5 Common Mistakes When Setting Up Your Home Theater

so guys i want to talk about the five mistakes you're likely making with your home theater hey guys i'm gene de la sallo with audioholics so this video topic is i think it's very important i know we always talk about getting the best equipment that you can for home theater we do the reviews we do the measurements but we don't talk enough about the mistakes you might be making when you're setting up your home theater and i'm not doing this video to disparage anybody or to make fun of anybody i'm just telling you what i see when i do consulting or when i go to people's homes or when i look in the stores and i look at the setups that people are doing in home theater and it occurred to me that these five things that you could be doing could really be hindering the performance of your home theater so i want to go over step by step and then tell you how you should fix these problems to improve the fidelity of your system so before we do that please like this video subscribe make sure you hit that bell notification we've noticed lately there's a problem with youtube it's not giving notifications for our subscribers when we're dropping new videos so i appreciate if you can do that for us so let's go with the first mistake that i've noticed people often make with their home theater setups and that's bad speaker positioning i've consulted with people where they wanted me to improve the fidelity of their system the first thing they say is they want to get better equipment then i go send me a picture of your setup and let me see what's going on and then i find that they have the center channel on the floor that's not a good position for the center channel you want your front three lcr speakers preferably to be at seated ear level position so when you're sitting on your home theater chair or your couch you want the tweeters from your front three lcrs to be about at the same level the same height as your seated ear level position and i've just seen some whacked out um setups in the past where the front lcrs either the front speakers are way too close together and we have videos about how to set up the width of your lcrs with relative to how far away you sit you know the golden triangle rule is a starting point but at least it's something but when you when you get these people that are setting up their lcrs and they're not considering placement and they're not doing line of sight for the front three lcrs that could really hinder performance of your system the other thing that i see and this is often the case when you go in to new homes and you look at construction that these builders are setting up these home theater packages for their clients they front they put the front three lcrs in the ceiling i call that a fancy intercom system you never want to put your front three lcrs in the ceiling those speakers are far too off access to give you the direct sound from them without just basically beaming on the floor so please don't put your front three lcrs in the ceiling so let's go over the second mistake that i often see people making and that's to block a direct sound path from the speaker to the listener you'll see these people that get hulking towers in the front but then you know the wife thinks it'll be cosmetically pleasing to stick a plant in front of it and it's blocking the tweeter well that hinders sound significantly when you block the direct path of sound from the speaker to the listener with an object whether it be a couch or a plant or bookcase or something like that that's not a good thing it's okay to put it on the sides it's it's it's okay to put it behind the speaker assuming that there's no drivers firing behind the speaker but generally speaking you don't want to block a direct path of sound from the speaker to the listener think of it as a flashlight okay put a flashlight by your speaker and shine it towards the listening area if there's something blocking that light then it's not a good thing that means the sound is also being blocked as well so that's the second mistake i often see is blocking the direct path of sound from the loudspeaker to the listening area so the third mistake i see is people get the speaker positioning good they set it up they connect it correctly but they don't run through the channel trims and delay trims at all they just basically let it go on default and they don't set the levels that's a huge problem because default receive the default settings for the receiver zeros everything out the delays are all set the same you're almost never going to be in a situation where your listening position is going to have all your channel trims balanced with them all being at zero because your speakers are at different distances they have different sensitivities so that's why you really need to at very minimum get an spl meter and we have a video on this and i'll link it up in the in the video description below on how to balance your channels from speaker to speaker at the listening area then you also have to get your physical and electrical delays correct as well and sometimes people forget to set their delays so that's the third mistake that i often see that is easily correctable even if you don't run the auto eq you can get an old-fashioned tape measure and measure the distance from each speaker to the listening area and put those distances into your processor or receiver and then use the spl meter and channel balance all of your speakers at the listening area i'm telling you if you guys haven't done that pause the video right now go set that up go do your channel trims go do your delays then come back and comment below about how much better your system sounds because i guarantee it'll sound better if you didn't do that in the first place so the first the fourth mistake that i often see people making is they rely on everything the auto eq system does and that's especially true with base management in almost every case regardless of how good the auto eq system is whether it's waipal from yamaha or it's drac or it's um odyssey that denon uses or it's even anthem arc they're all not perfect and they almost always mess up base management i have a lot of experience with odyssey because i've done a lot of reviews with denon and marantz receivers and odyssey almost always sets the channels the base management wrong if you have a surround speaker that's up against the wall you're going to get what's called boundary gain so there's a little bit bass reinforcement at certain frequencies and right away odyssey's going to identify that speaker is large you don't want those speakers set for large in 95 of the cases you want all your speakers set small and you want your base management your crossover setting at 80 hertz and i've seen where it sets towers small and it sets them to 40 hertz the problem with setting towers to 40 hertz is when you're listening to two channel music and you're relying on those subwoofers to to fill in that base um they're only going to fill in the base from 40 hertz and below and if you want to take advantage of modal distribution of multi-sub you really want to go to the 80 hertz so i would suggest to you that if you run the auto eq go into the base management settings set all your speakers to small set your crossovers to 80 hertz and you at least have a fighting chance to have a good calibrated system that sounds good so again check your base management if you're relying too much on auto eq go in and manually tweak that so the final mistake that i often see people make and we've done many videos on this is relying on full range auto room correction there's a lot of problems with full range auto eq the the biggest uh problem with that is the fact that that microphone is not as smart as your brain so it's very hard for that microphone to discern what's going on in the room with your speakers in terms of the direct sound versus the reflected sound and it's making decisions that aren't always in beneficial to your speaker so if you start with a good speaker that doesn't need any correction because it doesn't have a lot of non-linearities and the auto eq system goes in and it and it calculates what's going on in your room and it messes up the frequency response you're making things worse not better so what i usually tell people to do if you have this ability if you have odyssey odyssey has a multi-cue editor app go in and set it up so it stops the correction at 300 to 500 hertz i've run anthem arc i've run odyssey i've run ypow and almost every case i get better sounding results if i limit the correction to say 500 hertz 300 hertz is usually the right one but 500 hertz is acceptable what's what you ten what tends to happen is you've run the full range correction is weird things to happen i noticed the sound stage especially with two-channel music kind of collapses when auto eq is at full range correction don't like it it just doesn't sound natural to me trust your ears if you ran auto eq listen to a two channel source with eq on versus eq off if you don't think it sounds significantly better with it on turn it off if you don't like the way it sounds but you like the bass that it did limit the correction limit it to three to five hundred hertz don't do full range correction if you could avoid it especially if you start with good speakers so those are the five mistakes that i see for home theaters that people often make i'm kind of curious if you can give me a list down below what you've seen what kind of mistakes maybe you've done in the past that you've kind of overcome give us some feedback below make sure you like the video thumb it up don't forget about our patreon channel at patreon.com audioholics you get advanced access to content that doesn't always show up on youtube you get additional measurement reports that i put there that i don't always put on the editorial side so there's a lot of benefits plus you support the channel and we always appreciate your support well until next time my friends keep listening when you're ready we can start um so bad speaker positioning blocking the path direct path of sound from the speaker to the listener rely relying on base management settings from auto eq not setting your not setting your levels at all not calibrating your system relying on auto eq for base management and doing full range auto eq okay ready go is it going it's recording are you sure i'm very sure okay

Channel: Audioholics

Views: 302,170

Keywords: audioholics, video review, home theater, audiophile, tech, headphones, speakers, amplifier, movies, music, audio, video, projection, bass, subwoofer, hdtv, blu-ray, dolby, atmos

Id: k0aRLAMNlK4

Length: 10min 59sec (659 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 20 2020