You Don't Need a Receiver to Have a Surround Sound System!

I get the question all the time do I need a receiver for a surround sound setup and that's kind of a complicated question it's in a general sense if you want a traditional surround sound system or you can pick out your your front speakers pick out your rear speakers have ceilings upward firing speakers then yes you'll need a receiver because that allows you to specifically connect these different speakers to those zones or channels what we would call them so if you have a front left front right center you can individually pick up those speakers and connect them to the receiver so yes you do need a receiver for a surround sound setup like that with a lot of flexibility and a lot of we have the ability to kind of change out things a little bit to go a little bit into how a receiver works essentially it takes all the incoming signals for media devices so you have an Xbox Playstation 4 a fire TV Apple TV blu-ray player whatever all those are gonna connect HDMI into the receiver or the audio/video receiver then it's going to output the video for you HDMI out to a TV projector or some other type of display device then you'll have the audio which is outputted to those connected speakers through the different channels and that receiver does all the audio processing the surround sound decoding and it sends the specific bits of information to each speaker and that's how you can create a full surround sound environment the receiver does this all automatically through the processing inside of it now let's move on to sound bars and how can a sound bar possibly provide surround sound audio well there's two different ways really I explain this one of my other videos but basically a sound bar can emulate or simulate surround sound audio with the front speakers by angling them slightly the main issue with this is if you have a very open room where the audio can't bounce off the walls then this really isn't gonna work well for you you know if you have a 5.1 channel sound bar then the audio you know it may have front speakers that are kind of angled at 45 degrees and what they're trying to do is send that audio have it bounce off of walls then bounce into your ears where it sounds like it's coming from behind you but in all reality it's coming from now the issue with this is like I said if you have a very open room that's not going to work for you then there are other sound bars that actually have wireless surround sound speakers and they typically connect with the cable to a subwoofer sometimes they connect directly to the wall and they just independently are wireless to the sound bar if they're connected to the subwoofer then typically they receive the power and signal from the subwoofer and the subwoofer wirelessly connects to the sound bar I know that's kind of confusing but it's typically how most systems work now now where sound bars have really started to take over the game is that they've started including HDMI inputs on the sound bar itself and that's where a sound bar is essentially replacing a receiver altogether the sound bar does the surround sound audio decoding the processing and it's sending up the video signals and then the sound bar itself is actually playing the audio so that's where sound bars have really started to replace receivers and a lot of homes now and then you see more and more sound bars or some of our manufacturers starting to add in the rear wireless speakers it's becoming more and more common however on some of the older units you really don't have a lot of options so let's go over a few examples of those you know first off you have the Sonos playbar the sominus beam or the sona's play base and those are actually you can add in the Sonos play:1 or Sonos play v as wireless surround speakers and that's all done wirelessly through so enosis system one that I have in my living room is the nakamichi shockwave Pro that is a seven point one point four sound bar where we have five channels in the sound bar itself and then two wireless rear speakers and a subwoofer both those speakers connect to the subwoofer and the subwoofer wirelessly connects to the sound bar so that's what I have in my living room and you know it's a really great system there are some audio delays with it so that's something you kind of have to factor in a little bit with sound bar systems is that sound bars are gonna have a slight delay in getting that audio from the front to the rear especially if there's some obstructions or it's of much further distance so you may have to mess with that system just a little bit to try and get odelay as minimal as possible to where you don't notice it or there's no connection interruptions those has a very interesting setup with their surround speakers they have these small little spy forget the name of them included on the screen here but they have these speakers that you can purchase separately and then they connect wirelessly to a few their different sound bar models so similar in house onus is set up where they have the Sonos playbar the sono space or the Sonos beam that those sonís wireless speakers connect to any of those sound bars well the same thing with those Bose has the sound touch 300 the sound touch 700 the sound bar 700 I think as well they have quite a few sound bars that these wireless speakers are capable of connecting to I'll include all this on the screen just to make it easier for you because I don't have it right off the top of my head so with this we have three companies that are really pushing forward with wireless surround sound Vizio is doing the same thing where they're starting to have a few of their sound bars come with it not a ton of them but definitely a few so we're starting to see it more and more and that's really cool because this is really going to change the whole home entertainment section of audio just because a receiver limited a lot of people to their setups if you had a very open living room or you had a very unique setup getting the wires to the locations you needed was the number one problem for most people but now with wireless audio like this is really changing and it makes it so much easier for the normal person who doesn't know how to run all these wires the normal person just can just go by a sound sound bar system install it and within 30 minutes to an hour they have full surround sound audio and that's just crazy because years ago we would never would have thought this would happen now I want to take a second to talk about some of the older sound bars where there is no option to add in surround sound speakers to them we are there are a couple ways to add in surround sound speakers now I actually have a video coming out soon if it's out already I'll have a link to it but basically you can add in surround sound speakers to a sound bar with a very particular setup basically the sound bar just needs a digital optical out or a digital optical input to it and you'll be able to add in a small set of wireless surround speakers so that's something you're interested in if the video is not out yet go ahead subscribe even if it's not go ahead subscribe and then I'll have a link to that in the description so you can watch it it's really interesting it's really cool how we get around this but that's really all I have for this video I think I explained why you don't need to receive our first surround sound setups anymore I'll definitely include all the sound bars I mentioned in this video in the description just so you can take a look at them and you can really see like okay this is what a surround sound system looks at with sound bars or looks like with sound bars so yeah I hope this video was helpful if you have any questions leave those down in the comments below I'm always monitoring that answering questions that anyone has make sure you like the video if you learned something if you enjoyed it and subscribe to the channel for new videos we'll see you next time bye

Channel: Jonah Matthes

Views: 251,124

Keywords: soundbar, sound bar, tv, receiver, a/v receiver, projector, speakers, projector screen, HDMI

Id: bhereDlAzGo

Length: 7min 28sec (448 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 22 2020