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I’m often asked, “Are in-wall speakers really good enough to use as rear surrounds?” I get this question most often from folks who’ve invested quite a bit of money for their front channels and are a bit dubious that in-walls (this applies to in-ceilings as well) can perform in the same league as their floor-standers. Make no mistake, in-walls have come a long way in recent years. It’s likely that some of them may even sound better than your current front channels.

In the past, in-walls were made with flimsy plastic frames, low quality crossovers, paper driver cones, and were best suited for background-noise. These days it’s possible to find in-walls with metal baskets, injection-molded frames, crossovers that rival those found in some traditional speakers, polypropylene drivers and are best suited to blowing your socks off.

A couple of in-wall speakers in the ‘knock your socks off’ class would be the Klipsch KL-7800-THX in-walls with 8-inch aluminum woofer and one-inch titanium-dome tweeter, or Energy’s’ Veritas V2.2WM 3-way, custom series, in-wall speakers with aluminum dome mid-range and tweeters with 6.5” woofer.

From there and moving even higher up in the high-end food chain, would be something like PSB’s CW800E (pictured left) in-wall speakers priced at a budget busting $2,749.00 each. Obviously these are some extreme examples of in-walls that can hold their own against tradition speaker types, but there are plenty of others to choose from at all price points. As always we recommend listing to any speaker before you buy it.

If you’re new to the front-projection world, at some point in your research, shopping or browsing you’ll stumble on the term “screen gain”. You’ll want to know what this is and how it applies to different rooms and projectors before proceeding down the front-projection path to home theater nirvana. Screen gain is the measure of how reflective the screen material is, or in the broader sense, how much light the screen reflects back into the room and ultimately to your eyes.

Typical screens are rated at gains from 1.0 (neutral gain) to 1.2, 1.3 and beyond. There are even some negative gain screens designated as 0.8 and alike. Generally speaking however all you have to remember is that a 1.3 gain screen should appear brighter than a 1.0 gain screen, at least from the same manufacturer. Although rare there are cases where one manufacturers 1.0 gain screen could appear brighter than another’s 1.2.

I generally advise my clients to stay away from the ultra high-gain screens if they have the ability to control the light in the room, i.e. make it completely dark. Typically the low-gain screens present less off-axis viewing irregularities and in many cases just plain look better than their high-gain counterparts, when paired with a bright enough projector. Of course if you can’t control the light in your room at all times of the day, a high-gain and or high-contrast gray screen may be just what the doctor ordered.

While HDMI is rapidly becoming the de-facto cable of choice in many applications, component cables (for video) paired with digital audio cables are still widely used and will be for some time, you’ll notice I said digital audio cables and not cable singular. For years now we’ve had two different connection methods for passing the same digital audio stream, namely optical and coaxial. While both are perfectly capable of transmitting digital audio from one device to another I do have a preference between the two.

A typical coaxial digital-audio cable won’t look all the different from a standard “RCA” cable and as a matter of fact given the cables resistance of 75ohms, a composite video cable will work just fine in this application. Keep in mind that one-half of a stereo cable and or single channel RCA audio cable shouldn’t be substituted for a 75ohm digital cable; as these cables are intended for 50ohm applications i.e. analog audio. While it’s easy to mistake a coaxial digital cable for something else, Toslink digital-audio cables shouldn’t prove hard to identify, the end of the connector will have a square, plastic housing and clear center conductor or tip.

Which do I prefer? coaxial, its essentially maintenance free, more robust and for all practical purposes identical in sound quality to Toslink cables. As a matter of fact since we’re talking about digital signals the only thing would give one of these transmission methods an advantage over the other; would be the quality of the transmitter/receivers in the individual pieces of gear. Toslink is fine and will give excellent results in most cases but in my experience coaxial cables tend to cause less transmission errors and last longer to boot.

In order to discuss the different display technologies effectively (at a later date) we’ll need to define some of them upfront. I could have started with LCD, plasma, D-ILA, SXRD or any number of others but I wanted to start with DLP (Digital Light Processing) as its one of the most common front projection technologies in use and well, front projection is just plain cool. DLP was developed by Dr. Larry Hornbeck at Texas Instruments in the late eighties but believe it or not front-projection wasn’t one of the first implementations. It (DLP) was actually used to fuse red dyes (text and images) onto airlines tickets.

DLP uses millions of moving micro-mirrors to create the images we see on-screen, the mirrors are fixed to a chip called a Digital Micromirror Device (DMD) which is illuminated by the projectors lamp (gross oversimplification). The technology is known for its accurate colors, sharp images and often better than average contrast ratio.

