Home Theater Systems » Speaker Placement

Design Your Room For Home Theater

admin — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 08:32:36 +0000

One gets the home theater to bring in the theater effect at home with no crowd. It gives the most pompous video effect for cinema at home with excellent quality. Setting up a home theater is not only about just getting a product and installing them at home. It requires a lot of analysis on the set up of the room too. Acoustics are an important branch to be considered when a video or an audio is to be applied on a larger space or in larger volume. Hence, a room must be designed well in accordance to the purpose of the home theater. Echoing, video disruption, interference with environment noise, clarity all should be tested before installing the home theater in the room.

Designing the room well to accommodate home theater’s features would provide us with the ultimate outcome of the product. Designing a room involves furniture or seating arrangements, display and speaker placement in orientation to the room.

Selection of room:

Make sure to select the best room to fit in your home theater. This would involve considerations like the electricity supply, the space available, the windows and doors, the lighting capability, acoustic set up of the room and many more. Usually a sales person or a representative would be there to hook up your home theater for you. Get technical advice from the person to decide the room you want the theater in.

Display Positioning:

One has to derive out a logical relationship to the video display speaker and the seating arrangements. View of the viewers must be directly focused on the visual display without any strain to turn their neck. Moreover, sound must be directed right to their ears without any interference to outside noise. Therefore, it would be good to have the speakers on either side of the seating arrangement.

Lighting Set-up:

Lighting set up plays a major role in designing a home theater room. Based on the lighting of the room, one can get the real impact or effect of the display device. Lighting must not be too jazzy to degrade the quality of the visual display. It would be always better to have an ambience lighting that suits well to the atmosphere. One could have matching lights elative to that of the paint on the walls. Paints do show variations on the light reflection. Be sure that the lighting do not end up with their reflection on the display giving a glare effect.

Seating Arrangements:

Seating arrangement would be the most difficult task in designing the room for home theater, because arranging the seats would spoil all the above set-up made for the room. It is always difficult to satisfy a human mind. One must make sure that all the viewers are comfortable with the view they obtain from the seat. Make sure the seating arrangements never cause neck and back pains. Always get comfortable furniture that would keep you for long time without any strain. Make sure that you get an adjusting handle to raise or lower the seat position this would add additional comfort for people of old age. Check in to get the most suitable furniture that suits people of any age range.

To get the full product benefit of a home theater, one has to make sure that they make proper arrangements of all the above said details. Acoustic planning and room design is very important when considering setting up the home theater. One has to consider all the issues right from positioning to seating arrangement to give the entire family a pleasant experience of getting into home theater.

By: Ilango Chokalingam

Home Theater Design: Optimum Speaker Placement

admin — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 21:36:31 +0000

The standard theater arrangement is of course a screen at one end of the room, with one central speaker, one speaker to each side of the screen, two speakers providing surround left and right, and sometimes a speaker providing surround rear. If you have your room arranged this way, chances are good that you call it your home theater, and speaker placement is fairly straightforward for you. The ideal placement has the front speakers at the same height from the ground, usually either slightly above or slightly below the display, and the surround speakers at least 60cm above the heads of the viewers.

The front center speaker should ideally be in the same position as the screen; the front left and right speakers should be placed approximately 25 degrees to the left and right of the direction the viewers face, and about the same distance from the viewers; the surround left and surround right speakers should be 90 degrees to the left and right of this direction, and, again, about the same distance from the viewers; and the surround rear, as its name suggests, should be directly behind the viewers. A subwoofer if used can theoretically be placed anywhere in the room.

For many people, and I include myself in this, the design of your home is such that it does not comfortably permit a room set up in this way. After all, unless you are very lucky, the chances are that the room that contains your home theater equipment doubles as your living room, and you will not want it to be dominated by a screen. You may not wish to call it your home theater as such. To solve this problem, you need to draw a scale diagram of your room. Add your intended screen placement to the drawing, along with the seating arrangements (your sofas and chairs), and identify where people will be sitting when they watch movies, and the direction in which they will be looking.

The next thing you need to do is to draw a line from each viewer directly to the screen, which shows the direction in which each viewer faces. Then draw a line angled 25 degrees to the left of the line you have just drawn from the viewer, for each viewer, until it meets the wall. If the speaker is placed anywhere along that line, then it will be at the correct angle for the appropriate viewer. You need to identify a point along the wall fairly close to the position at which these lines reach the wall. This will usually be somewhere near the middle of the collection of lines. You have then identified the optimum home theater placement for your front left speaker.

