Introduction

Home Theater Confusion

Of all the expensive things that people buy (homes, cars, computers, vacations, college educations), home theater is probably the one about which they know the least.

The ads in the Sunday paper say that if you spend enough money you can get a movie-theater experience in your own home, but the closest they can get to explaining why is to rattle on about Dolby Digital, progressive-scan DVD, 16:9 widescreen, 480p resolution, and dipole surround speakers. Since hardly anyone knows what any of those things are, they might as well be talking about fluzits, grakobs, worblits, and drubinks. You just know that if you fork over the thousands of dollars they’re asking for, you’re going to be horribly embarrassed the first time one of your geeky friends comes over and tells you that you’ve wasted your money because everyone knows that a grakob can’t even interface with your drubink properly, and that you should have gotten a grakob II instead. In addition to being embarrassed, you’re also angry with yourself, because you suspect that your friend, however inconsiderate, is also right.

Certainly one of the main reasons for all this confusion is that home theater is new and rapidly changing, whereas homes, cars, and even computers, are older and have become commonplace.

As with most new technologies that enter the mainstream, there’s lots of home-theater information available for the enthusiast, but not for somebody who just wants to watch films on a quality home system without getting a master’s degree in the subject. Hiring a custom installer to do all the work might be an option for the wealthy, but it’s out of the reach of most buyers. And even the rich are in trouble if they have no idea what the custom installer is talking about.

There are a few great salespeople (mostly with specialty retailers), but the others are of very little help. They may not know what the various terms mean any more than you do, but they’re pretty good at faking it. Fortunately, they’re usually much too busy to answer your questions in detail, so the harm their wrong answers do is relatively limited.

The situation was much the same in the early days of Hi-Fi, but then people who just wanted reasonable sound without getting into the details could buy all-in-one systems, in attractive wood cabinets, called consoles. Plug them in, put on a record, and you got pretty impressive sound, way better than whatever you had before. It wasn’t the best you could do, not even the best for the money, but it was fine. Twenty years or so later, when Hi-Fi became commonplace, everybody got comfortable with plugging together separate components and a couple of speakers.

Alas, there’s no equivalent to the console for home theater. You can buy a “home theater in a box,” but, amazingly, it won’t show any pictures because there’s no TV! Or, you can buy a TV with a built-in DVD player or VCR, but that won’t get you home theater.

Who This Book Is For… and Not For

I wrote this book for you, not for your geeky friend. Not to teach you everything about home theater, but just what you really need to know. I assume you don’t want to make home theater your hobby—you just want to watch movies at home with the best picture and sound that your budget will allow.

Here’s another way to look at whom I’m writing for. There are three kinds of home-theater people:

·      TV watchers who stick the TV in the corner, maybe have a VCR or DVD hooked up to it, and watch a movie now and then.

·      Average people who appreciate a fine, widescreen picture and excellent surround sound, and can spend, say, $2000 to $15,000, but need help choosing what to buy and how to set it up.

·      Extremists—the kind of people who spend $50,000 for a projection TV and $9000 for a DVD player.

(If we were talking about wines, the first group would drink it from a cardboard box that they keep handy on a refrigerator shelf, the second group knows a bit about wine and likes to buy bottles for under $10 from a wine specialty store, and the third group has their own wine cellar with a few $1000 bottles in it.)

So I’m writing for the middle group. The first group probably isn’t even interested in this book. And, while there’s lots of good information here for the extremists, I’ll have very little to say directly about the high-end equipment they’ll be looking to buy.

Here’s another perspective: The middle group gets a home-theater experience about 100 times better than the first group, and the third group gets it maybe 25% better than the middle group. Once you get past $10,000 or so, the benefits diminish very rapidly!

I’m also assuming you’d rather read a short book than a long one, so you can get on to the main goal, watching movies. Before I included any topics here, I asked the question, “Does my reader need to know this?” That’s why, for example, there’s very little here about the design of speakers, or how laserdiscs differ from DVDs, or why it’s hard to build a flat-screen TV. Hobbyists want to know these things, but I’m assuming you don’t. (If I’m wrong about you, click on the “For more” links through this book or try some of the Internet resources I’ve listed in the last chapter.)

But, complicated or not, I have included fairly detailed explanations of some topics, such as TV resolution, which you really do need to know about.

What’s Not In This Book

Because this is a book about home theater, it covers little or nothing about other audio or video products that aren’t for the home or aren’t for theater, such as:

·      Mobile systems for showing movies in a car or on your lap.

·      Portable or bookshelf audio systems.

·      Small TVs under about 27”.

·      Computer-related hardware and software.

·      Game players.

Also, I do mention many specific brands and models, but mostly just for examples. I make no attempt to list all the products available or to rate any of them. I will, though, give some advice (mostly in Chap. 7) about selecting specific equipment and how to buy it.

How This Book Is Organized

Here’s how this book is organized: After some basics in Chap. 1, I start from the outside in, with the components that bring the picture to our eyes (Chap. 2) and the sound to our ears (Chap. 3). Then I cover the sources for all of this, starting with discs (CDs, DVDs, and the like) in Chap. 4. Shows that are transmitted by over-the-air broadcasting, by cable, or by satellite are covered in Chap. 5. Recorders (VCRs and the newer digital video recorders) are in Chap. 6. That much covers all the main technologies and equipment. You’re then ready to pick what you want and buy it, which is the subject of Chap. 7. Choosing or building the home theater room and setting everything up is in Chap. 8. In the last chapter I’ll point you to some useful resources, mainly on the Internet.

I’ve tried to introduce terms before they’re used, for readers who go through the book sequentially, but I know that many of you will skip around. So if you encounter a term that doesn’t seem to be fully explained, check the index to see if it’s already been covered. If you get lost, or have any other comments or questions, please let me know by sending me email at feedback@htexplained.com. I won’t promise to answer every email, but I’ll try.

Here and there I’ve included links to a special web site that contains additional or more up-to-date information about a topic covered in this book. These links are preceded with a ¤ symbol, as in the one that follows this paragraph. You can type the whole URL into your browser, or just go to www.htexplained.com, where you’ll find all the links and more.

¤ www.htexplained.com/more/intro.htm