Most Common Home Theater Mistakes (and How To Avoid Them)! Home Theater Gurus.

foreign [Music] hey guys welcome back to home theater Guru So today we're going to be talking about the top 10 mistakes that are very commonly seen in home theater not only are we going to talk about the mistakes but we're going to talk about how to fix them and most of these make a huge impact to the performance of the room itself all right the number one thing is screen size sizing your screen correctly now we all want an immersive experience or at least most of us do because this is home theater so we're trying to recreate what we experienced at the movie theater in video wise you know that comes from having an immersive image and immersiveness is how much of your view the image is going to take up we call that viewing angle so the wider the viewing angle of course the more immersive it is so a few of us are going to like to sit in the very front of the movie theater where you know you're having to turn your head that's going to take up a lot of viewing angle some of us like to sit in the nosebleeds you know that's going to be a very small viewing angle where we really don't have much immersiveness now the majority are going to find our ourselves kind of in the middle the middle to the back three quarters of the movie theater where we have a nice comfortable image we're not turning our head but it's still very immersive and that's what we're after in home theater so when someone says I have a wall you know this big how big should my screen be that is a huge red flag anyone giving answers to those questions you know you need to understand that you can't answer that because we must know how far we're sitting you could tell someone that need 150 inch screen but they're 15 feet away that's not that big that's only 40 degrees of viewing angle you know so you're probably going to be closer to a 165 to get more around 45 degrees you first have to find out where you're sitting and then you can calculate the viewing angle and make sure that you're going to have an immersive but a comfortable experience you don't want to have you know a screen so big that it's not comfortable you watch a movie and you start to get fatigued you don't want to use the room it's just not enjoyable to be in so you don't want that either but you don't want it to be small and lose the immersiveness either now if you're in a living room or something like that maybe you have to you know you have a TV you just can't get close enough to get that immersive experience you know that's okay you have to do what you have to do number two is about the most important speaker in the room of course that's the center channel sometimes in living rooms in compromised situations it's really hard to get the center channel perfectly placed but you know really having a center channel down on the floor is a really bad idea for one thing when you recline your feet are going to block that Center Channel and also you know if your Mains are several degrees up higher you're going to have a U-shaped Sound Stage and you don't want that either now you may not think it's a big deal but if you have someone talking to you you close your eyes and then all of a sudden they drop down to the floor and continue talking you can tell that their voice just moved down to the floor so whether you know you may get used to it but it is an audible compromise because it is not tied to the screen like it should be and aligned with your LCR acoustically now of course A Center Channel ideally is behind an acoustic screen a woven not really a perf you can't get away with a perf but you need distance away from it we're not going to get into that in this video but ideally it's behind the screen but if it can't be behind the screen at least get it as high as possible you know as close to the tweeters of your towers as possible try to get them all aligned make sure that your feet when fully reclined aren't blocking the center channel again it's the most important speaker in the room so we want that speaker to to Really shine if you're on top of a TV stand don't push it all the way back you know pull that front edge even with the front edge of the TV stand you don't want any diffraction or any type of nasty Reflections coming off of that table top that it's sitting on top of and also like a cubby like if you have a shelf system or something like that you know don't push it back into a cubby if you do have a nakobe try stuffing everything around it and behind it you know maybe with a pillow or some some type of stuffing to kind of cut down on any resonance that might be going on inside that cavity number three surrounds not being placed properly and what I mean by that is you can't see them you can't hear them now I'm know the tolerance is 90 to 110 degrees for your your site surrounds and around ear level now that's what Dolby Spix you will not find any professional designer following those specs the studio PDF is not written like that at all it's Performance Based of course so is the cinema PDF but the home PDF has you put them in head level all that works great if you're sitting in a lawn chair by yourself but with home theater we have other people sitting next to us as soon as someone sits next to you that speaker's completely blocked if you have home theater seating and you recline that seat back and the the seat next to you is not reclined that seat bat blocks that speaker you know if you have your speakers past 90 behind 90 as soon as you sit down they're blocked you don't even have to recline in their block if you use arc's Quick measure or Rew ruby Q Wizard and you put the mic where your head goes and then you run sweeps of that that surround Channel then you sit next to it you'll see everything from like a thousand fifteen hundred