HOW TO Set Up a 5.1 HOME THEATER Surround Sound Speaker System

hey everybody welcome back my name is Andrew Robinson I am a recovering audiophile and if this is your first time to my channel I would just like to say welcome welcome to the place where we talk about all things - music art and design but if you're one of my subscribers you already knew that so welcome back and today we're going to break with some of the audio file talk instead we are diving into home theater that's right we have cooked up a very simple easy-to-follow 5.1 home theater setup guide for you all but before we get into that earlier this week we told you that we were launching a members-only section on this channel well guess what it's alive you can go check it out by clicking the join button right down there but enough about that let's dive into our 5.1 home theater setup guide so before we go any further I want to stress one thing today's video is not a review I repeat this is not a review we are not going to be talking about the performance of any of the components that we are using to illustrate how to set up a home theater but I do want to tell you what components we are using in this video so that if you a are shopping yourself and looking for options out there these are worthwhile things to consider but we will also link to a bunch of other ones in the description below to get you started so the speakers we are using today are from Yama they are the studio series s 803 speaker system this system is currently available on Amazon for a hundred and ninety-nine dollars and it comes with four bookshelf speakers in a center channel so it is the five of the 5.1 in a speaker system it doesn't come with a subwoofer and for that we are using a Kanto sub eight the Kanto sub eight also available on Amazon we've talked about it briefly a little bit on this channel it's just something that we had in-house the AV receiver that we are using is the marantz NR 1509 now this is last year's model so we're linking instead down below to the current one just know that there really isn't any changes between the one that we're versus the new one if you are shopping for an AV receiver and it should be noted that the 1509 is an entry-level receiver I'm talking sub $500 it is a 5.2 channel receiver and it is meant for small to medium sized rooms if you are looking to do a little bit more fancy home theater type setups you're going for at most things like that this is not the receiver to do that with but also this isn't that video this video is about getting you up and running quickly and easily and that is why we are focusing on a basic 5.1 channel home theater setup now the TV that we will be using in this example is an lg nano cell 90 series it is an LED backlit TV we're not going to be diving too much into the television this again this is about setting up a home theater from the TV on down to the speakers but it is important that you know because there are features about the LG that we will be taking advantage of but understand that there are other televisions out there that have similar features so it's not like you have to only look at or buy the LG the other thing that you're going to need in order to follow along and set up your home theater properly is the appropriate lengths of speaker cables preferably terminated with banana terminated ends you're also going to need the requisite length and number of HDMI cables now the speaker cables audio cables and HDMI cables that you see in this video are all generic and I want to stress this you do not have to go broke buying very expensive cables you can buy any off-the-shelf non name-brand generic cable in this regard it will work fine and it will work wonders for your first ever home theater system now before we get into the physical setup of this home theater I think that it's important that we take just a second to define some of the terms you're going to hear in this video and probably elsewhere in your journey for example we will be setting up a 5.1 channel home theater now channel is just another word for speaker or loudspeaker it's all the same so a 5.1 channel home theater refers to the number of speakers found in home theater five representing the speakers themselves and the dot one representing the number of subwoofers so anytime you hear 5.1 that's five speakers plus one sub woofer in a home theater pretty simple now there are other types of home theaters or 7.1 7.2 9.2 there's Dolby Atmos and those are all very exciting but that is not the video we're talking about today we're talking about the entry point to home theater which is 5.1 and in a 5.1 speaker system there are five key speakers that you need the first being left and right main channels or speakers now these can be bookshelf's they can be floor-standing they can be whatever speaker you want you will be seeing the installation of two-way bookshelf speakers from llaman but their left and right they go on either side the left or right side of your display now the other speaker and arguably the most important speaker in any home theater system is the center Channel and the reason why it's so important is because movies have a lot of dialogue and therefore the center channel gets used 90% of the time it is arguably the most important loudspeaker in a home theater system and the center channel goes where it sounds right in the middle below your screen pointed directly at your seated listening or viewing position apart from the three speakers located up front you are going to need a left and right surround speaker that is to say a speaker that is mounted to the left and to the right of your seated position so that you can hear all of the surround sound effects that are mixed into your favorite movies now a few things about placement with respect to surround sound speakers a lot of people think that surround sound speakers go behind you in a 5.1 system this is not true surround sound speakers and a 5.1 system should be mounted above and directly to the side of your primary seated position if you can't mount them up high that's fine you can put them on stands and we're going to show you both implementations