Setting up multi-channel audio such as a home theater system has always been quite complicated and vendors recently have created unique products and technologies such as wireless audio products or virtual surround sound to help simplify this process. I will review the newest trends to understand which devices actually work. I will also give some advice for selecting the perfect components.
While previously setting up a TV has been fairly straightforward, the appearance of multi-channel audio has made installing home theater systems a great deal more complex by requiring a number of external speakers to create surround sound. In case of 5.1 surround, 6 speakers are used: center, left and right front, left and right rear and a subwoofer. More recent 7.1 systems need a total quantity of 8 loudspeakers by adding 2 additional side speakers.
Consequently installing a home theater has turn out to be fairly hard and long speaker cable runs are normally undesirable for aesthetic reasons. Part vendors have come up with various technologies to simplify the setup.
One approach is minimizing the quantity of speakers by creating virtual speakers. This technique applies signal processing to the sound and adds phase shifts and cues to the sound that would normally be broadcast by the remote speaker. Because the signal processing is based on how the human hearing detects the origin of sound, the sound components which underwent signal processing can be mixed with the front speaker components and sent by the front loudspeakers. The viewer is in effect tricked into assuming the audio is originating from a location other than the front speakers.
The benefit of this technology is that only a few loudspeakers are needed and no long speaker cord has to be run all through the viewing environment. The disadvantage though is that each person will process audio in a different way because of the different shape of each human ear. The signal processing of these virtual surround systems is based on a standard model which was calculated with a standard ear. However, virtual surround will not function equally well for every person.
Wireless surround sound products are one more solution for simplifying home speaker setups and usually come with a transmitter component that connects to the source in addition to wireless amplifiers that will connect to the remote speakers. The transmitter will often come with amplified speaker inputs and also line-level inputs and come with a volume control to adjust it to the source audio level.
A number of wireless systems come with wireless amplifiers that connect to two speakers. This still requires cord runs between the two speakers. Other products come with separate wireless amplifiers for each speaker. The most sophisticated wireless devices use digital transmission to eliminate signal degradation. Ensure that you choose a wireless system with a low audio latency, at most a few milliseconds. This will make certain that the audio from all loudspeakers, including the non-wireless speakers, is in sync. Low latency is also vital for good sync with the video. A large latency would lead to an echo effect. This effect would degrade the surround effect. Some wireless devices work at 5.8 GHz which offers the benefit of less competition from other wireless products than systems employing the crowded 900 MHz or 2.4 GHz frequency band.
Another method, which is often called sound bars utilizes side-reflecting loudspeakers. In this case the audio for the remote loudspeakers will be broadcast by separate loudspeakers positioned at the front at an angle and reflected by walls as to seem to be coming from besides or behind the viewer. The result by and large depends on the shape of the room and interior design and not work well in many real-world scenarios resulting from different room shapes and obstacles in the room.
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You can get further details regarding wireless amplifier products at Amphony's website.
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