DLP’s create color by focusing the light path through a color-wheel; multiple “colors” are projected by varying the speed of the color wheel. Early DLP’s were prone to smear colors (known as rainbow effect) due to the slow speed of color-wheel but this was all but eliminated in recent models by higher-speed, multi-segmented color wheels.

3-chip DLP projectors eliminate the color smearing problem altogether with the use of one DMD per primary color, i.e. red, green and blue. 3-chip DLP’s are quite expensive when compared to their single-chip counterparts but are generally perceived as superior in all regards.

If you’re wondering whether it’s safe to buy into either Blu-ray or HD DVD in the midst of a “format war” just put HD DVD out of your mind and know that Blu-ray has won, the format war is over and you can take that to the bank.

In the past several weeks/months HD DVD has taken hit after hit, most notably starting with Warner Brothers announcement that they would stop supporting HD DVD by June of this year, followed by Netflix announcing they would stop renting HD DVD’s by the end of the year and then with Best Buy announcing they focus their attention on Blu-ray as well.

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Home Theater is more than just a big screen and precise sound; it’s about the overall experience. It’s a means of entertainment, relaxation and or being scared out of your wits especially if you’re into horror films. Regardless of your personal likes and dislikes of movie genre’s you want the film to be the main focus, not the associated technology or hassle therein. Lighting control is a great way to improve your theaters overall functionality and enjoy-ability, and hey nothing beats being able to control the lights from the couch, well except maybe Ed Mcmahon with a big check at your front door.

This is a subject we’ll delve into with greater detail in the future but for now we’ll stick to the switch-for-switch (infra-red) remote control lighting solutions on the market. What do I mean by switch-for-switch? In essence these solutions involve removing your existing light switch (or switches) and replacing them with one that has the ability to be remotely controlled. Note: always have an electrician perform this task.

The infra-red lighting control products we most often use come from Lutron, whether it’s the Maestro, Spacer or Grafik Eye series, all of these products are UL listed, reliable and most importantly remote controllable. Single gang light switches with included IR remotes in the Spacer lines can be found for under a hundred dollars. More customizable solutions in the Grafik Eye range can go for several hundred dollars and can control up to 4 (or more) gangs of lights from a single wall box.

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Sorry for the cheesy post title, it really was the first thing that popped into my head. Recently I was asked “Well, what does the subwoofer do?” It was a perfectly innocuous question but I was caught off guard, every now and then a good jolt of (not everyone lives and breathes this stuff) reality is just what the doctor ordered. So with that and in a very small nutshell this is what a subwoofer does.

A subwoofer is meant to compliment your existing front channel speakers in either a 2-channel (stereo) or home theater (multi-channel configuration) setting. The subwoofers purpose is to reproduce bass information at frequencies lower than your front channels speakers are capable of reproducing.

In other words, your front speakers may perform like champs from 18kHz to 45Hz but may run out of steam completely below 40hz (low bass). This is where the subwoofer comes in and takes over for the front channels. The benefit is twofold, the front channels are able to focus on what they do best namely treble, midrange and the upper to mid bass range, and the subwoofer is left to do what it does best, low bass.

I’m often asked if it’s worth it to hire a professional to calibrate a systems audio and or video quality, many of those who ask assume their systems wouldn’t benefit from calibration because they don’t own the latest and greatest video gear, I tell them nothing could be farther from the truth. First off make no mistake professional calibration can and often does give a better end result than buying the next model or “spec” up in the product line. Simply put if the environment or the gear itself isn’t optimized to its fullest extent, you’ll never get the maximum return on your investment.

Now before I get any farther, know that you can perform calibration on your own (often with excellent results) for as little as the price of a few DVD’s and a sound meter from radio shack, but professional calibrators have the tools and training to take it to the next performance level. I’ve personally seen ISF (Imaging Science Foundation) calibrations that made night and day, jaw dropping differences over the original settings.

On the audio end of the spectrum the Home Acoustics Alliance (HAA for short) trains independent calibrators from all across the country to troubleshoot, diagnose and recommend the best course of action for ailing audio systems. An HAA certified calibrator can make your system sound better than you ever imagined without adding a single piece of new gear to the equation. Often times custom home theater specialty shops employ calibrators who are both ISF and HAA certified, this allows for a one stop source for all your calibration needs. In future tips we’ll explore how to get the most out of your own (end user) calibrations.

