Your Buying Tips for Your Home Theater speakers
Whether it’s mellow background music or the boom of an exciting movie, the sounds you hear from a home theater entertainment system all require speakers. A speaker system can make or break a home theater entertainment system. No matter how great you’re other audio gears is, if the speakers aren’t good, you won’t have good sound. And vice versa.
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Buying Tips
1. Audition speakers, and buy what sounds good to you.
2. Match your speakers to your receiver or amplifier.
3. Tower speakers can be beautiful.
4. Small speakers can rock as well
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The good news is you don’t have to pay a fortune for nice-sounding speakers. Audio technology has advanced to a point where many small speakers sound good enough for most people. Which leads us to the even better news: Today there are lots of different kinds of speaker to choose from building home theater entertainment.
Almost all home theater speakers today use what are called drivers. Typical cone-shaped drivers consists of a woofer for low sounds, a tweeter for high sounds and a mid-range driver for mid-range sound. A one-way speaker covers a full range of sounds with one driver; a two-way speaker uses a woofer and a tweeter; and a three-way speaker uses a woofer, tweeter and mid-range driver.
Home Theater: Speaker Type
Tower or Cabinet Speaker is the descendants of those plant-bearing behemoths your better half may have banished from the family room. Many tower speakers look like beautiful sculptures that blend with your decor. And here’s another reason to consider them: They will give you the best bang- not necessarily for your buck but in terms of sound quality. That’s because sound moves air, and generally, the more air moved, the better. Hence, bigger speakers tend to produce better and bigger sounds. That make these speakers great choices for the front channels in a large home theater system-even if they’re hidden behind walls and in columns.
Bookshelf Speaker
Bookshelf speakers are much smaller and take less space. In most cases, they’re small enough to fit on a shelf or a floor stand. Some are just smaller version of those big cabinet speakers. Many bookshelf speaker can also be placed on stands, and they can deliver enough power for all but the biggest and most serious home theaters.
In-wall speaker works like a regular speaker. But instead of being attached to a cabinet, it’s mounted in a frame and set into your wall. It uses the wall cavity as a large cabinet, giving you more bass than you might get from a stand-alone speaker of the same size. These are great options when you don’t have the space. The reduced depth of an in-wall speaker, because it’s made to fit inside a wall cavity.
Ceiling speakers are hung or installed on ceilings to save space and better distribute sound. They are commonly used in home entertainment systems where there is limited room for freestanding speakers. They can also be used to channel sound over different rooms, such as kitchens and bedrooms. Ceiling speakers may be a single speaker or a system consisting of a subwoofer and tweeters. They may also come with a back box, which serves as a control panel for adjusting volume, equalization, and other sound attributes.
Subwoofers reproduce just the low bass for music and movie effect, becoming more and more crucial to the home theater experience. When you go to the movie theater, you marvel not only at the images projected on the screen, but the sounds emanating around you. What really grabs you, though, is the sound you actually feel; the deep bass that shakes you up and gets you right in the gut. A specialized speaker, known as a subwoofer, is responsible for this experience. The subwoofer is designed only to reproduce the lowest of audible frequencies.
Subwoofer Speaker
Bipole and dipole speakers create ambient, nonlocative effects for home theater surround channels. Bipole surround speakers have two or more speakers that output sound from both sides of the cabinet. If used as side surround speakers, the sound is output both towards the front and rear of the room. If used as rear surround speakers, they output sound in both directions along the rear wall. The dual speakers used in a bipole speaker are ‘in phase’, meaning that both speakers output sound simultaneously. Bipole speakers create a diffuse surround effect so the location of the speaker cannot be pinpointed. In general, bipole speakers are a good choice for movies and music and are usually placed on the side walls. A dipole speaker outputs sound from both sides of the cabinet. The difference is dipole speakers are ‘out of phase’, which means that one speaker is outputting sound while the other is not, and vice-versa. The purpose is to create a very diffuse and enveloping surround sound effect. Dipole surround speakers are usually preferred by movie enthusiasts and are also placed on the side walls.
Speaker bars contain all the channels for a surround-sound system in one cabinet and are often placed beneath a TV screen. It can be a solution for people who do not want a lot of wiring running about their home and want to supplement the audio from their flat panel HDTV. They are designed to be used in a living room home theater application and are placed below a flat panel TV. The slim units normally house an amplifier and speakers which simulate the effect of actual surround sound speakers with varying degrees of success depending upon the brand and model.
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Deciding to invest in the best home theater system for your home is a big decision which should factor in many things with quality and price range being the two biggest determining factors. There are many home theater systems available so knowing how much you can spend and what you want to spend it on will help narrow the field down.
