setup

What is HDTV calibration?

From TV salespeople to TV reviewers, you'll often hear the word "calibrate" thrown around. It is said that getting your TV calibrated will improve its performance, increase its accuracy, and even make it less power hungry.

But at a cost?

Most calibrations cost a few hundred dollars. So the questions are: What is calibration, and is it worth it?

… Read more

If one subwoofer is good, are two or more subs even better?

Subwoofers aren't easy. Sure, adding a decent subwoofer to a system to supply more bass is no big deal, but getting the best possible sound out of a subwoofer is. I've written a few How To Set Up A Subwoofer articles and blogs in my time, but Brent Butterworth's recent "Subwoofers: 4, 2, or 1?" feature in Sound and Vision magazine tackled one of the more difficult aspects of home theater setup: do multiple subwoofers offer any performance advantages over a single sub? Butterworth's premise was simply this: Should I spend my $1,200 … Read more

What is TV color temperature, and why does it matter?

One of the least understood controls on nearly all modern televisions is the color temperature control.

Casual adjustment of this can result in the image appearing too red, or too blue. Setting this vital control correctly has a significant impact on the accuracy and performance of your TV.

A bit o' science

Before we can get into what the color temperature control does for a TV, we need to talk about color temperature itself.

Imagine an imaginary object. Hmmm, OK, forget that. Imagine a marble. A perfectly black marble. There's one over there >

It's black because it … Read more

HDTV settings explained

Televisions are unlike other consumer electronics products. Their setup and settings have a tremendous effect on how well they perform. The best TV on the market incorrectly setup will almost always look worse than a mediocre TV setup well.

Ideally, you'll get a setup disc to ensure the correct settings, but regardless, it's important to know what each setting actually does.

To get the ultimate performance out of your TV, a full calibration by an ISF Certified technician is your best option. Even if you go that route, it's good to know what the calibrator is adjusting. So here's a quick look at the basic settings every TV has, and what they do.… Read more

How to make your subwoofer sound better

I recently wrote about how to improve the sound of your speakers by fine-tuning their placement in your room. Hey, it's a free "tweak," and can make a big difference in your sound.

The same logic applies to subwoofers. So if you just plopped your sub down in the corner, chances are you haven't even begun to hear how good it can sound. Optimizing subwoofer placement within your room is the key to achieving the best possible performance.

To judge the potential for changing the sound, move the sub 5 or more feet from wherever it … Read more

How to make your speakers sound better

Think about it: when you're listening to music or movies most of the sound that reaches your ears doesn't directly come from the speakers. You're hearing a lot of sound reflecting off the floor, ceiling, walls, and other objects in the room. Speakers "play" the room. It's an analogous to way light illuminates a room, the source of the light may be the light fixture, but most of the light you see is reflecting off the surfaces of the room. With speakers we're trying to reduce reflections where we can to maximize the … Read more

Home theater automatic speaker calibration dos and don'ts

Just about every home theater receiver comes with an automatic speaker setup and calibration system: Denon, Marantz, and Onkyo feature Audyssey; Pioneer has MCACC (multichannel acoustic calibration); Sony's is called DCAC (digital cinema auto calibration); and Yamaha's proprietary system goes by the name YPAO (Yamaha Parametric Room Acoustic Optimizer). The systems handle the basics like determining the sizes of all the speakers, setting speaker and subwoofer volume levels and the speaker-subwoofer crossover point, measuring the distances from the speakers to the listener, and checking that all of the speaker cables are correctly hooked up. Some autosetup systems also employ equalization to balance the frequency response of all the speakers, and they try to minimize room acoustic problems.

To accomplish these goals, the systems send test tones through all of the speakers and the subwoofer, and they all use a microphone to capture the sounds of the speakers. Autosetup is a great idea, but there's no guarantee you'll have a perfectly adjusted home theater sound after the test tones have run through all of their beeps, whooshes, and thumps. The volume levels of the speakers may not be perfectly adjusted, the speaker-to-listener distances may be inaccurate, and the subwoofer volume may be too loud or too low. In the worst cases, the autosetup sounds worse than doing no setup at all.

