How to Install a Home Theater - Selecting a Receiver
Hi, this is Keith Harman with Smart Wired Home and we’re back to talk about selecting a surround sound receiver. Now surround sound receivers can be the, really the heart of your system. It’s gonna receive all of the audio signals, and change those and amplify them and send them out to your speakers. It’s also going to do your video switching, well, it doesn’t have to, but here’s why you wanna do it. Anytime you start to get multiple components working together, they’re going to, you're gonna be selecting the audio and the video. If they get out of sync, then you see one thing on the screen and a different thing coming out of the speakers, not typically what you’re looking for. By doing all that audio and video switching together in your surround sound receiver, you can reduce, perhaps eliminate, but definitely reduce of the chances of that happening, because you, you were doing that together, the audio and the video changes together so that what you see is what you’re hearing most of the time. So what do you look for in a, in a surround sound receiver? Well we got here some older one, this Tecknics, that one, you know, it’s typically volume control is one of the main things, switching your audio, and switching your video, decoding the surround sound signal, and that’s what you’re looking for in there. You’re gonna look for the total power, do you have 50, 70, 80, 100, 150 watts per channel for the speakers, and how many sets. Almost everything today is gonna be a 7.1, although there are exceptions to that, again, most of your signals are gonna be 5.1. So, let’s take a look at, you know, if we take a look at the front, that’s usually pretty simple, its’ the back of the receiver that gets to be a bit daunting. So, first of all, we’re look down here, speaker connectors. Speakers are gonna be right left, center and the front, surround sound rear as well as the back surround for 7.1. So, about right and left for both of those and a lot of these will have a second room or zone two, that would basically allow you to hook up sound in another room, maybe even show, have a different source over there. A nice to have for your home theater, but we’re not really looking at that here, we’re looking at how to power your home theater. When we look at the connections, we see the standard stereo connections here, right and left, red is right, white is left. Being able to input and output all kinds of stereo signals. Maybe you wanna hook up iPod up, you could do that right here. So, now we’re gonna, we take a look at the, the audio, that just a stereo, but then we say, well, you know, we actually wanna get something more than, more than just the right and left, again, we’re talking about home theater and surround sound. So now we start to see this optical inputs and coaxial inputs, that allows you to take various devices, like your DVD player, your cable box, your satellite box, your Teevo, whatever other things that you have and be able to get the sound from them in your, into the surround sound receiver. Now, you notice, none of these, all these are labeled, DVD, VDP, TV, VCR, tape, all of them are subsequently labeled, that’s a specific input for a device. Each one of these, the digital, typically those are what we call an assignal input, whereas you’re gonna take that input and you’re gonna go through the menus, set up menus that on the remote that comes with the receiver and be able to designate, yeah, optical audio in, oh that’s TV, optical audio in two, that’s DVD, optical audio in 3, that’s cable box, or satellite box, or whatever it’s hooked up to, so that’s an important part of the set up, is going through those menus. Getting away from the audio, we start to look at the video, so, over here we’ve got the old component, yellow style. And again we’ll cover all these in the cables as well, and the best video, which is little better, and here’s the component, the red, blue, green inputs. Basically you’re looking at number of connectors, two connectors gives you A level of quality, if you look very closely at the S-video, you’ll see that there’s four connectors there, gives you more quality, and here we have two, four, six connectors, again higher quality, being able to split up the video signal better. So you can get your 1080 signal into, in and out of the component. We’re starting to see a lot, lot more today of the HDMI, this particular receiver also does HDMI switching. Two HDMIs ins, one HDMI out, so that when you’re, if that’s the way you hook up, you hook up your HDMI in there, that’s DVD, it comes in and then it will go out to your whatever display that you selected. Then maybe your cable box comes in to HDMI2, that is now selected, you configure that, you tell it into the machine, it comes out to go to the receiver, I’m sorry, go to the display so that you see the right signal on the display and have the right sound coming out of your speakers. So that’s a quick overview of the connectors, again, we’re looking for 5.1 versus 7.1, we’re looking for that watts per channel, and how much, you know, how well does that sound, you know, what kind of, what, you know, you wanna be able to test this things out in the store, they say, how does this particular receiver sound? Some of that you're gonna do just because it’s a big name, typically you’d get something that’s, that’s not the cheapest one in the, in the whole line of a good name and you’re probably gonna be okay.