What is Home Entertainment?

Most people characterize home entertainment as both audio and video components that can play a variety of media in a comfortable and convenient home setting. Some people might say that a home theater system is synonymous with home entertainment. A home theater system is where both audio and video work together to produce a cinema experience in the comfort of your own home.

Most home theater systems have two components; an audio component and a video component. In a home theater system, both of these components work together in concert with one another to produce a cinema experience.

Home theaters usually come in either individual components or in prepackaged integrated home theater systems. If you are buying separate components, you will probably need to choose a large widescreen TV set, DVD player, a receiver with digital surround sound processing and surround sound speakers.

When choosing a TV, you will probably want to go with a widescreen, HDTV set. These TV sets offer the highest quality picture in a format (widescreen) that is the same as the format used in cinemas. The screen shape at most movie theaters has an aspect ratio of 16:9, the same aspect ratio that many widescreen HDTV sets use. This way you can watch a film the way the director intended it to be viewed.

Another important component needed for a home theater system is a DVD player. Today, you can view DVD's on a standard DVD player or on high definition players such as HD-DVD or Blu-Ray DVD. While most consumers agree that the quality of movies on standard DVD is excellent, high definition DVD's although new to the market, promise even higher quality video and audio signals.

Now that you have a TV set and a way to play your favorite movie, you will need to focus on the audio components. You should first start with a receiver that can process digital surround sound. Practically all DVD's and some CD's have encoded data that specifically tells the receiver where the sound should be sent. For instance, most surround receivers have 5 types of speakers and the encoded data tells which of these speakers the sound should be sent to. There are many types of surround sound processing formats. Some of the more common formats are Dolby Pro Logic, DTS, Dolby EX and THX Surround EX.

Most of these surround sound formats are either 5.1 or 6.1. A 5.1 format means that there are five separate channels and 1 subwoofer. The 5 channels include one front right and one front left speaker, one center channel speaker and one set of rear speakers. A 6.1 requires the same speakers as a 5.1, except that you can also add a set of rear speakers that are in stereo, meaning one rear right speaker and one rear left speaker.