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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."
One of these things is not like the other. One of these things does not belong.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
...I spent years building my own home theaters in each house I owned and lived in. Since I performed all the labor myself, they actually did add value upon resale.
One area that, in my experience, offers the most bang-for-the-buck is a two-part issue: room dimensions and sound-proofing, i.e. room treatment.
There are a LOT of expensive and probably useless room treatments. For me, the ultimate sound didn't come from watts or speaker power-handling but in properly sound-proofing the room against external noise. The lower the noise floor, the clearer the sound. This is key to having a good movie experience, I'd say, because you don't need it loud to be dynamic.
Room dimensions can be just as important, as certain rooms (square is the worst) have standing waves that emphasize or de-emphasize certain frequencies at certain locations. My ultimate theater had an odd shape (slightly angular walls and ceiling) but the sound was amazing. We also covered the walls in fairly cheap acoustic foam of varying lengths, and covered the foam with nice acoustically transparent cloth (red) so you couldn't see the varying foam squares. It was a slightly dead room, but it really had punch for the action films my friends liked.
Lastly, the proper bass crossover combined with the proper bass drivers is the final key for those who want action-style entertainment. I am a HUGE fan of Bag End from Barrington, Illinois. They make an ELF crossover and driver system which is just a miracle in a box. It is the flatest, most dynamic bass system imaginable, and the crossover was wonderful since it didn't overemphasize higher frequency bass to muddle male vocals or punchy sound effects.
One sidenote: I almost never focused on surround sound. Honestly, I was more happy with pseudo-surround out of low power, but dynamic speakers, than I was at have 16.5 channel surround sound. When I removed my rear channels, my visitors were always blown away by the clarity and depth of the properly positioned, amplified and mounted front 2 to 3 speakers I had installed. My current home theatre only has 3 speakers, and we're extremely happy with the install, which I did for a fraction of the overblown sound system my neighbor has. Even better, we're only driving the efficient and dynamic speakers with HEAVY 30 watt amps each, but since our noise floor is so low and our room is so quiet and dead, the sound is gorgeous, even for music.
I'm done with my theatre days, as the money is best spent elsewhere, and the upgrade bug is finally over.
These jokers didn't even mention the most important part of a home theater: comfy chairs.
The speakers themselves play little role in your sound system, so it's fine if you get ones so cheap. A real home theatre environment, however, depends entirely on $200 speaker cables. Good (= expensive) speaker cables can compensate for lesser stereo equipment, as well as for a small penis.
Some of the advice for the video display was ok, but the rest of the article was very poor. One of the main determinations of audio performance is room acoustics - yet this is not covered at all. Monster cables are generic stuff that is horribly overpriced with outrageous markups. Never buy that stuff. Power filters are a total wast of money for 95% of people, and can often hurt more than they help. The speaker selection (Polk) is sort of a mass-market default - there is much better to be had out there in other brands, especially from the Canadian companies like PSB and Paradigm. Polk is by no means a brand that you would expect in a reference home theater.
It appears to me that this article was written with a lot of feedback from a big box store like Best Buy because the brands they recommend are typically what these stores carry, and in particular they push Monster stuff and power filters hard because of the huge markups.
They dedicate an ENORMOUS amount of page space to cables... when they are by far the LEAST important part of the setup.
www.partsexpress.com has excellent Dayton-brand cables for a fraction of the price of Monster-cable. (And by the way, MENTIONING moster-cable among audio pros is a faux-pas in and of itself). Expensive digital cables are a HUGE ripoff, because jitter is largely a consequence of the source, rather than the transmission... and a well-made (yes, just look at it) $10 digital cable is going to sound no different from the $1000 MIT insanity.
Analog cables need to be well-made, but again... no need to spend more than $10-15 per channel. As long as they are well-insulated and shielded, they'll work just fine.
Trust me - on my multi-thousand $ system (Aragon, B&K, MSB, etc...) I could detect no audible difference between the most expensive cables I could borrow ($1000 MIT), and the $15 set that I soldered myself.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
80-conducter IDE cables still only have 40 pins. The other 40 pins are insulation and grounding, used to space and isolate the active conductors so there isn't any crosstalk. There's not just a performance difference if you plug a modern disk drive into the controller using a 40-conductor cable, there's inevitable data corruption. This has NOTHING to do with expensive speaker cable, or the Monster myth. It's one of the stupidest justifications I've ever seen.
AND THEN they go on about PCM jitter with a straight face. Holy god, people still believe in this?
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
The way you do it is you take a CD with a couple of songs you typically listen to (also maybe a sample from a movie soundtrack). Important is that it should be something you're familiar with and preferably uses natural instruments (not synthesizers).
Then, compare speakers in your budget two at a time, make notes on which sounds closest to what the recording should sound like. When doing this make sure of two things:
1) the receiver base and treble settings are set flat
2) No other speakers (or subs are on).
Listen for how clear each instrument (and voice) comes out on each speaker.
When you get your two main speakers you need to get a matching center, you can switch between dolby pro-logic and stereo to compare the sound of your mains vs your central, or better, if they'll let you, hook up one the center channel in place of one of the main speakers and use the L/R fade on the reciever to compare the sound between the two (your music should be pretty even on both channels for this to work well). If you got bookshelf speakers you may want to really consider getting a 3rd identical speaker as your main (you probably will have to buy a 2nd pair since they won't sell them solo but in some cases it's worth it and you have a spare if something goes wrong in the future).
Don't assume the center channel provided by the manufacturer is the best matching center for your mains either. Get the best matching speaker period. When sounds pan across the front you don't want the quality of the sound to change too.
