Surrounding Yourself with Sound in Your Home Theater

Adapted From: Home Theatre for Dummies

Unless you plan on installing a 360-degree Cinema-in-the-Round screen in your home, just like you’d see at Disney World, video plays a rather confined (but still big) role in creating the home theater illusion of “being” in the movie. The real job of surrounding yourself in the scene falls to your multichannel surround sound audio system.

Imagine that you see on the screen the soon-to-be victims of a firing squad, and from behind you, you hear the clicks of the rifles as they chamber a round. Your rear channel-driven surround sound system brings you that sensation. Hearing that sound coming from in front of you, when you can’t see the firing squad, simply doesn’t carry the same weight.

Two-channel sound versus multichannel surround sound
Most of us are used to age-old two-channel sound – the stereo sound that gives us a left and a right speaker effect. Multi-channel surround sound builds on this presentation by adding a front center speaker between the front left and right speakers and adding two surround speakers. Some versions of surround sound add two more rear speakers and side surround speakers to really enhance your surround-sound field.

So imagine a scene that shows a squadron of jets doing a fly-by of the carrier command bridge. If we were in the command bridge, we would hear the jets coming in from the left, sweeping across in front of us, and then disappearing to the right and the rear as they turn off to the starboard side of the ship. If you’re sitting in a well-tuned home theater, you should hear no differently. And in fact, as the bridge shakes, your subwoofers (and bass shakers) give you the vibrations to make you feel like you’re actually there.

In a 2-channel system, you may hear some of that effect because it may get the left and right part correct. A 2-channel system can’t help with the front to back movement, however, and that’s the critical part of a surround sound system – it surrounds you!

Understanding surround sound lingo
For the most part, the entertainment industry boils down a lot of the surround sound terminology into numbers, such as 2.0, 5.1, and 7.1. Sometimes these numbers refer to the playback system’s speaker configuration, and sometimes they refer to the audio signal format. You may find the lingo confusing, especially when the speakers don’t match the audio signals. In these numbers, the first number represents the number of speakers or main audio channels involved, and the 1 or 0 after the decimal point tells you whether or not the system has a subwoofer or supports a low frequency effects channel. Systems that end in 1 have a subwoofer or an effects channel.