Home Theater Fundas

For surround sound, you will need to have speakers all around you. The recognized and most common format today is 5.1. This means 5 speakers and a subwoofer. The ‘1’ stands for the number of subwoofers, so you can even have a 7.2 system which would mean seven speakers and 2 subwoofers (phew!). There are more formats doing the rounds, like 6.1 and 7.1, though frankly they are not of much use as very few DVDs have their audio encoded more than 5.1. Though Blu-rays now do offer 7.1 so it makes sense to keep up with the tech.
 
There are two major companies producing surround sound formats, Dolby and DTS (Digital Theater Systems). This format is stored on the DVD along with the video, and is sent to your AV receiver. (See Connections for more on this) The decoder inside your AV receiver reads the file and sends five separate audio streams to the five speakers, plus one special stream to the subwoofer, for the thump!
Something known as Dolby Pro Logic and DTS Neo can take a normal stereo sound and up-convert this to 5.1 or 6.1 sound. These are found as options in the AV receivers, so when you click these on, you can hear your CDs, cable etc. in surround. That’s real cool!

The five speakers are not placed just anywhere. There is a specific arrangement; basically you have a center speaker placed right below (or above) the TV, through which you hear all the dialogs and important effects. Then there's the left and right front speaker pair, each of which are placed on either side of the display. Through these two channels you will hear most of the background score and a little bit of ambient effects. Then comes the rear 2 channels, called the surround left and surround right, through where we hear more ambient effects and motion effects such as gunshots, drive-bys, dialog panning, and last but not least, a meaty chunk of the background music.

But wait, we are forgetting something very important: the Subwoofer. It is through this speaker that you get all the thuds, bass and growl rumbling effects. Placing the sub is quite important; you must place it inline with the fronts, or else the phase of the sound will be affected, meaning less tightness overall. But most subs these days come with a phase control, so you can dial in a good sound after placement anywhere.

Conclusion
This was a very basic intro to the concept of home theater. It lays the groundwork for more articles to come in the future on specific aspects. The main goal of setting up a home theater is to achieve a comfortable position first, and then the quality and performance of your equipment must be top notch, harmoniously syncing with each other. It’s like a team performing together; any mismatch or bad link in the chain will ruin your sound.