These malfunctions can be caused by a number of things: your room may not be quiet enough, microphone placement can have an effect, or your subwoofer's built-in volume control may be set too low or too high. I'd recommend checking that all of the speakers are wired "in-phase," meaning red/+ and black/- connections are consistent at the speaker and receiver ends. Some autosetup systems check the wiring, but try to get it right in the first place.

I recently met with Chris Kyriakakis, Audyssey's CTO and founder, to talk about new developments at Audyssey, and while I had his ear, I brought up my concerns about autosetup problems. He followed up with a list of tips that generally apply to most autosetup systems. There's a lot of useful information about Audyssey setup on the company's Web site.… Read more

Boom in your room: Subwoofer setup tips

I suppose the "place the sub wherever" myth is based on the fact that low frequencies (80 Hertz or lower) are nondirectional, so it's hard to tell where in the room the deep bass is coming from. That's true, but that's not the same thing as disregarding subwoofer placement concerns altogether.

Some experts recommend always sticking the sub in the room's corner. I rarely do that, but corner placement will produce more bass at a given subwoofer volume setting. The corner's two walls and floor reflections "reinforce" bass output, so sure, the sub would have to work harder to generate the same amount of bass when it's not in a corner. But in my experience the bass is smoother (flatter) and better integrated with the speakers when the sub's placed next to a wall.

If your speakers are small, fewer than 10 inches high, with a 4-inch or smaller woofer, I recommend keeping the sub within 3 or 4 feet of the front left or right speaker. The logic here is that if the sub is much farther away it's easy to tell the bass is coming from the sub. The goal is to make the bass sound like it's coming from the speakers, not the sub.

Larger speakers, with 6-inch or larger woofers, make more bass on their own, so the sub is only responsible for delivering the deepest (nondirectional) bass. Sub placement options are greater for that reason, but the best possible bass sound still requires a little work on your part.

Some placement experimentation may be useful; play a CD with lots of deep bass and keep repeating the track as you move the sub to all of the visually acceptable locations in your listening room. Wireless subs simplify the task somewhat, but they always have at least some wires and need to be plugged into an AC power outlet. You'll be amazed just how different the bass will sound in different locations; some will be muddy, some will sound louder, and some will reduce the bass volume. The goal is to get the best balance of deep bass and still have mid and upper bass in equal proportions. … Read more

Post-Christmas Wireless-N routers explained

You finally received a wireless-N router as a Christmas present and are now ready to move on to the new and faster standard. (And even if you didn't, I would recommend that you go get one yourself.) Now that you have some relaxing time, let's go through the basics on wireless networking and how to generally set up your router like a pro.

Wireless-N router basics

The year 2009 is a very significant year for wireless networking as the N standard (or 802.11n, which offers speed up to 300Mbps and higher) was finally ratified in September after seven years of being in draft. However, chances are, your new router is still based on the latest revision of the draft N. As far as I know, there aren't any final N products on the market yet, though there will be soon.

Nonetheless, as long as has been certified by the Wi-Fi Alliance, it's guaranteed to be interoperable with N products when they come out. Even if it's not certified, it's likely that it will still work, and all existing draft N wireless routers can be upgraded via firmware to be fully compliant with the final N.

As some of you might not know, routers are platform-agnostic. It doesn't matter if you run a PC or a Mac, your new router will work. In other words, if you just upgraded to Windows 7 and your router's says it's "Vista-ready," you will not need a new router. That kind of labeling is just for marketing purposes. All wireless routers work with all consumer operating systems.

Wireless-N is backward compatible with previous standards of wireless networking including wireless-G, which caps at 54Mbps and is currently popular in mobile devices like smartphones and Netbooks, and the now obsolete wireless-B standards. This means clients (computers, phones, handheld devices, etc.) that use the old standards can connect to a wireless-N router and vice versa; the wireless-N clients can also connect to a wireless-G routers.

However, the cap speed of a mixed connection is that of the slowest standard. Most wireless-N routers are capable of delivering the slower speeds to clients of old standards while maintaining the high-speed connection to N client at the same time. So upgrading your router to an N one will not require changing the adapters to your computers, unless you absolutely need the faster speed.… Read more