Hertz and up just drop down considerably like 10 12 DB you lose so much output I mean it's just a horribly performing system you need to be able to see those surrounds if you can see it you can hear it guys if you need any help setting your room up I do consults and I do full design plans all right number four so your Atmos speakers this one is extremely common the atmos are not supposed to be in line with your mains dimensionally you know or you know actually in line with them physically they're supposed to be acoustically aligned with domains now this is in everything from the studio PDF which is Performance Based they use angles they don't use just a dotted line and the reason is because you're a different distance from your mains you know for 12 feet from your Mains but you're only you know six feet from your Atmos you put them in line with each other your Mains may be at 30 degrees but your Atmos are like it you know they jump way out you know they're they're not at 30 degrees from directly overhead they may be 50 degrees or 60 degrees smear into the bed layer you have very very poor Atmos performance now there's some guys out there saying that you know no one knows how the studio you know sets up they don't have a really tight requirement they're all over the place it's absolutely not true they have a very very tight window that they set their speakers and it's their PDF is Performance Based it has compensation for you know if you raise your surrounds and Rears up any you're supposed to account for it in the atmos to maintain separation it's very Performance Based we've got videos that go over that and I even have a one-page diagram that I made to help you guys lay them out quickly and you can watch episode 48 where we break down the cinema and the studio PDFs and compare them to the home PDF just so we can see how vastly different the home PDF is and of course the home PDF is trying to sell speakers they want to make sure that anyone can make these speakers fit in their room they don't really go over what's best number five your Mains are not towed in now we actually just had an episode on this episode 52 and it shows you how to aim your Mains for multiple seats this is home theater so we need all of our seats to have a similar tonality in you know with our Mains so what's going to happen when you aim them properly or what happens when you donate them so you have them straight the guy's sitting right here in front of one of these speakers here's a main the guy's sitting right in front of this Mane he's on axis of it but he's off axis of this speaker so all he's going to hear when two channel or something that should image between both of them is playing he's not going to hear that other speaker he's going to hear this speaker and as a matter of fact if you're sitting dead center you're going to hear both speakers as soon as you move over a foot left or right you're usually going to lose it completely you're going to get steered to the closer speaker aim your Mains now this is a problem with in-walls but it's under you need to understand the compromise and not be lit to think that oh this speaker is a wide dispersion it doesn't need to be aimed you know that's total baloney this is why towers and bookshelves you know people aim them and you can experience the vast difference of the Sound Stage blowing up you know by adjusting the toe in no room is exactly the same we treat them differently the speakers you know are placed a little bit different the room is a different width so you need to go and do this by ear in episode 52 is going to help you set your Mains up so you have an even tonality across the seats and that's going to help open up that wide sweet spot so that you can move left and right some without immediately getting shifted to the closer Main number six having our Mains too close together our Mains need some separation if you look at the tolerance it's 22 to 30 degrees there's even one tolerance says 22 to 40. there is some discrepancies on that but if you get too close together all of a sudden you have basically a soundboard you have no separation if you're sitting 10 feet away your Mains are really close together an object goes from left to right you get no sense of movement between those two speakers as we separate them and now when a you know a vehicle moves from left to right you start to get a sense of movement across the front of the screen and that's what we want we want to have a nice wide Sound Stage but you know we don't want to go too far apart if we go too far apart we're going to lose it and also our placement is going to be off so pay attention to the width of your Mains how wide they are I like to stay around 24 to 26 degrees you know if you go too wide it makes it harder like we talked about a minute ago with the you know opening up The Sweet Spot getting the whites a wider sweet spot so more seats have a very similar sound and you don't lose your stereo Imaging quite as fast The Wider you go that makes it more difficult because you can imagine if you have two speakers close together and you're moving you know different seats on a couch out there I mean the difference between one speaker and the other is much less because they're so close together they're touching right there you can move left and right you're not really going to hear one much louder than the other but as you go further apart when you move left and right you're closer to this speaker and really far from that speaker over there so it's kind of a balancing act you don't want to be separated too far apart but you also don't want to be so close together that you just don't have a really good Sound Stage and a sense of movement across the front of the screen number seven okay this one is having one sub now of course we all have to