You now need to do the same thing, but angle the lines 25 degrees to the right of the direction in which the viewers face. With these lines you can identify the optimum home theater placement for the front right speaker.

Repeat for lines angled 90 degrees to the left, 90 degrees to the right, and 180 degrees (a continuation of the line from viewer to screen, but in reverse). With these lines, you can identify the optimum home theater placement for the surround left speaker, the surround right speaker, and the surround rear speaker.

Ideally, the front left and right speakers should be placed at the same distance from each viewer, as should the surround left and right speakers. This will normally not be possible to achieve, so it should be approximated. Far more important are the speaker placement angles for each viewer, which should ideally not be more than about 15 degrees away from the optimum position. Optimum home theater speaker placement depends on minimizing the angle error for each viewer.

Your subwoofer could be placed theoretically at any point in the room, because the ear cannot easily determine the direction of low-frequency sounds. However, you may find that positioning the subwoofer at different parts of the room change the sounds from the subwoofer; some frequencies may be amplified, while others may be reduced, especially if the subwoofer is placed near a wall or corner of the room. It is suggested that you experiment with the placement of your subwoofer until you find a position that you like.

Some other considerations may affect the position in which you place the speakers. You will not want your speakers in a position where they obstruct a path that is regularly walked through, e.g. too close to a doorway. Also, if you do not have magnetically-shielded front speakers, they should not be placed too close to a cathode ray tube (old-style) TV, because they will cause the color purity of the display to be affected. This does not apply to LCD or plasma televisions. Using this approach, you can successfully place your speakers in such a way that you can be proud of your home theater and of your living room at the same time!

Always remember that the idea behind home theater is to set your system up so that you can enjoy movies to the fullest. Some people lose sight of this goal. Whatever you do with your home theater design, don’t fall into the trap of over-analyzing your results. Start enjoying those movies!

By: Dave Thomas

Home Theater Speakers – What Models and Styles Are Right For Your Home

admin — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 07:53:02 +0000

Having the right speakers for your home theater room – correct size, proper sound output, and fitting aesthetics – brings the entire room together in one cohesive piece. When looking at audio speakers, consider the size of the room, the appropriate speaker size, the number that you are going to be using, and what is within your price range for sound equipment. You may also want to consider more aesthetic items like speaker placement and the overall look of your home theater design.

When it comes to finding home speakers, the first thing to do is analyze the size of the room. You want to take a good look at how much space you have, and then do some calculations about the placement and number of pieces able to fit within your room. For instance, if the room is very large, you are going to want to place the units much higher. If it is small, speakers on the floor will cut down on echoes and make it easier to align your entire sound system. In-wall units are another option that will allow you to have quality sound from all parts of the room without dealing with the potential clutter of floorstanding models.

The next thing to consider is the size of the speakers themselves. Each speaker type (front, side, subwoofer) come in different sizes depending on how they will be mounted, the quality of the sound and the type of application they will be used for. Larger units may be able to give you richer, deeper sound but that sort of sound may not be necessary for the size and layout of your particular home theater room. Additionally, quality manufacturers are improving on the audio quality of smaller speakers every year. Large rooms may soon not require the use of large floorstanding or cabinet models. Consider the size of the in-wall speakers you prefer as well. The size will equate to the portion of your wall that will need to be removed. A custom home theater installer can help with defining the parameters for the speaker size best for your home.

The number of speakers your room needs is another item to consider. Several brands offer different lines that include three, five or seven unit configurations. Consult with a home audio technician or custom installer about what is the best proportion for your home if you are unsure of what you will need.

Speakers for any home theater are no longer outside of many people’s reach. Home theater equipment is available in a wide range of pricing suitable for any budget. Quality, top-brands are available within the range of average home owners and top of the line units are also available for audio junkies who have a fine ear for sound and a fascination with the technology. Don’t let pricing stop you from getting the right type of sound for your home. Talk to a custom installer about your price range and what is most important to you when it comes to the sound quality in your home theater.

Consider these important items as you develop your home theater’s audio system.

~ Ben Anton, 2007

By: Ben Anton