in this video but just know that in a 5.1 channel surround sound set up the left and right surround speakers are actually meant to be installed directly to these sides of your listening position and not to be forgotten of course we're talking about the subwoofer and today we are only going to be using a single subwoofer and I know on YouTube and on the internet maybe you're running into things where people are telling you you need multiple subwoofers and more subwoofers are better and that's not entirely wrong but it's also not entirely true the truth is you can have very very satisfying bass from a single subwoofer provided you set it up properly now this video is not going to be about sub woofer placement or setup per se but mm-hmm a while back I created not one but two sub woofer videos and I will link to them in the description below and you should go check those out to get the absolute most and best performance from whatever subwoofer you have currently in your system but for the purposes of this video we will just simply be placing it in our room and I will be showing you the basic steps and connecting it to your receiver and getting the most out of it as quickly and as easily as possible so with all that kind of basic terminology out of the way let's dive in to installation so once we've unboxed all of our loudspeakers the first thing that we're going to want to do is place them in the proper positions in our room so for this example we have put both of the larger of the llamo bookshelves on stands to the left and right side of our LG TV we've obviously placed the center speaker directly below the LG and in the center atop our BDI octave media cabinet and if you don't have speaker stands you can provided your cabinet or media center console is wide enough you can potentially put your loudspeakers if they're bookshelf speakers on either side of the television on the cabinet itself and as for the surrounds we've chosen to set them up in two ways just to kind of illustrate our point but the first way is above and to the side of our seated position and the second is a top speaker stands themselves also to the side of our seated position now you might notice that I have placed the subwoofer off to the side and depending on which way you choose to look at the room if I'm staring at my LG it is off to the left side of the room and the reason I've placed it there is I have already predetermined that that is one of the places in our room where bass sounds best and if you're wondering well how did you know that again you can check out my two older videos on sub woofer placement and I will link to them down in the description below but that is how to place the speakers in and around your room for a proper 5.1 channel home theater setup it's it's really that easy this part this part is not meant to be complicated and the next part isn't either because connecting your speakers to your AV receiver is very very straightforward the first thing that you're going to want to do is make sure that all of your speaker cables are the appropriate length to run from the back of the speaker's themselves all the way to wherever you are choosing to house your AV receiver now since we are putting our Marantz AV receiver inside our BDI cabinet the front three speakers don't have very far to go in terms of length of speaker cable required however surround sound speakers are obviously further away so you're going to want to make sure maybe even before you start installing stuff that you know the rough distance that you're going to have to run speaker cable from your surround speakers all the way to your equipment rack where your AV receiver sits and the same thing is true for your sub woofer you're going to want to make sure that you have a long enough RCA style cable that runs from the subwoofer to the back of the receiver itself now before we get into connecting all of our loudspeakers and various components to our AV receiver why don't we go ahead and make sure that everything everything is powered down and for extra safety go ahead and unplug everything from the wall we want to make all of our connections with no possibility for there to be any drama electrically until we're ready to hit power and power everything up together now it's time to start connecting our loudspeakers to our AV receiver we're going to start with the left and right front speakers so we're first going to want to take one end of our speaker cable we're gonna want to take the red and black ends and plug them into the corresponding lugs on the back of the speaker themselves red to red black to black then take the other end of that speaker cable and plug it into the corresponding terminal on the back of your receiver so left speaker gets plugged into the left speaker terminal on the back of your receiver do the same for the right speaker do the same for the center speaker as well as the right and left surround speakers to connect our subwoofer we're gonna want to take our RCA cable and go to our subwoofer plug it in to the left or LFE out some subwoofers have stereo outputs we're going to want to use the left or white output in this instance and then running it all the way back to the sub output number one on our Marantz receiver if your subwoofer only has one output that is to say it just says sub out or LFE out then you don't have a choice you just go right out of that now I don't want to leave the subwoofer just yet because you may notice on the back of your subwoofer there are a number of dials and maybe even a few switches the first dial that you're likely to see is level that is referring to the level or volume control on the back of the subwoofer itself go ahead and put the volume in the 12 o'clock position give or take now the next dial you may notice on the back of your subwoofer is labeled crossover now this may seem a little confusing but look at think about it this way a crossover is the point with which your receiver stops sending base to your loudspeakers and instead crosses it over to sending it to your subwoofer now you may have a myriad of settings on this dial you may see dozens of options you may see