start somewhere I mean heck I started out 25 years ago building DIY Subs actually I started out with a home theater in a box before that but we all have to start somewhere but just understand with one sub being this is home theater more than one seat we're not going to have a similar seat to seat response as we move from one seat to another the response is going to vary greatly it's going to be all over the place you're going to have great base the person sitting next to you you know you're gonna be smelling like an idiot they're gonna be looking at you like you're needing because they didn't hear anything at all you know they're like what I don't you know it kind of sucked for me and you're all over there giddy gitty giddy so you can crawl around the floor all you want it's not really going to do anything for multiple seats and even crawling around on the floor all you're doing is listening for Peaks I mean that's not really the proper way to do that either you can check out episode 9 on General sub setup and you know all the plate amp features on the back of it just to kind of make sure your settings are right we also have episode 11 is going to help you with a remote calculator if you have a symmetrical room it shows you how to how to place your subs and your seats so you're not having to do the sub crawl method which we have episode 10 which is pretty much squash is the sub crawl method show us the shows you the issues with it in a much better method that's free it'll allow you to see Peaks and nulls so you're not crawling around on the floor just listening for Peaks is the only thing you know of course you can hear and it's also going to show you issues with the first sub so when you add the a second you know where to place them to help it fix the issues with the first which is the whole purpose of having two subs well that's one of the purposes the other purpose is it fixes more room modes in your room so you have a more similar seat to seat experience number eight trying to force rears whenever you really don't have the room for it now of course we're talking about the surround backs you know some people just call I just call them rears but uh trying to force those say you're sitting on a back wall you know you have you're in a living room or something and you've got a couch up against the wall you know we've got our sights around placed you know off to the sides where they're supposed to be and you want to go from a 5.1 to a 7.1 and add those around back so those rears if you're against the back wall you really don't have that the room set up for it you know you have to get off the back wall now the back wall is not a great place to sit for room mode issues but if that's what you've got to do that's what you got to do doesn't mean it's not going to be enjoyable you can try to EQ some of those issues out you know you're gonna have bloated Pace you know your your room correction is going to knock that base down try to help you out there but having those rears right behind your head is not going to sound good it's going to Hot Spot I mean if you're sitting right in front of the left rear you know you're barely going to hear the right wind compared to the the left one it's going to be really loud it's just not going to perform well you're not going to have any Imaging you know from those speakers they should be they should image kind of like Mains something pans around the room you know it's just not going to sound good you will be better off with just sticking with a 5.1 bit later because when you tell the processor hey I don't have Rears it's going to understand that and when something's behind you it's going to try to use those surrounds or side surrounds to compensate for it and try to mimic a sound behind you it's not going to be the same but it'll be better than trying to force them behind you now once you begin getting off that wall a little bit if you can get a few feet off it then you can get to the point to where you can start looking into it now you need to be a few feet from the speaker itself not just the wall you know if you got a speaker that's 18 inches deep and you're two feet off the wall you know that's not really going to fly but if you can get a few feet off that wall you give those rears enough room to begin to image you're going to have a much better experience with a 7.1 and you can actually look at it and say okay this is something I want to do I'm going to get some performance out of that and you can go for it number nine is one of the most important on this list and that is room Acoustics I'm sure you've all experienced going to a really nice you know store like maybe Best Buy like you know the Magnolia where they've got a treated room or you've gone to some other high-end store and you on in their really nice room they got all this super fancy equipment expensive gear expensive speakers and maybe you purchase some speakers and you got them home and you put them in your room and they just didn't do it for you it didn't sound like it did in that room so you go back over there and they're like oh well you need this amp you need this power conditioner now or you need these cables in reality most of that is complete baloney what you need a room Acoustics they're in a treated room so they're in a room that's going to make pretty much whatever you put in there shine it's going to sound great they could have a budget speaker in there and it's going to sound much better than you know if you had an extremely high-end speaker in your room that's not traded that budget speaker is going to sound better this is a very important thing to understand the room contributes more sound than the direct speaker does now of course the speakers what's producing the sound but you know once you get past that Source hitting your