Rear speakers should be reasonably close matches to your fronts. When they're in your room they'll sound different anyway (since the quality of sound we hear is different when the source is in front of us vs the rear). You can also get dedicated surrounds (with drivers facing in different directions) vs traditional speakers for the rear. Always audition the rear speakers as you did your mains. Make sure they're good quality as well.
Last but not least, higher model number, more expensive *does not* mean better sounding. Louder.. maybe. But there are alot of considerations that go into balancing the sound from a speaker and some manufacturers get it right with their mid range models but lose it as they stray from that design.
Oh and if you're gonna listen to a Bose offering (typically not the best value for the price), really listen to the alternatives, you'll be surprised.
Georgia Tech, the leader in Chia(tm) technology.
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.
Yeah, because everybody knows that if the receiver is tilted, nothing is going to come out straight after that, no matter what angle you place your speakers at.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I think that charging more than that for, say, a Bose system is a bit overboard. The speakers are no better than what you get in the $60 system, the only difference I can discern is that Bose mangles audio in a way that "sounds bigger" by adding echoes and enhancing bass.
If the room you watch movies in is a fairly standard 12'x12'x10' box there's really no need for much more than a $60-$80 system. The components in such a system are superior in frequency response and isolation to expensive Hi Fi systems of a half century ago. AF electronics are cheap. High strength magnets are cheap. Precision machining is even cheap.
The law of diminishing returns kicks in quick for audio equipment, and the only reason you'll need to spend more is if you want to damage your ears by listening to an hour-long movie at jet-engine volume levels. In which case, you won't need high fidelity equipment for long.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
But my wife complained about all the trash, rats, and sticky floor.
Aside from the fact that the barrage of ads on that site nearly melted my laptop, a few observations:
The article starts off with a disclaimer in the first page. When an opinion piece has to state, "this doesn't represent an endorsement from FiringSquad, but rather our research," the opposite is generally true.
He decides the lack of 1080p content is a myth. His argument? You can convert 1080i back to 1080p. While this is fundamentally true, so is the statement that there's little 1080p content available. Converting it doesn't mean that the content was natively available in 1080p. I know, seems trivial... but this is a precursor to an argumentation style he uses that gets tiresome and downright disingenuous as the article goes on.
He has a table of data for maximum viewing distances to appreciate the full benefit of 1080p quality. He doesn't bother to cite any sources or what methodology was used to arrive at the data... but nevermind, it does get worse.
He's right about LCoS being superior, but for the wrong reason. It isn't the control circuit but rather the fact that there's a liquid crystal display element for each pixel and, in principle, support for resolutions well above 1920 x 1080. Also the fact that baseline LCD displays and DLP do not display a red, green and blue pixel simultaneously for each pixel of resolution on the final image.
Then he uses THX and SMPTE theatrical standards and applies them to a home auditorium, to support his argument that the opposite is true? What ever gave him the idea that these standards were ever applicable to small home auditoriums in the first place? Theatrical exhibition is a different deal entirely, whether digital or optical... but I'm guessing that the THX/SMPTE specs he's quoting were for 35mm which has much higher effective resolution than 2k/4k digital theatrical projection systems.
He confuses the term motion blur with the issue of print clarity. Motion blur is a side effect of optics whereby an object in motion is blurred by way of the aperture and shutter timing of the exposure. This is actually a good thing because in a motion picture format, i.e. a series of still images, it assists the brain in perceiving fluid motion from a series of still images. Motion blur is NOT correlated with effective clarity but exposure length. Therefore it's ridiculous to say that 35mm is equivalent to 720p. In fact, 35mm, depending on the film stock used and the style of cinematography (e.g. sharp, grainy, diffuse glow, etc.) used, motion picture can render images whose digital equivalent would extend up to 6000 pixels of horizontal resolution... three times that of HD 1080p.
While it's true that theatrical Dolby Digital is 320 Kbps and DVD Dolby Digital is typically 448 Kbps, he makes no mention of additional parameters in Dolby Digital home encoding (e.g. dialogue normalization, Dynamic Range Compression, etc.), he doesn't discuss theatrical DTS (an ADPCM-style format with a 1.5Mbps bitstream), nor does he observe that Dolby Digital at 448-640 Kbps is acoustically transparent relative to an uncompressed source. He also confuses the term "lossless" with "uncompressed"... Lossless refers to compression formats, but "high resolution audio" like that on a DVD-Audio recording is typically 20 or 24-bit Linear PCM, which is an uncompressed format. Calling it lossless is superfluous.
He doesn't mention that in addition to the majority of sound being in the front channels, 5.1 is actually 5.1, whereas 7.1 is not. At best, 7.1 is actually 6.1 with the two rear surround channels paired in mono as in DTS-ES. At least, 7.1 is actually Dolby Digital 5.1 discrete with the two paired rear surround channels still mono, but also stereo matrixed into the left and right surround channels the same way that Dolby Surround analog carries the rear surround stereo matrixed into the front left and right channels.
I mostly ignored his commments on power filtering and cables because that subject has been beaten to death already. H
You have to hand it to those Dolby guys, they really figured out a good system with Dolby Stereo. We still do Dolby SR/Stereo printmasters the same day we do the 5.1 printmasters, with the same mixers, and generally with the director present; it's just as authoritative artistically as the 5.1, and it's still just about the most compatible format there is for a wide class of room types and playback systems. It lacks a little awesomeness in a large room, but for any 800sq/ft or smaller room, or any overly long or broad room, I think it's the best compromise you can have. Split surrounds are a waste unless your head is at least 5-10 away from the closest one, IMHO.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.