four options it all depends on the subwoofer you have chosen to buy in this instance we have a variable knob in which we can kind of set it wherever we want the other things that you may notice on the back of your subwoofer may be auto on/off or phase go ahead and set your subwoofer to auto on that is to say when it gets a signal when it senses a signal it will turn itself on and when it's not being used or you've gone to bed for the evening it will shut itself off so I do recommend that you set your subwoofer to auto on as for phase it's probably in the zero position fancier or higher-end subwoofers have a variable phase where you can kind of dial it in but more affordable budget offerings tend to have a 2-way phase which is either 180 degrees or zero go ahead and leave it in the zero position we will come back to that in a moment if we need to so with our sub we've are connected to the back of our AV receiver and all of our speakers connected to the back of our AV receiver the only thing left to do is to connect our AV receiver to our television to do this you're going to want to take one of your HDMI cables and plug it into the monitor or video out HDMI port on the back of your receiver these are usually pretty clearly marked and a lot of AV receivers only have one output in many many inputs then you're gonna want to run that same HDMI cable into an HDMI input on your television now for this I highly highly highly recommend plugging into the input on your television marked HDMI /ar C an a our C stands for Audio Return Channel and all that means is that any audio coming from the TV or that you otherwise would have heard through the television speakers themselves will now be routed down to your receiver and thus come out your loudspeakers if you want to connect a blu-ray player CD player DVD player anything like that it's pretty straightforward if your player has an HDMI output you're going to want to connect the HDMI out of your player into the corresponding labeled HDMI input on the back of your receiver so for the purposes of this example we have a blu-ray player we have simply connected it to the blu-ray input on the back of our Marantz AV receiver once everything is connected everything is plugged in go ahead and plug in all the power cords to all of your various devices and power everything on now we're going to go through the basic on-screen menus inside your AV receiver now we again are using a Marantz NR 1509 so understand that not every AV receiver has exactly the same menus laid out in exactly the same way so your experience may differ ever so slightly than what I'm about to describe but you should still be able to find the necessary menus in your on-screen menu and follow along I'm going to take you through the steps manually but I am going to point out that if you do have an automated setup system in your AV receiver go ahead and use that because it's going to do it for you and that's awesome and the first thing that we're going to do is configure our speakers and configuring our speakers is different than setting them up we've already set them in the room but our receiver doesn't know what we've essentially put in our living room so we need to tell it and that's what speaker setup or speaker configuration means so we're gonna go into that menu and we are going to tell it what type of loudspeaker we are using for our left and right front speakers that is the two speakers on either side of the television now bookshelf speakers are often referred to as small and so in this instance we would set our loudspeaker to small but if you have floor-standing speakers capable of producing enough bass or satisfying bass go ahead and set them to large moving on to the center speaker you may see an option for is there one is there not one and then what kind is it in the case of the marantz you have none small or large again our particular center channel in this example is small so we're gonna go ahead and set it to small as for the surround speakers we are also going to set those to small because obviously they are actually much smaller than our left and right mains it's very rare that you walk into a home theater where the surround channels are as beefy as what you find across the front and then of course we also want to tell our receiver that we are using a subwoofer so we're gonna want to go ahead and set the subwoofer to on so now that we've told our receiver what speakers we have and where we're going to go ahead and back out of that menu and move on down to distance now distance is exactly what it sounds like it is the distance between you and your loudspeaker the AV receiver needs to know just how far away each speaker is from you in order to make sure that the sound and all of the surround sound effects reach your ears at exactly the right time so you may need a tape measure for this and you may even need a little bit of help you can do this by yourself but it is a little easier with a partner but what you're gonna want to do is from your primary listening seated position measure roughly the distance to each loud speaker and it's okay that the front three lots because your left center and right channels may all be roughly a certain distance away while you're surrounding closer for example in our room our front three speakers are roughly about 12 to 13 feet away from our seated position whereas our surround speakers are more like 8 or 9 feet away and that's okay just because they may have a closer distance that is to say they're not as they don't measure as far away that doesn't mean that their sound is going to be closer to you so yes make sure that you measure the appropriate distance to each speaker from your primary seated listening position and do this also for your subwoofer once you've entered all of the distances for each of your loudspeakers in your 5.1 system go ahead and back out of that menu and the next menu that you are likely to see is going to be labeled levels now we are going to skip this part we are because this is a little bit more of a higher functionality that may require you to have a special tool that you probably don't presently own but basically