Helpful Hints For Setting up Your Home Theater Speakers

| Wednesday, September 14, 2011
By Gunter Fellbaum


Are you trying to set up a new home theater system or some wireless speaker models? The easiest way is to hire a qualified installer to help you. However, you may consider doing the setup yourself. I am going to outline the basic setup procedure and give some tips to help avoid some common problems.

After unpacking your new home theater system, you will usually find one central component as well as 5 or 7 speakers. The central component is going to provide the audio for all of your speakers which you are going to set up. This central component is also known as surround sound receiver or amplifier. It is the central hub of your home theater system.

Locate this receiver in a place that minimizes the speaker cable run to each speaker. Choose a location that is not far away from your audio source or TV because you will need to connect the receiver to your source.

Connecting the receiver to power and to your TV or DVD is fairly straightforward. Most modern TVs have an optical output which connects directly to your receiver via a fiberoptical cable. This cable may not be included with your system but it is available at any electronics store. However, setting up your speakers may be a bit more tricky.

If you have wireless rear speakers you will not need as much speaker cable and the setup will be somewhat easier. First of all, measure how much speaker cable you will need. Make sure to add some extra cable to take into account those bends and corners. Pick the gauge of the speaker cable depending on how much power you intend to drive your speakers with. The higher the power the thicker the speaker cable. Your subwoofer will usually have a built-in amp and connect to your receiver via RCA cable.

The satellite speakers each connect via a speaker terminal which is usually color coded to help ensure proper polarity. Most speaker cable will show one strand in a different color. This is essential since it will help ensure the correct polarity of the speaker terminal connection. Simply attach the different-color strand to the speaker terminal which is colored. Similarly, each speaker output of your surround receiver is color coded. When attaching the cable to your receiver, observe the right polarity once again. This will keep all of your speakers in phase.

Wireless rear speakers will typically incur an audio delay during transmission. This delay is also called latency. Typically the latency ranges between 1 and 20 ms. For optimum effect, it is best if all of the speakers are in sync. If you have a system that uses wireless rears and wired front speakers, i.e. you have a mix of wireless and wired speakers, you should try to delay the audio going to the wired speakers by the latency of the wireless speakers.

Check with the manufacturer if your surround receiver can be set to delay the audio of specific channels. If you are using wireless rears, you want to set the front-speaker and side-speaker channels to delay the audio. Home theater systems which were not designed for wireless rear speakers may not have this capability. In this case you may want to look for a wireless speaker kit that has very low latency, ideally less than 1 ms. This will keep all of your speakers in perfect sync.




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