Demystifying Home Theater Audio

Home theater has evolved tremendously in the last decade, becoming not only more affordable but capable of replicating the immersive experience of attending a premium cinema. While we focus on bigger screens, 4K Ultra HD, and major developments in video, we often neglect the importance of audio in creating an exceptional home theater experience. Buchan Consulting can help you build out an existing home theater audio set up or build a new one from scratch in order to create a truly incredible viewing experience.

Conventional Speaker Set Ups

If you've done a little exploring, you'll see that most home theater audio systems come with a number after them – 5.1, 7.2, 7.1.4, and 5.2 are a few of the most common designations. Rather than a version or model number, these designations refer to the number and type of speakers involved in the particular set up. The first number refers to the number of speakers, the second number identifies the number of subwoofers, and the third – a relatively new designation – indicates if there are overhead speakers involved.

A 5.1 home theater audio setup is the most compact, conventional approach to home audio surround-sound. It's comprised of a front right, front left, front center, left surround and right surround speaker. In addition to these 5 speakers, there is 1 subwoofer. This configuration is relatively simple – the front left and front right speakers are placed an equal distance from the viewing position and the screen, the center speaker sits directly below the screen, the subwoofer stands in a front corner of the room, and the right and left surrounds are placed in the rear corners of the room. If you're sitting 15’ from the screen, for example, you should consider placing your front right and left speakers 15’ from you and 15’ from the screen. This placement helps ensure sounds that match the action moving across the screen.

From this basic set up, you can upgrade your theater set up with additional surround speakers or an extra subwoofer. A system advertised as 7.1 or 7.2 indicates 7 total speakers, and expands the surround capabilities of your system. The configuration is much the same as in a 5-speaker layout, but the two additional speakers are placed level with the viewing position, which allows for greater fidelity in tracking sound as it moves around the room. At Buchan Consulting, we're big fans of Definitive Technology – they offer compact and beautifully constructed set ups in both 5.1 and 7.1 formats, as well as other space-saving alternatives if you don't have the square footage for a full surround-sound layout.

Recently, a third digit has been added to the audio-numbering system. This third digit trails the digit indicating the number of subwoofers, and indicates the number of over-head mounted speakers in the layout. Dolby Atmos, a relatively new innovation in cinematic sound-mixing, makes this number pertinent, and offers the home theater buff a chance to incorporate professional-grade sound into their personal set-up.

Making the Move to Dolby Atmos

An audio processor decodes digital information from source material, like a BluRay disc or streaming content, and relays it to your speaker set up. This digital information is more advanced than ever, as major movie studios increasingly rely on what's known as object-based sound editing platforms. These platforms give sound editors unprecedented control over how and where you hear the sound in movies, and the most widely used of these platforms is Dolby Atmos. When you attend a Dolby Atmos-enabled movie theater, it's this system allows you to hear dinosaurs charging from behind or a raging storm descending from above with such startling clarity.

At home, however, none of this information is available to your speakers unless you've got an audio processor that can decode this information. When shopping for an audio processor, make sure it's Atmos compatible in order to take full advantage of object-based sound mixing on the latest films. Without this designation, you'll miss the depth and breadth of sound that Atmos offers.

Atmos is one of the first platforms to take advantage of the overhead speakers we mentioned above. The incorporation of overhead speakers offers you the chance to hear your movie's sound from every direction that you could naturally – above, behind, in front and to the sides. It's a great time to invest in a 5.1.4 or 7.1.4 system, as more and more content released in the coming years will be able to take advantage of this new sound dimension.

If you've got a surround-sound audio system already in place and are hesitant to buy additional speakers, or simply don't have the mounting capacity, never fear – Atmos' programming is advanced enough to leverage your existing set up in order to synthesize coming-from-above sound in a truly convincing fashion. Right now, incorporating an Atmos-enabled audio processor into your home theater set up is probably the best single action you can take to improve the quality of your viewing and listening experience.

Freedom In Scalability

Incorporating new technology into your home can be a daunting task. Balancing budget and performance and assessing the longevity of a new product can feel overwhelming, since it tends to feel like an all-or-nothing proposition: either this is the perfect piece of technology for my home, or I'll have to go through the same vetting process in just a few years and be frustrated in the interim.

That's not the case with home theater audio projects. You can update a bit at a time, first investing in new speakers and later adding an Atmos processor, or the other way around. If you're starting with a 5.1 speaker set up, Buchan Consulting can help you expand that to a 7.1 set up, or even add overhead mounts to take full advantage of the Atmos platform. These improvements will allow you to bring the thrill of watching a movie in a cinema home to your personal theater space, and enhance the enjoyment of movie-watching for many years to come.