You've got your new large-screen HDTV set up, and you have plenty of your favorite DVDs waiting to be viewed. Now all you need is the right sound. When you sit down to watch a movie -- or live music concert -- in your own home theater, you want to feel as though you're in a real movie theater. The audio is just as important as the picture quality, which means you should take great care in shopping for the right receiver and speaker pieces. As you shop for audio components for your home theater, first check out "HDTV – A beginner's guide." Then, consider the following points:

The AV receiver
Most average home theater users don’t need to buy separate tuners and amplifiers for the different channels. The easiest and perhaps most cost-effective way to get several pieces all in one package is to go with an audio/video receiver, which lets you plug in most, if not all, of the pieces in your system, including your television.  read more »

You might answer that question a number of ways: “As big as it can be”, “As small as it can be”, or “Big enough to accommodate twelve seats”, or maybe “the exact size of the existing room I plan to convert”. However, many considerations are to be made before you answer too quickly. There is a lot of science involved in the design of a high performance theater, even in just determining its size. There are also budgetary constraints and physical limitations that come into play. Each theater has its own equation that must be understood and calculated based on these factors and the customer’s personal direction. It is the intent of this series of articles, titled “Home Theater Planning, Design, Calibration & Enjoyment,” to help you make educated decisions during the process. There are always pros and cons that must be weighed, and as a consultant, it is my job to make sure that my clients can make an intelligent decision. Customers may end up dissatisfied with the results if they didn’t know there was a choice to be made, or didn’t fully understand what the consequences were going to be. There are some things we cannot control, but we can influence almost every factor that determines our eventual success. It becomes a question of prioritizing. I cannot make these decisions for you because they are personal, but I’ll guide you through to a happy ending.  read more »

• by Norman Varney

Digital Video Recorders may very well be the future of television. They offer you unprecedented freedom: You can watch precisely what you'd like, whenever you desire. But options vary, and it's worthwhile to investigate what's available so you can be satisfied with your ultimate selection.

The accompanying chart lists six DVR options—TiVo, Comcast, Verizon FiOS, Dish Network, DirecTV and SnapStream Beyond TV4—and provides information about each company for each category to give you a starting point for comparing options.  read more »

Screen Location
It all starts with location. Referring back to an earlier article in this series, we discussed how the number of seats dictates the room dimensions and that room dimensions dictate optimum speaker and listener locations. Once we determine these positions, we know that we want the sound to seem as if it is being created by the picture, rather than coming from in front of, below, above, behind or to the side of it. That said, we want the screen to be located about the same distance from us as the center channel speaker.  read more »

• by Norman Varney