Understanding Basic Custom Home Theater Setup Excursions

When it comes to custom home theater setups, a lot of "theater" elements are considered, and congruently optimized.

From the viewing screen type, to ideal lighting conditions, custom home theater excursions mostly deal with optimizing the surround sound setup of a home theater system. What basically makes a home theater system different from a regular television setup is a home theater system's surround sound feature, and most custom home theater work deal on this aspect of the system.

For a minimum degree of surround sound quality, one would need two front speakers, and two speakers positioned behind, or on the side, creating a surround area for sound to travel in. An audio mixer handles the multiple channel mixing need for the sounds coming out from the speakers.

Most surround speaker systems come in 5.1, 6.1 and 7.1 packages. The .1 in these defining package names refer to a subwoofer channel, which are low frequency channels ideal for bass boost sounds. The preceding number figure before the .1 refers to the number of speakers included in the surround speaker package.

In effect, a 5.1 surround speaker system is made up of 6 speakers in total, one subwoofer, and five speakers. 6.1 and 7.1 speakers are composed of 7 and 8 speakers, respectively.

Using the main viewing screen as a surround sound setup's anchor point, the most prominent sounds of a custom home theater setup come out from the front speakers. Ideally, two speakers would do as front speakers, one on the left and another on the right. Once left side oriented noise is made, one would hear it more on the left speaker, while right side oriented noise, on the right speaker. Putting in a third speaker in the center greatly improves a system's surround sound quality, as the third speaker acts as an anchor point, anchoring the sounds coming from both left and right side speakers. Most 6.1 surround sound packages use this type of setup.

The rear and side speakers in a surround sound custom home theater setup fills in background music, as well as right or left inclined sounds. Background sounds like running water, chirping crickets and explosions sound amazing and more vibrant. They are also ideal for movement sounds, like sounds that start from a certain point, for example from the horizon of a plain, and end going behind you.

Most 7.1 surround sound speaker package setups are laid out to this setup: two front speakers, two side speakers, two rear speakers, and a subwoofer positioned behind the viewers' viewing area. A variation to this setup would involve two front speakers, and an equal distance space positioning of the four other speakers, forming a half circle behind the viewer's area.

Of course, a surround sound custom home theater excursion isn't limited to only using 8 speakers. One could add as many as 12, but these would have to be highly dependent of one's budget, as well as custom home theater space, and a/v mixing system.

Bottom line, knowing what one wants and how much one could spend, should come to a compromise in the building of a custom home theater system.