Home Improvement

The current king of the couch entertainment, a home theatre system combines crystal clear images with the best possible sound output to provide a top quality at-home multimedia experience. All of this is very nice but when it comes down to it, getting your own set up involves either a heavy fee for the technician or a face-to-face match-off between you and a bundle of electronics and a jungle of cables. What to do?!

No London Shelf Brackets Required!

The first rule is: don’t panic. The equipment you now hold in your hands (or, most likely, is all over your living room carpet) is set up to give you the least possible amount of trouble when you are in the set-up phase. The only things you will need is some time and the patience to read and follow instructions (so make sure you have bright lights, avoid soft festoon lighting). To make the process easier, try to think of the source components (things like the DVD player, the sound system and so on) as the beginning point and your TV and speakers as the end point. All that you will be doing is making sure that the signal from that beginning point can get to the end.

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The basic home theatre set-up includes a television (most likely a high definition model) or projector, a DVD/Blueray player, and a surround sound system. Here is how you go about connecting them up.

• First you will need to connect either your satellite, cable or antenna to your television set. If you’ve purchased a DVD recorder you have two options, either connect the cables to the recorder and then into the TV, or split the signal (you can buy an inexpensive device to do it) and connect it to the recorder and the television separately.
• Now you need to connect the DVD or Blueray player to your television set. You will mostly find 2 different ways to do this:
  1. Composite video, S-Video and DVI: In this case you will have just one cable which is used for the video signal. Composite video cables are colour-coded (make sure you plug them into the AV input section of your TV) and both S-Video and DVI have unique plugs that will prevent you from missing the right spot.
  2. HDMI: The special thing about this type of signal is that it combines both high definition video with audio in one single cable. Here, you have two options. One is to connect this to your TV and use the sound output plugs to connect your TV to your sound system. The other is to choose to disregard the sound signal on the HDMI cable (you can access this option in most DVD/Blueray players, read the manual for further instructions) and connect the player to the audio system directly.

• Once you have done that, the only thing we need is to connect the sound signal to the surround sound system. Depending on the type of connection you used on the last step, you will either have to connect the sound system to the DVD/Blueray player or your television set. The cables are usually coded to avoid confusion, so just match the connectors with the plugs and you should be ok.
• The last step is to position the speakers. This process varies depending on the size and shape of the room but some general guidelines can be applied (the following example is for a 5.1 sound system.)
  1. Front Centre Channel: right in front of your TV set, either above or below it.
  2. Sub-woofer: either to the left or the right of the TV set.
  3. Left and Right front speakers: position these roughly to the same distance to the centre speaker and angling slightly towards the audience.
  4. Surround speakers: directly to your left and right just below your listening position, you can elevate these speakers for a clearer sound. To achieve this, you can either buy specially pillars or use regular furniture like a couple of London shelf brackets.