I’m often asked how does the Playstation 3 perform as a Blu-ray player and would you recommend one? The answer to the second question is a little easier to tackle than the first, as direct comparisons of the PS3 to current standalone Blu-ray players generally leave the standalones at a slight disadvantage. That slight disadvantage will no doubt change in the coming months as we see more profile 1.1 and 2.0 standalones enter the market. (The PS3 is already profile 1.1 capable and it’s assumed that a profile 2.0 update is in the works)

But getting back to recommending the PS3 as a Blu-ray player, the short answer is yes I do recommend them as Blu-ray players, but that recommendation comes with a few caveats. Yes the PS3 produces great looking video from Blu-ray discs and yes it’s able to decode Dolby TrueHD and transmit PCM audio but it doesn’t have the ability to transmit bitstreamed audio (i.e. letting your receiver do all the decoding of the audio stream versus the player) but my biggest gripe about using the PS3 as a Blu-ray player is its lack of an IR remote.

I can’t think of a single full-featured, universal remote with the ability to learn Bluetooth, but there are tens of thousands of learning, universal IR remotes on the market right now. The simple inclusion of a infrared receiver in the PS3 would have been a fantastic way to better integrate the unit into our home theaters. Now a few months ago this was a relatively serious problem, luckily since then aftermarket solutions have become available but its still not as clean a solution as supporting IR internally.

That said, sure the PS3 makes a fine Blu-ray player, I enjoy mine very much and as long as none of the aforementioned issues are outright deal breakers, I’m sure one would suffice just fine until the day full-featured, profile 2.0 players reach mainstream price points.

It may sound a bit strange but when potential clients ask me for home theater “tips” I always try to mention a network interface for their home theater equipment. In days past we thought about cables in terms of things like composite, s-video, component and eventually HDMI but ethernet cabling is rapidly becoming as important as any other cable in our home theater systems.

Whether for devices like AppleTV, Blu-ray players, game consoles, home theater PC’s, infra-red repeater systems, networked audio/video balun’s or any number of as yet unforeseen home theater devices, you can bet that eventually you’ll find that “killer app” for net connectivity in the living room.

If you’re pulling cable now (or having it done) take my advice; go ahead and add an extra CAT-5/6 cable for ethernet to that list. What about Wi-Fi you ask? sure wireless is an option and in many cases it’ll work just fine, again though I say if you’re already pulling wire, hardwired ethernet’s the way to go.

We hear a lot about plasma burn in, too much in my opinion, the problem used to be real to some degree and it still is to some degree don’t get me wrong but it’s really blown way out of proportion. The phosphors used (yes Plasma’s use those as well) in early plasmas were much more susceptible to burn-in than the materials used in today’s sets. Combine that with advancements like pixel-shifting and lower wattage power supplies and the burn-in rap plasma gets starts to look a bit silly.

That said there are a few things you can do to all but guarantee a hassle free and more importantly burn-free plasma television experience. First off for at least the first hundred hours or so, go easy on the brightness and contrast. We all know you want to crank it up so high you get a suntan but if you’ll resist this temptation for a few weeks; your set stands a lot better chance at a burn-free life span.

Secondly be sure to turn on any screen savers available in your source devices, many newer DVD players and satellite receivers have the feature built-in, look for it in other devices as well. I make it a habit to avoid any unnecessary pillar-boxed and or letter-boxed programming for the first 50 or so hours of use, what do I mean by this? no that doesn’t mean never turn a new plasma to a 4:3 aspect ratio channel when its new, it means don’t take the dog for a walk with Casablanca playing in the background, at least not until the sets had a few hours to break-in.

You might hear people talk about changing channels from time to time, randomly, during break-in to avoid “burn-in”. In my opinion that’s a bit excessive, as long as you don’t have the contrast and or brightness cranked up into the stratosphere you’ll be just fine, when the sets new avoid news tickers and practice some common sense, it’ll take you and your new set a long way.

We all know about surround sound, right? yeah I knew we did but did you know that surround sound comes in many different flavors? Aside from the different formats (we’ll get into those later) there are actually five (at least) different surround sound configurations on the market today. First off we have 2.0 or stereo, while obviously not a proprietary Dolby Digital configuration it is important to be able to recognize this format as many older movies shown on cable and satellite use 2.0 audio. Why is this important you ask? many modern receivers allow you to apply Dolby PLIIx processing to stereo sources which will give you a surround effect with just two channels.

From there we move into the venerable Dolby Digital 5.1 which encompasses a huge portion of our overall surround sound world, from DVD’s to movies on cable and satellite 5.1 is the bread and butter channel configuration for home surround sound playback. Simply put if you’ve heard surround sound at home there’s a good chance it was a 5.1 configuration. A “5.1″ speaker system consists of a discrete channel for left front, right front, center, left rear, right rear and subwoofer.

Moving right along we get into the 6.1 channel configurations, 6.1 really took root in the latter half of the decade with the configuration finding its way into receivers at all price points, as a matter of fact its probably harder to find a 5.1 receiver now than it is to find a 6.1 capable receiver. 6.1 adds a back surround or “center surround” in some circles to the equation; this provides a smoother transition of sound between the individual speakers.

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