Acoustic Nirvana :). Review on Tips on maintaining a Sound System

Great sound is exhilirating. It's the decibel driven nirvana you experience when you sit back in a movie theater, pick up your pop corn and lose yourself in the magical world of surround sound. The crystal clear sounds of water droplets, chirping birds and the heart pounding thuds of bullets firing and the roar of choppers thundering by. All these are marvels of minimally distorted digital sound. And nowadays these effects are available right in the comfort of your own homes. With the advent of home theater configurations, the experience of inimitable digital sound is now available at your fingertips. But to recreate the digitally superior effects you need to choose the right equipment and optimize it to suit the auditory ambience that you're looking to create around you. Here are a few pointers that may come in handy should you decide to bring the movie theater to your living rooms.

Most home theaters are available as off the shelf packages and a handy user manual. These are good for people who have the spending leeway. But for the slightly more cash-conservative sort (my PC term for miser) like yours truly, do not despair -- for there are several options to choose from (and this comes from first hand experience). Get the right gear and educate yourself on how to assemble it all together. When choosing your audio equipment, you can cut a few corners without compromising the overall quality of sound. If you want to go from the ground up, here's what you will basically need --

A room with good acoustics

One of the first things to do when rigging up your sound system is to do an acoustics analysis. Go to one end of your room and yell at the top of your lungs. If you can hear an echo, you're in luck because your walls reflect the sound and that's really what you're looking for when you want a good acoustics set up. Part of the whole experience is what I like to call ''moving'' sound. It's essentially being able to feel that you're one with the sound. Especially when you're watching a really great movie, you want to feel like you're a part of the action. Moving sound creates that ambience for you. If you're rigging up a surround system, the more room you have the better off you are. Make sure you dont clutter up the area with too much furniture, keep it as open as possible to avoid sound from being absorbed.

A multi-channel digital amplifier/reciever.

The party begins here. This is sort of the ''center piece'' of your assemblage. So when you buy, make sure you're going for the gold when you choose one of these. Sony has some of the nicest digital amps I have come across at an affordable price. I'm sure I'll raise up a storm among hardcore acoustic purists by giving out brand names, but if you are one of those, I'm pretty sure you won't need to be reading this. I own a Sony STR-DE475 5-channel receiver/amp and this bad boy gets out about 80 watts per channel. Each channel connects to a speaker. Typically a 5 channel amp supports a left, a right, a center and two surround speakers. There is also a dedicated co-ax sub-woofer output that you can connect to a sub-woofer (for those of you unfamiliar with the terminology, a sub-woofer is the speaker that will make your neighbors detest you with its rumbling low frequency sound).

When looking up a spec-chart for a digital amplifier you can look for any combination of the following attributes:

1. RMS (root mean square) output: Without getting too technical, in very basic terms, RMS will give you an average measure of the output of your system components (amp and speakers) and is usually the most accurate measure of performance.

   
   




2. PMPO (Peak Music Power Output): This gives the peak power rating of each component and is usually not a very accurate measure of output. PMPO measures usually dont count for bragging rights!

   
   




3. Type of digital decoder used: This is usually standard in most digital amps. If you see the words Dolby Digital, or DTS, or Dolby Pro Logic, you're in pretty good hands. The decoder is what distributes the sound through the different channels. DTS 5.1 for instance, means your sound is distributed through 5 channels (depending on the frequency) and an LFE (low frequency) (.1) channel (where you can typically rig up the subwoofer).

   
   




4. Multiple component inputs: Here's what makes the amplifier/receiver the ''center piece''. If you want to build a home theater you want everything to be routed through the amp so you can use the amp control to switch between components. My Sony STR DE475 is connected to my TV, my DVD player, my PS2 and an auxiliary CD player.

   
   

Speakers

And of course the end game is all in the speakers. If you buy a monster amp, odds are you will want to get speakers that complement your amp. If you end up buying cheap 30 watters for your 80 watt a channel amp, you'll be smelling smoke very very soon. Get speakers that at the very least match the channel output. If your channel is an 80 watt channel then you want at least an 80 watt speaker. Here you dont necessarily need to go brand name unless you have a very discerning ear for sound quality.

For the left and right, pretty much any brand of bookshelf speakers will do. If you want to really get enhanced sound quality, Bose has some great speakers but then do you want to spend a fortune? You can invest about half the price on a pair of very decent speakers. Yamaha, Cerwin Vega, KLH and Sony are competitively priced with Yamaha at the lower end and Sony at the higher end.

The center speaker is typically optional but if your sound is more high frequency-rich (like conversational) the center will greatly enhance the overall auditory effect.

The surround speakers and the sub make for the background and the ambience. The surround speakers are delayed by about 10-30 milliseconds from the left, right and center and make for what is called the ''travelling sound'' effect. Most DVDs these days are 5.1 compatible which means if you have a surround set up you will get the complete theater effect and if you're half the audio freak that I am, this will result in a very satisfying acoustic experience.

Another quick pointer when placing your speakers at different points in your room. A common mistake is to have the left and right speakers pointing straight ahead at you. That gives a very ''mono'' effect that doesnt really justify the whole concept of stereo sound. Always angle your speakers at about 20-30 degrees facing each other (like a cone) - essentially the cone should converge right where you are. I wont launch into the physics of acoustics but trust me, you will be surprised at the difference this will make. Keep your center directly facing you. The sub woofer ideally would be somewhere either behind you or to the side. If you keep the sub facing you, the low frequency sound will overwhelm and cancel out the sound coming out of the other speakers and you definitely dont want that. The surround speakers would ideally be behind you or at strategic points further away from the other speakers. The further away you can get your surrounds, the more effective your travelling sound effect will be.

In closing, you can really get a great set up going with minimal expenditure if you do the research ahead of time. Even if you do spend the extra dough and procure a whopper of a system, you want to do the right things to kick up the effect a few notches and get the most value for your money!

Thanks for reading!