Home Theater System

To Start your Digital Home-Theater, you need to have 5 speakers, 1 or 2 subwoofers, Dolby Digital or DTS receiver, DVD player, Big screen TV, speaker cables and interconnects. That's it!

Let's start your system!

So what are the demand of digital surround? For one more thing, it's much more dynamic than Pro-Logic. In other words, the loud sounds are louder, the soft sounds are softer. Although the sound of DD or DTS won't be any louder on average than with Pro-Logic, it will hit louder peaks. Thus, your speakers need to tolerate a little extra power. Thye should be handle at least 100 Watts, and more if possible. Most people use subwoofer(s) in their DD or DTS system. Subwoofer is a speaker that is designed to handle bass friquencies. Almost all of them has built-in amplifier. Usually, you should get the biggest subwoofer you can afford. If you want to use two floor standing tower speakers, that's find, too, as long as they pump out enough bass for your teaste. Such as Definitive BP3000 speakers, they have built-in 18" woofers with 1000 Watts(RMS) amplifier in each tower. In that case, you don't need subwoofer any more, but most of the cases are depended on your teaste.

Don't forget to pay attention to your surround speakers. With Digital surrounds, they send the full-range signal to your surround speakers, so if possible, use the surround speakers that can handle full-rangfe signals. Use the same model as your front speakers, if you can afford.

Dolby Pro-Logic is a matrix style surround sound system from Dolby Labs in which four channels are derived electronically from a conventional two-channel stereo soundtrack. So, left/right channels are added together to create the center channel. To create the rear channel, the right channel signal is subtracted from the left, and the different-which is usually ambience or other out-of-phase information is routed to a pair of surround speakers. So, both surround feed by monaural signal.

Lucasfilm's THX is not an alternative to Dolby Pro-Logic or Dolby Digital, but is the enhancement of these systems. So, THX is only the standard of Lucasfilm. You need an entire THX system to achieve the full effect. A THX-certified processor will usually have, in addition to regular DPL or DD modes, a THX Home Cinema mode (enhanced DPL), and/or THX Home Cinema 5.1 mode (enhanced Dolby Digital). These modes eliminate brightness, match front and rear timbre, and decorrelate the rear channels to make them more diffuse. Front THX speakers have control virticel dispersion that minimize floor and ceiling reflections. THX surround speakers are always dipole types that simultaneously radiate sound forword and backword to enhance spatial ambience.

Dolby Digital is a "discrete" Surround system in which six channels of digital sound are recored and play back independently. This ensure much greater channel seperation than Dolby Pro-logic. From that advantage, it gives recording engineers the ability to pan special effects or other sounds in any direction they choose. Dolby Digital is usually refer to AC-3 or 5.1 channels system with full-range left, right, center, left-rear, right-rear channels (the "5"), and a dedicated, independent low frequency-effects (LEF) channel for generating bass special effects (the ".1") From my experiance Dolby Digital is much better than Dolby Pro-Logic, so you better go for it. You don't be dissapointed.

DTS stands for Digital Theater Systems. DTS is the same 5.1 discrete channels as Dolby Digital, but DTS uses less data compression than Dolby Digital, and many reviewers believe that it sounds better.

SDDS stands for Sony Digital Dynamic Sound. SDDS is 7.1 channels surround sound including left, left-center, ccenter, right-center, right, left- surround, right-surround, and subwoofer. For now, SDDS is only available in the Sony theaters, so I won't talk abou it.

Dolby Digital Surround EX is developed by Dolby Laboratories and Lucasfilm THX. The differrent is that Dolby Digital Surround EX will add the "Third Surround Channel" between the normal surround speakers in Dolby Digital system. This will makes the movie sound better and smoother than the normal Dolby Digital. Especially the "Fly-Over and Fly-Arround Effects" would be much smoother. This surround system is first available in theaters, and the first movie that used Dolby Digital EX is "Starwar Episode 1" , and The Perfect Storm will be the first DVD movie that contain the Dolby Digal Surround EX.