Your Dream Home Theater Starts With These 3 Basic Components
You could buy a TV and a home theater in a box, but what fun is that? Besides you are looking to buy the best home theater equipment for your money. The best way to do this is to get your components separately.
Purchasing a home mean making a lot of decisions in the process, many among aren’t even sure of exactly which components are included in a home theater or which ones are needed in order to create an artful and impressive home theater. For this reason, many people simply do not bother going through the process of looking at their options and simply purchase an all-in-one solution. For the bold I offer the following advice.
The first thing to understand is that there are varying degrees when it comes to home theaters. The following components are the makings of a very basic home theater that will provide excellent picture and sound. They are not however an all-encompassing list of every possible piece or part that could make up a home theater system. For now we’ll go over the necessary basics. The Television. For a dream home theater I would only buy a plasma tv, LCD TV or projector. There are some newer technologies, but the improvements are almost imperceptible and the cost is much, much higher.
As I stated, there are essentially three choices in today’s television market: Plasma, LCD and projector. There are variations within each of these and the prices fall anywhere from relatively inexpensive to costly. This is the component that most home theater owners spend the most time contemplating. Considering the current pricing, if you ever plan to buy a blu-ray player, buy a 1080p high definition set. The picture is amazing and the costs on both TVs and blu-ray players have come down. Choose a 120hz set over a 60hz set, it reduces or eliminates motion blur - especially on LCD sets. The receiver. This is the brains and the brawn of your system. Find one that supports the latest technologies.
The receiver is the box you plug them all into-it receives all of this inputs and correlates it so to speak. This is the ultimate traffic director when it comes to your home theater and I suggest you spend a good portion of your home theater budget making sure that this is a good quality part. Again if you plan to use blu-ray, find a receiver that supports HDMI 1.3, and DTS-MA HD and TrueHD sound formats. The best brands in my opinion are Outlaw, Denon, Onkyo and Marantz (If you have a good-sized budget). I own an Onkyo, to me it is the best value, but check them out yourself.
Speakers are the heart of your dream home theater. Nothing makes a movie come alive and puts you right smack in the action like a audiophile quality sound system. Speaker technology is has come a long way.
Sound that would have cost tens of thousands cost only a fraction of that today. One of the best things to me about my dream home theater is that sound is way better than what I experience in theaters while having the ability to put my feet up while wearing my pajamas (which simply can’t be done in a theater).
My advice hear is to make sure your center , front and surround speakers are all from the same manufacturer and share the same design and driver size, this is called timbre matching and creates a smooth open sound. Recommended brands here would be, Paradigm, B&W, Polk, Meridian and the ones I own and love Definitive Technologies (that’s right I did not mention Bose). But we all have different tastes, go listen to a few for yourself. Finally, you have your DVD player or recorder. If high definition is important to you, get a blu-ray.
Sony’s PS3 is actually a very good, and well priced blu-ray player - and you get a great game system to boot! These items are a great start for your dream home theater and you can build, expand, and upgrade over time for an even better system. Enjoy!
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Tags: Components, Starts, Theater
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