A home theater system is an immersive audio experience that can dramatically improve the experience of watching movies and TV or playing video games. A home theater systems works by sending digital audio signals to speakers located throughout your home, so that sounds from a movie or video game appear to be coming from all around you instead of just from the front and the back like in traditional stereo.
Surround sound systems can be configured in a variety of ways based on the size of your room and how immersed you want to feel while listening to content. The most common setups are 5.1 and 7.1, which refer to the number of channels, or points of audio, that are used to create the surround sound effect.
The five channels in a standard 5.1 surround sound system are split between three speakers that provide audio that appears to be coming from in front of you, two speakers that provide the audio from your sides, and one speaker that provides audio from behind you (or above you for creepy effects like footsteps). A single subwoofer handles the low frequency sounds that would normally be handled by the center channel in a normal stereo system.
When you watch a movie in a surround sound system, the sound is more dynamic and life-like than a regular stereo system. That’s because when the actors speak, their voice will come from the speakers that are closest to them on screen. But if they move, the sound will usually shift to the other speakers in the system, so that you can hear them as they move and get closer or further away from the camera. This adds a sense of realism and immersion that makes you feel like you’re right in the middle of the action.
While the idea of immersive audio is nothing new, the technology that allows it to be achieved has only recently become widely available. The first true multi-channel audio systems were created by Dolby Laboratories in the late 1970s, and their pioneering work was followed up on by other companies that designed and manufactured different kinds of theater and home theater surround sound systems.
In order to have an immersive audio experience, the speakers in your surround sound system need to be correctly installed and tuned. A professional can do this for you, so that your system is always interpreting sound properly and giving you the best experience possible.
Unlike music that is encoded with just two channels, most movie soundtracks contain multiple channels of audio data to create a full-soundstage. The simplest of these are stereo channels that are encoded as left and right, and this is the form of audio most people think of when they hear the term “surround sound.” However, more recent technologies allow movies to be filmed and then recorded with a greater number of audio channels than just stereo, which means that they can be played in surround systems.