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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


Guide to Wireless Speakers For Home Theater

Although there is a large selection of portable and compact wireless powered Bluetooth and Wi-Fi speakers designed for personal music listening, there is an increasing number of inquiries regarding the availability of wireless speakers that are designed specifically for home theater use.

Running those long, unsightly speaker wires required to connect speakers for a surround sound setup can be quite annoying. As a result, consumers are attracted by increasingly promoted home theater system options that tout wireless speakers as a way to solve this problem. However, don’t get sucked in by the term ‘wireless.’ Those speakers might not be as wireless as you expect.

What a Loudspeaker Needs to Create Sound

A loudspeaker needs two types of signals in order to work.

  • First, speakers need to access the music or movie soundtrack. This is provided in the form of electrical impulses (the audio signal).
  • Second, in order for the speaker to take the electrical sound impulses and convert those impulses into an actual sound that you can hear, the speaker needs to be physically connected to an amplifier, which can be powered either by a battery (most applicable for portable devices) or AC power.

Wireless Home Theater Speaker Requirements

In a traditionally wired speaker setup, both the soundtrack impulses and the power needed to make the loudspeaker work are passed through speaker wire connections from an amplifier.

However, in a wireless speaker setup, a transmitter is required to transmit the needed audio signals, and a receiver needs to used to receive the wirelessly transmitted audio signals.

In this type of setup, the transmitter has to be physically connected to preamp outputs on a receiver, or, in the case where you have a packaged home theater system that incorporates a built-in or plug-in wireless transmitter. This transmitter then sends the music/movie soundtrack information to a speaker or secondary amplifier that has a built-in wireless receiver.

However, another connection is needed to complete the process – power. Since power cannot be transmitted wirelessly, in order to produce the audio signal that is wirelessly transmitted so you can actually hear it, the speaker needs additional power in order to work.

What this means that the speaker still has to be physically attached to a power source and an amplifier. The amplifier may be built right into the speaker housing or, in some cases, the speakers are physically attached with speaker wire to an external amplifier that is powered by batteries or plugged into the house AC power source. Obviously, the battery option severely limits the ability of a wireless speaker to output adequate power over a long period of time.

by Robert Silva

See Full Story at www.lifewire.com

Tips for Choosing a Good Sound System

Choosing the right sound system for your venue is crucial to providing the best possible audio visual experience. Whether you’re a church, a retail store, an intimate restaurant or a stadium planning on enormous crowds, your sound system is crucial to everything that happens in your space. So crucial, in fact, that the audio sound equipment industry in America was worth $120 billion by 2016. Before you choose a sound system, educate yourself on the basics and what principles you should bear in mind for a PA system:

What Are the Sound Basics?

There are three important components to the system. First, you need a device like a microphone to change sound waves into an electrical signal. Then you need an amplifier to boost this signal, which at this point is pretty weak, to a level that will power a speaker. Finally, you need a speaker that will convert the electrical signal back into sound waves. When an audio video company puts together a PA system for you, they’ll be providing these three basics. Within those basics, however, there’s a lot of choice and variety depending on your specific needs and budget.

What’s the Biggest Consideration?

The most crucial basic issue for your sound system is power. The bigger your audience or the noisier your venue, the more power you need in an amplifier. If your venue is a place where sound reflects easily, this will bounce back and lower the perceived volume for the audience. This means you have to crank it up, and that means a high wattage amplifier. It’s usually wise to get something a bit bigger than you think you’ll need so it can work efficiently and allow you some room for expansion if necessary.

What Do You Want To Use Sound For?

Music, for example, has a lot more variety than just speaking voices. You’ll need an amplifier that can produce a wider range of audio frequencies, and you’ll also need more wattage. In fact, you might need double the power for music that you would need if you were only amplifying voice. Music also sounds better in stereo, and with more speakers, each one tuned to a specific frequency.

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5 Tips for Getting the Best Home Theater Sound Possible

This short, but SWEET, article will give you some tips on how to make sure your home theater delivers the sonic goods, giving you the best home theater sound your equipment is capable of.

Tip 1: Use the right speakers

This one is absolutely critical. Many people are simply using the wrong speakers in their home theater. If you are an enthusiast, and like listening at high SPLs, then there are very few speaker topologies that will reliably deliver the goods.

Tip 2: Keep seats away from walls and speakers

Simply put any ears should be minimum 4ft away from any speaker. Do not put seats near walls, especially a back wall, or you’ll lose surround sound envelopment and get boomy bass as well. A seat too close to a surround speaker will result in excessive localization.

Tip 3: Make sure you have enough subwoofers

If you have one row of seats you need two subwoofers. If you have two rows of seats you need at least four subs and possibly more.

Having an horn loaded mega sub will not give you smooth bass.  It will certainly give you a lot of it but you’ll also get massive peaks and dips across your listening area from rampant room modes and speaker boundary interference cancellations.

Tip 4: Don’t forget the acoustic treatment

Your audio system is only one half of the sound you get. The other half is the room. Room acoustics are a minefield of conflicting opinion and armchair experts. Our advice is to make sure you do the basics.

See full Story on www.acousticfrontiers.com

10 Tips to Improve your Home Theater Experience

When we surveyed some of our neighbors’ home theater systems, we discovered about 90% of them didn’t even have a digital connection between their DVD players and receivers and 100% of them didn’t even bother with level calibration or proper bass management setup, we were shocked!  While most of our neighbors still don’t understand what Audioholics is all about, they know that it’s a safe bet to come to us with their audio woes.  Have your builder run 10,000 ft of speaker and audio cable during the framing stage of your house, and the news travels fast among the neighborhood that these guys must know something about home theater.

This Top 10 Tips to Improve your Home Theater and Setup Guide will help flesh out those issues for either you or one of your fortunate neighbors that needs your help.  Armed with the right tools, you won’t need Bob the Builder to fix it.

Top 10 Basic Tips to Improve your Home Theater Experience

  1. Check connections – speaker wire polarity, right cables used, etc
  2. Speaker Positioning – check locations, eliminate obstacles blocking direct path of sound
  3. Speaker Configuration – check your bass management settings and channel assignments
  4. Speaker Calibration – check your levels using an SPL meter -slow, c-wt
  5.  Seat Optimization – positional EQ, move seats away from back or sidewalls
  6. Source Setup – make sure your Blu-ray or Cable box is set to pass bitstream audio, shut off dynamic compression
  7.  Display Calibration – get your TV out of torch mode, properly set black levels and color temperature
  8. Improve Room Acoustics – padded throw rug for tile floor, drapes on windows, absorption if room is too reverberant
  9. Improve Room Lighting – darken windows, doors to cut light and improve contrast ratio of your display
  10. Add Cool Props – dress the room up with a theme using movie posters or cardboard props or models, popcorn machine, fridge to store beer

By

See full story at www.audioholics.com

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