4 Things to Stop Doing If You Have Surround Sound

You’ve saved up a good chunk of change for a surround sound system and have already decided on an AV receiver and several speakers. But before you start swiping credit cards, it’s worth knowing a few common mistakes to ensure your home theater is operating at peak performance. While it might not seem like buying cheap HDMI cables or turning up the volume on just your center speaker is a big deal, sometimes it’s the smallest mistakes that turn into the biggest AV problems.

It’s worth knowing as much as you can before paying, as a surround sound system that isn’t optimized for your home can also be difficult to troubleshoot. In the world of home theater, it’s far better to avoid mistakes altogether than to learn from them. That’s why we’ve put together a list of four things any potential or existing surround sound owner should stop doing. Some of our tips also apply to various soundbar setups with AV switching.

When a surround sound system is well researched and carefully calibrated, the sonic reward can be hard to beat. Spending extra time locking down the most important parts of your system might not be much fun, but we think you’ll thank us in the long run.

One of the best parts about building the surround sound system of your dreams is that you can do it piecemeal. Breathe a sigh of relief if you think you’ll have to spend $2,000 or more to get up and running, but try not to view every future speaker purchase as a standalone upgrade. For best audio results, all of your surround speakers should be made by the same company and be similar in size, especially your front left, center, and right channels.

Many speaker manufacturers use the same basic components for a specific model type, with driver size and material playing an important role in how one speaker family sounds over another. This is called voice matching, and if you want your surround sound to deliver evenly matched tones, the last thing you want to do is buy randomly sized speakers from several different brands. Your system may seem fine for some movies and shows, but others may seem confusing or unbalanced.

If you can’t afford to buy all the speakers at once, focus on building the front of your system with a set of voice-matched speakers that fit your budget. As funds become available, add rear speakers and a subwoofer from the same brand (ideally the same range) to expand your vocal match and overall soundstage. “Slow and steady wins the race” is an adage that rings true in the world of home theater audio.

Fine-tuning the output of your speakers is an important part of a well-configured audio system, and the lion’s share of AV receivers include a calibration microphone that automatically adjusts speaker levels based on the unique acoustics of your home theater. But let’s imagine that even after going through the auto-leveling process, you are not satisfied with the volume of your center speaker. For some reason, the dialogue and voices aren’t as clear as you’d like.

In most cases, the simplest solution is to increase your center channel output, which you can do by accessing your AV receiver’s speaker settings. You may even have the option to change the size of the speaker that’s giving you trouble (for example, going from “small” to “large” and vice versa). However, if you end up changing how one speaker works, chances are you’ll need to rebalance your other surround channels as well.

Fortunately, this isn’t the kind of audio edit that will take a lot of time, and it’s another way to contribute to a good voice match (as discussed in the previous section). Most AV receivers also include some type of reset option if you get too far in the weeds with individual speaker settings.

There is a wide variety of surround sound content on the market, both in terms of streaming and physical media. Platforms like Netflix and Disney+ encode many movies and TV shows for surround sound playback via formats like Dolby Digital Plus and even Dolby Atmos, but not all media benefits from multi-channel audio processing. This is especially true for older movies and shows, especially if the media hasn’t undergone some sort of remastering over the years.

If you’re watching a movie or show that isn’t encoded for surround sound, your AV receiver will likely downmix the media for PCM/stereo playback, meaning you’ll only hear sound from your two front speakers. That said, most receivers include a handful of audio presets that will allow you to mix in additional speakers, regardless of how the source is encoded. There’s even an option called EXT Stereo (Extended Stereo) or Multi Ch Stereo, used by brands like Pioneer and Denon, which sends a stereo signal to each speaker in your surround setup.

Keep in mind that if you choose to use one of these “fake” audio presets, you won’t hear your media the way it was intended to be heard. This could result in a loss of sonic detail, perhaps making it harder to hear dialogue and instruments before mixing. If that’s the case, you might just want to stick with the audio format your AV receiver already works with (even if it’s just PCM).

HDMI cables are the kind of accessories you might not think about much once they’re wired from A to B. But if you’re trying to future-proof your home theater for years to come, you’ll need to pay close attention to the type of HDMI cables you add to your cart. Even if you’re just starting out with a basic 5.1 setup, we don’t recommend buying anything other than Ultra High Speed ​​HDMI, which can reach 48Gbps, to connect your TV and AV components.

It takes a lot of bandwidth to transmit all the data required by spatial audio formats like Dolby Atmos and DTS:X, and anything less than 48 Gbps can result in audio downmixing or playback issues. Fortunately, ultra-high-speed HDMI is not uncommon and there are many affordable options and lengths to choose from. Speaking of length, if your TV and AV receiver are located on opposite ends of the room (or if your receiver isn’t even placed in the same room), buying a cheap 100-foot HDMI cable to connect the hardware isn’t the best idea.

Generally speaking, HDMI signals longer than 25 feet are much more prone to interference and signal degradation. Instead, we recommend investing in either an HDMI balun – which converts HDMI to Cat5 or Cat6 for most of the cabling and then back to HDMI – or a fiber optic HDMI cable. You might end up spending a little more initially, but you won’t end up dealing with sudden AV cutouts and other signal anomalies down the line.