding the right spots is worth the effort to greatly improve sound quality and depth.  Positional EQ(Listening seat location) – where you place your listening seats also determines sound quality NOT just in bass but for the overall home theatre surround envelop. Keep your seating away from back and side walls if possible. Backwall placement is a maximum pressure zone where you will hear very loud but not accurate bass. If you can move the couches at least 1/4L of the room away from the backwall, you will ensure more accurate bass reproduction. 
  2. Positional EQ – Believe it or not you can equalize the sound of your speaker/sub system simply by moving your theater chairs or couches. Proper seating location can have a huge impact in the quality of  bass you hear. You generally want to avoid placing your seats up against a back or side wall. We recommend locating the seats at least 1/4L (L = length of the room) away from the back wall to reduce excessive bass energies caused by build up of standing waves. Locating a seat to a sidewall will shift the balance of the sound towards the closest surround speaker while also severely impacting stereo imaging of the front left/right speakers. Instead, apply symmetry and line of sight principles when locating your couches so that every seating location has a direct unobstructed path of sound to each speaker and the front left/right speakers are equidistant for true stereo imaging.

by Gene DellaSala

See Full Story at www.audioholics.com

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