Building a "Reference" Home Theater

An anonymous reader writes "FiringSquad has recently written a 14-page article on building a 'reference' home theater. They go through step-by-step and define all of the issues you need to think about when going with a new home theater setup. Exceptionally detailed but also easy to read."

Comments

Wow, this is a really, really terrible article

[hudsonhawk]

There's nothing even remotely "reference" level about anything suggested here. Their suggestion for speakers, as mentioned elsewhere, is very poor (Polk? Really?) given that there's much better stuff available from great companies like PSB, Paradigm, and NHT.

That they top it off with a $400 receiver, and completely dodge the notion of getting into separates (other than to say that it's complicated and they haven't really listened to anything), makes it lose all credibility. The cable and power conditioning sections are a joke - they steadfastly refuse to entertain any alternatives to Monster Cable (hint: almost all the alternatives are better values for the money; just because you can get Monster Cable on sale doesn't make it a good value - their markup tends to be 3x-4x that of other cable manufacturers).

I get the feeling that they've listened to a handful of mass market pieces and decided to just suggest whatever crap it was they bought. As mentioned elsewhere, they don't even touch on room acoustics and setup factors, which can greatly influence the end results.

In short these guys don't know anything more about setting up a reference level home theater than your average Best Buy salesperson. Given their selection of brands, that's probably what they are in fact.

Re:Too much wire/cable BS

[egomaniac]

Bull. Shit.

For some reason people seem to turn off their brains and start appealing to voodoo magic when dealing with audio technology. Let's put it in a more familiar context: computers.

Suppose you're downloading a digital representation of music -- an MP3, say -- from the Internet. Now, we all know that an MP3 is just a series of bits, and as long as those bits arrive unmodified the song is going to sound exactly the same. Suppose I were to claim that you needed some super-high-fidelity Ethernet cable in order for the MP3 to sound its best after being downloaded, because otherwise the inter-edge arrival time in the digital signal will be distorted, and this, in turn, would map directly into harmonic distortion in the analog reproduction.

Anybody with half a brain would simply laugh at me. The bits either arrived properly or they didn't, and single-bit errors in the MP3 are going to produce pops and static, rather than anything so clean as harmonic distortion. Harmonic distortion is an analog problem, there's just no plausible way it can occur with a digital signal. Furthermore, we all know that you can hook your computer up with pretty much any old Ethernet cable, and unless the cable is seriously crap it's going to work perfectly even at gigabit speeds (far higher than anything you encounter in audio).

The same is, for the most part, true with digital audio as well. You're either going to get a perfect signal or horrible pops and static. There really isn't an in-between, and you're certainly not going to get harmonic distortion. Admittedly digital audio does not feature error correction, so marginal connections are more likely to give you problems, but it's not going to be subtle.

For the record: I have a home theater with a 160" screen and $15K worth of speakers and audio gear. And I use the absolute cheapest generic (but still quality) digital cables I could find, just as I hook my computers up with the cheapest (but still quality) Ethernet cable I could find. I don't think I spent more than $5 on any of my digital audio cables, and the sound from my setup is still awe-inspiring.

Video, of course, is a different story -- none of the video cable standards were really intended to span the 30' run between my equipment room and the projector, and video runs at a much higher bandwidth than audio. I found that I had to buy relatively expensive video cables in order to get a good signal (but we're still talking $100, not $1000), and again with the digital hookups it's nothing subtle. With good cables, the signal is perfect. With lousy cables, it's covered with white and black snow.

And I'd like to echo the comments of a previous poster: if you are looking for high-quality cables / connectors /etc. but don't want to get ripped off, use Parts Express. They kick all kinds of ass.