ears directly from the speaker your ears are bomb boarded with lots of Reflections all over the room you know kind of like if you've been to McDonald's or Burger King and you pull up at the drive-through they've got the block wall there and you can hear your engine bouncing off of it you know reflecting back into your cab it's really loud you know it's the same things happen in your room Reflections are extremely strong they kill the vocals they smear location I mean they can be very very very harmful so you need to treat your room all my room plans come with room treatment plans I will not sell speakers or design a you know a room and not tell you how to treat it because that's the most important thing you know besides speaker placement that's extremely important as well but even if you have a living room you know you need to understand what those Reflections are doing maybe you can use a carpet you know between the TV and the the seating you know there's a reflection there kind of tame that down a little bit you've got some windows on the sides maybe you can throw up some heavy curtains you know some rooms we can't do acoustic treatments all over the place you know they may not look good now there are options where you can have like art you know like large acoustic panels but you've got some art print on them or something like that I actually want to do that in my living room because right now the living room is not really treated I don't really like the look of just acoustic panels in my living room the wife doesn't either you know if we want to do any critical listening we have a home theater for that but you know at one time I was considering just making one theater in this new house and just having you know my living room set up but with YouTube and everything it made more sense and then with the business as well as they have issues in their build I can jump on my own Zoom or jump on my phone and video something and show them how to do something how something should look so it's useful for my business perspective for me but you know I really did think about just having a living room set up but if you want any room or any home theater or any media room if you want it to perform well you've got to take care of the room Reflections alrighty number 10 this one's a pretty big one as well we hear people a lot of times saying oh room correction will fix it our Atmos speakers we don't have to aim them room correction is going to fix it no room correction is not going to fix placement issues it's not going to fix aiming issues remember aiming issues the problem with those are we're sending the good off Axis or the good on axis somewhere else it's not going to the listening position the listening position you know if you have Atmos that are aimed straight down the dog's getting all the good energy while you're are getting is off axis and also as you move further away from that speaker you're losing more upper energy than those people that are sitting in line with it there's nothing that room correction can do to fix that I mean all you're going to do is try to jack up the trouble because you're not aimed at the listening position and if you've got really bad speakers where the off axis does not resemble the on-axis you know room correction can't fix that all the room correction is going to do is sample the area when you move that mic around it's sampling the area and it's going to try to determine what it can EQ and what it can and by eq'ing all it's doing is turning certain parts of the frequency response up and down to try to get a hit a Target that you've set or the room correction automatically defaults to and of course it's also going to time align your speakers and align your speakers to your subs and set levels and things like that but you really need to go in there and do some adjustments and tweaks but you need to follow the steps you need to have your seats placed right so you're not sitting in any room mode so you have good bass place your subs properly play place your speakers properly aim your speakers understand that your speaker's image your Mains your rears even your Atmos they have a sound stage and will image when set up and aimed properly and once you're ready for room correction run your room correction but then go in there and adjust it if you're getting a room professionally done they're not hitting the start button and then leaving when that's done there's a lot that has to be done after the room correction is run now you can go check out the arc tutorial that was done just a few weeks ago that was episode 51 even if you're not using Arc that video will help you understand what you're looking for and how to manipulate the software that you're using because direct Odyssey Arc the the process is the same it's all room correction it's all room tuning it's just a different interface of course some are more advanced than the others I personally like Arc and again if you need help my contact information is in the description of this video that's going to be it for this one guys don't forget to subscribe hit notification Bell so you know when the next videos come out and I will see y'all for the next one

Channel: Home Theater Gurus

Views: 57,548

Keywords: top 10 home theater mistakes, top 5, home theater mistakes, home theater, subwoofer, hdmi cables, hdmi 2.1, home theater projector, home cinema, home theater setup, 4k projector, epson, home theater tour, mistakes, home theater system, tutorial, diy, projector, best projector, best 4k projector, gaming, how to build a home theater, lg, projector screen, tv placement, installation, home theater gurus, How to setup home theatet, how to surround sound, hook up tv

Id: IYtJTnc5Jfc

Length: 19min 46sec (1186 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 04 2023