What Exactly is a Home Theater?

A home theater is a room specifically designed to watch picture perfect movies and shows using the latest technological advances. Bravo AV's goal is to compliment your life style by demystifying the home theater and delivering to you:

• The Best Picture
• The Greatest Sound
• The Most Comfortable Environment

More precisely, a good home theater design is the combination of electronic components and room design developed to recreate the experience of watching a movie in a theater, but without leaving home. Home theater systems are made up of multiple electronic components and usually include furniture as well. Here is a summary, and then each component is defined:

• Display Device: Home Theater Projector
• Surround Sound Decoder: Home Theater Receiver or Preamp and Amplifier Combination
• Home Theater Speakers: Usually 5 or 7 depending on the size of your room
• Subwoofer: Another type of speaker, but for bass, explosions and sound effects
• Sources: Signal Components, DVD players, etc.
• Wire and Cables: To connect all the gear and to get signals to the speakers
• Surge Protection and Power Conditioning: To protect your system from damaging electrical disturbances

Home Theater Definitions

Projector: An optical instrument that projects large images onto a screen.

Receiver: An electronic component that "receives" sound signals from source devices and transmits these sounds to your speaker surround sound system. One can think of a receiver as a traffic cop through it you select what source you wish to listen to and the receiver directs it appropriately.

Preamplifier and Amplifier Combo: Same as receiver, but can be provided in two components rather than one for a higher fidelity.

Speakers: Also known as loudspeakers, are devices for audio playback. Typically a theater has at least 5 speakers. Left, Center, Right, and two side surround speakers. In some larger theaters two additional rear speakers are added on the back wall. In components and speaker systems, a channel is a separate signal path made up of the following:

Center Channel: The center speaker in a home theater setup carries the primary amount of information and all the dialogue. Ideally, center speakers are placed within one or two feet above or below the horizontal plane of the left and right speakers and above or below the display device, unless placed behind a perforated screen.

Left Channel: The left speaker carries the left audio channel information.

Right Channel: The right speaker carries the right channel audio information.

Side Surround Speakers: Speakers located beside the listener that reproduce the surround sound channels of surround-sound-encoded audio programs.v

Rear Surround Speakers: Speakers located behind the listener that reproduce the surround sound channels of surround-sound-encoded audio programs.

Subwoofer: A loudspeaker dedicated to producing bass (sound with low frequencies.) Subwoofers typically add that shake and rumble to your home theater.

Sources: Source components are devices that provide audio & video signals to your theater system. DVD players, Cable Boxes, Satellite Receivers, video games and digital media servers are all great examples of sources.

Wire and Cables: Wire and cables connect the entire system together. Examples of wire and cables necessary to outfit a complete home theater would be:

Speaker Wire connects the speakers to the amplifier (a minimum thickness of 14gauge copper wire is recommended)

Coax or RG6 Wire is typically used for Cable TV, DSS.

CAT-5/6 Wire: Category-5 is a communications wire used for many applications. Networking, telephones, infrared communications and keypad communications are some basic examples of the many uses of cat-5.

RGB Wire: Cabling for getting higher quality video signals (such as component and high definition to the display device. RGB wire can have anywhere from 3 to 6 wires inside one cable.

HDMI Cable: (High Definition Multimedia Interface) sends both audio and video on one cable. HDMI also supports the highest quality video available on the market today.

For more information on wire and cable see Bravos AV's:

• Theater Connectivity Diagram
• Classification of Low Voltage Network Wire and
• Structured Wiring Approach.

Surge Protection: In today's world electronics and electronic systems have become very expensive, even at the inexpensive level. Surge Protection helps to protect your expensive electronics from lightning, power surges, brownouts, blackouts, and many other possible dangerous signals that can come in through the electrical systems in your home.

Power Conditioning: Modern electronics have become increasingly better at displaying very high levels of detail in video and audio images. Noise on your electrical system from appliances and various other devices plugged in throughout the home can easily become magnified through your home theater system. Power conditioning takes the incoming electricity, cleans all noise and interference off the line and then provides clean pure power to your electronics system for a much-improved viewing and listening experience.

Theater Chairs: Theater chairs come in all sizes, color, firmnesses and styles. Many chairs have motorized options and some have heaters. We also have custom cabinet craftspeople and interior design consultation available to help you design a home theater that looks as good as it sounds.

Contact TOM CURNIN at 908-304-0555 or Tom@BravoAV.com.  Your Professional AV Expert.

LOCAL, RELIABLE AND KNOWLEDGEABLE