Don Lindich over at Scripps Howard News Service responded to a question about some common things to keep in mind when setting up a home theater. Mr. Lindich covers off four topics that are often missed by people when bringing home their first home theater system.

1. Speaker Placement
2. Speaker Loudness/Delay Setup
3. TV Calibration
4. Properly Arranged Lighting

Good advice. Changing your speaker placement has a large effect on what you hear. And of course, you need to make sure each speaker has the same loudness to your ear as the other speakers, when being driven with the same signal. Keeping these things in mind will really improve the sound quality of your HT. You might also want to watch that subwoofer placement. You’ll want to minimize boominess, and maximize even-ness. This can often be done by getting two subwoofers and placing each in the middle of two adjacent walls. If you don’t have that luxury, you might try placing your subwoofer on your seat, then crawling around on hands and knees while playing a bass sweep. Try to find the spot in your room where the bass sounds the most even. Then place the subwoofer there.

Getting yourself a test DVD and calibrating your TV is vitally important too. Sometimes some THX DVD’s even have the required test patterns for you to set up your TV properly. However, I’ve found the explanations for setting up brightness and contrast to be rather problematic sometimes. After calibration the other day at my friend’s house, for example, the brightness was obviously set way too high. And I mean obvious. So don’t be afraid to twiddle the settings a bit after calibration. You might also want to consider getting the colour temperature of your set professionally ISF calibrated, for more accurate colours than just fiddling with the user controls can give you. Just do a search on the internet for ISF.

And arranging lighting is also obviously important. I think you’d notice right away if a bright lamp is shining right on your screen, or causing you problems. So I’ll forgo an explanation of this one!

Scripps Howard - Four tips for setting up a home theater