WHAT IS HOME THEATER ?
Hear it, Feel it, Live it...
Home Theater is part of Home Entertainment. This is a very personnal way to
leave the everyday world and pressures to experience intensively vivid expressions and emotional
power of music and videos without leaving home. Home Entertainment has never been more exciting
than it is right now thanks to new advanced Home Theater technologies.
Most people will maintain that Home Theater means watching TV with greater
sound. As far as I am concerned I absolutly disagree and I claim that Home Theater has revolutionized
the way we listen to MUSIC. Indeed Home Theater aims at reproducing in your living room
what you would expect in any kind of famous theater such as an Opera house, a Concert hall or of
course a Movie Theater. Therefore Home Theater is not at all limited to movie watching !
Home Theater was made possible thanks to new DSP (Digital Signal Processing)
technology and powerful multichannel sound processing algorithms such as DOLBY
Encoding or Decoding Process (which can place sound anywhere in
a room by using four separate channels). Processors or Amplifiers mix these two technologies to
recreate life-like sound fields in your living room.
What do you need to enter the Home Theater World ?
Home Theater basically requires a stereo source such as CD, LD or HiFi VCR,
a processor with or without built-in amplifiers and a set of speakers. Now you may invest in a big screen
TV or video projector if your personnal taste is movie watching. However if you are only interested
in music listening, I would advise you to choose a very high quality CD player and a DSP which provides
at least 5 speaker outputs and a wide choice of deep natural sound fields. Please also ensure that it is
easy to use otherwise you will quickly loose all your interest. Indeed Home Theater involves so many
parameters that constant new setup and remote controls are fully used.
Go to my setup page to understand how to setup such a Home
Theater system.
Laurent TESSIER
Last updated Nov. 1996
Double-D symbol and DOLBY are trademarks of
Dolby laboratories licensing corporation