what levels entails is you can go in and finely tune all of your loudspeakers to ensure that they are absolutely outputting the exact same volume across all five speakers and your subwoofer but to do this you need an SPL meter and we're gonna create a video down the road about SPL meters and how to calibrate your system but just the basic setup and use know that most AV receivers have the levels set to zero across the board go ahead and just skip by levels for now now below levels you're likely going to find the cross over sub menu and we talked about crossover briefly earlier in this video and I told you we would be coming back to it here it is now crossover remember is the point with which bass is crossed over or moved from your speakers to the sub woofer and again you don't need to know really in terms of Hertz what that means just know that a lot of AV receivers default to 80 Hertz and 80 Hertz is fine that's a fine crossover point and it's kind of an industry standard now our bookshelf loudspeakers happen to play comfortably down to 80 Hertz so we can go ahead and leave the crossover point at 80 Hertz but if your AV receiver defaults to say a hundred Hertz or a hundred and twenty Hertz you can leave it there you absolutely can or you can go in and select each individual speaker and set the crossover accordingly now for surround sound speakers which tend to be on the smaller side we may want to use a crossover point of a hundred to a hundred and twenty Hertz the same is true let's say if you have things like the little tiny jewel speakers from say Bose those may not play down to 80 Hertz with the same authorities in which case you might money use a hundred or 120 Hertz setting all we're doing is letting the AV receiver know that anything below a hundred 120 or 80 Hertz is not to be sent to our loudspeakers but instead crossed over and routed to our subwoofer now our Marantz receiver does have another submenu below crossover called base settings and we're going to go ahead and go into that because we want to make sure that the base goes to both the subwoofer as well as to our main speakers when listening to a stereo signal that is to say that when we use our home theaters to listen to to channel music we want to make sure that our subwoofer is used because like I said earlier in this video stereo soundtracks don't have a dedicated subwoofer feed so what we want to do is send the bass that was otherwise going to go to our main right and left speakers we want to make sure that that base is also going to our subwoofers you may have to set your base settings to LFE Plus main main in this instance is referring to our left and right main speakers now that we've finished with all of the speaker setup we need to go to the video portion of our menus and select HDMI setup and the only thing that we're really looking for here is to make sure that a RC or HDMI a RC is turned on if it is in a default off position go ahead and turn that on and the reason we need this on is because we are using the Audio Return Channel on the back of our Marantz receiver as well as the input/output on the TV itself and we want sound that we are getting through our streaming services or apps on our Smart TV to be transferred from our television down to our Marantz and thus out to our loudspeakers so we just want to make sure that a RC is turned on so with a RC now enabled inside of our AV receiver go ahead and just back out of all of the menus but we're not quite ready to watch a movie just yet go ahead and grab your TV remote go ahead and enter into the menus of your television and select the audio submenu inside your TV's audio submenu you may have options like TV speakers optical HDMI AARC things like that we're going to want to make sure because we are using the a RC input/output on our television we're going to want to make sure that we set the audio to a RC as well and this will make sure that when we stream using our Smart TV apps all of the audio from the movies that we're choosing to stream or the television programming we're choosing to watch or the YouTube channels we're choosing to watch is sent down to our receiver and thus out our loudspeakers so with a RC turned on in both the television and our AV receiver congratulations you are done you have successfully installed your very first 5.1 channel home theater system in your living room congratulations give yourself a hand in the left to decide is what are we watching what are you gonna watch I want to know let me know down in the comments below and if you liked this video or if you want to see other guides on this channel also let me know down in the comments below but if you like this video please do give it a thumbs up like and subscribe remember our members only section is officially launched you can check that out by clicking join below and follow me on Instagram recovering audio file and that's it I got to get out of here so remember the only person that has to like the sound of your system is you it's a happy listening everybody thank you so much for watching be well and we'll see you on the next video bye get down in the god do not get him down sighs crap died alright I thought it was funny we're stuck we're almost done we're so close do you know you're gonna make it worse this easy to follow quick fire no you it's not quick that's for sure so close so close here we go the only thing that was weird was the very last thing and that's what the last thing people remember the only part that was weird was the thing you ended on you

Channel: Andrew Robinson

Views: 2,028,713

Keywords: Surround Sound Speaker System, Home Theater Setup Guide, Surround Sound Setup, how to set up a 5.1 home theater speaker system, how to setup a 5.1 home theater system, how to setup a 5.1 home theater speaker system, How To Setup a Home Theater, Installing a Home Theater, Home Theater Setup, Home Theater Installation, Home Theater How To, Andrew Robinson home theater, Home Theater 101, Home Theater Basics, 5.1 setup, HOW TO Set Up a 5.1 HOME THEATER Surround Sound Speaker System

Id: qkiyLe2zSSc

Length: 26min 6sec (1566 seconds)

Published: Fri May 08 2020