How to Get Better Sound in Your Home Theater System
Avoid These Common Surround Sound Mistakes in Your Home Theater
While the big-screen experience is awe-inspiring and a great thing to show off to friends, it's not what drives a lot of our home theater business. It's often constant issues with audio that push our clients to reach out for a professional home theater system. They're tired of straining to hear dialogue or not truly feeling the explosion in a blockbuster.
We wanted to address some of the issues that keep theaters from becoming the immersive entertainment experiences they should be. By avoiding these mistakes in your Edinburg, TX, home, you'll get the perfect soundtrack to all your favorite movies and feel like you're in the middle of the action when watching sports.
SEE MORE: Avoid These 3 Home Theater Design Mistakes
Section 1: Don't Settle for a Sound Bar
Soundbars are becoming an increasingly popular option for home theater systems, with even some of our renowned high-end partners like Klipsch and Bowers & Wilkins (B&W) offering great models. There’s no doubt a benefit in their convenience and compactness, but even those high-end models can't quite match the depth and immersion that expertly placed, high-performance speakers provide.
True auditory immersion comes from enveloping the listener in sound, which is precisely what dedicated speakers achieve. Strategically placed speakers in front of, behind, next to, and even above the listener literally surround them. 3D audio formats require signals to move freely from speaker to speaker to mimic real-life sound, something that can only be achieved by soundbars.
Soundbars mimic this movement by bouncing sound off walls and ceilings, making them more vulnerable to the room’s acoustics and often leading to unpredictable variations in sound quality. Instead, speakers can be calibrated and angled for optimal performance, ensuring clarity and richness that resonates with intention.
Section 2: Don't Forget About Your AV Receiver
Most people visualize speakers and projectors when they think of a theater. After all, they're the components that they interact with directly. But that doesn't mean they're the ones leading the show. Behind them is the real conductor of your theater: the AV receiver. You should have a receiver relaying the signal from your sources to your speakers for a few reasons.
While we could talk for hours about the technical benefits of high-performance receivers from the likes of Sony, first, let's get the most basic reason out. Your sources and speakers only have so many inputs and outputs. You could get up to ten sources or more feeding into your home theater system with a receiver serving as an intermediary.
That said, the receiver’s specs and features do matter. For example, the Sony ES receivers work with object-based surround sound formats like Dolby Atmos and DTS:X. They offer 360 Spatial Sound mapping, creating an expansive sound field tailored to the environment, much like a live venue. Powerful amplification makes them great for large theaters, while room calibration software helps adjust your sound to your room acoustics.
Section 3: Don't Go Entirely Wireless
With the advent of streaming and high-quality wireless speakers, many people are looking for wireless surround sound setups. We highly discourage our clients from doing this, as you'll always get a better result with hardwired installations.
Our Dolby Atmos surround sound systems require at least seven speakers and a subwoofer to work well. When sending wireless audio signals to that many speakers, the potential for issues rises substantially, which is why a wired solution will always be best when possible.
That doesn’t mean we ignore streaming entirely. Instead, we build hybrid surround sound systems. In most cases, that means going with receivers or media servers with wireless capabilities that make connecting streaming services to your home theater easier.
Are you building a new theater or struggling with audio in your existing one? We can design a surround sound system that delivers powerful, crisp, immersive sound. Call us or fill out our contact form to schedule a consultation!
