Setting up a multi-channel home theater system is something that gives many, many people grief. If you're moving just from living in the world of stereo with a single pair of speakers and you move into this world where you've got, these days it can be 11 channels and one or two subwoofers in the system, and there's so many things to worry about. Things have got a little bit easier with the advent of HTMI about 15 years ago, where you had the audio and video all conveniently carried on a single cable from device to device, and that's helped things out. This older receiver here has got S video and component on all those crazy connections that you had to do before the advent of HTMI, but today I don't want to talk about all of the connections and all of those things.
It's one thing that's come up in the comments to some other videos that I've done in the past, which is well, how using all of these tips of how do I set up my speakers and how close to the back wall or the sidewall should they be or can they be, towing in speakers, angling them towards the listening position, where to place the speakers? I had a really, really good question about, well, home theater system, where you've got five or seven or 11 speakers, how do you make sure that they're all placed properly when you listen to all that together? How do you know? How do you know that you've got your center channel for instance placed well, when you've got all of this other auditory, acoustic input in the room from all these other speakers? It's something that I don't think that I've ever answered. It's a very, very simple tip to do this.
If you've changed anything in your system, you've got a new pair of speakers, or it's a completely new system. You've never done a home theater or multi-channel audio system before, take it in steps. The first thing that I would do is all home theater receivers have a way to go into the menu system and tell the receiver what speakers are actually connected to it. The first thing and the most important thing in any home theater system are those main front left and right speakers. They are the most critical. They contain and handle the most audio content of any of the tracks in multi-channel audio. It's very important to get them right.
What do I suggest doing? You've got this shiny new AVR or audio video receiver, a new multi-channel speaker set up, get everything placed where you think that it's going to be as a decent starting point that's going to work out, and only connect the front left and right speaker to the receiver. Go into the menu, tell it that you've got front left and right speakers and this is critical. Set them to full range or sometimes set them to large, and it doesn't matter how small those speakers are. We're going to go and change that to the correct settings for the particular speaker after you've got them dialed in.
Now, I suggest listening to something that is actually stereo and not multi-channel that is down converted then to stereo, but something, a stereo signal, whether it's from the streaming service, a CD, whatever, something that's naturally stereo. Like any other good speaker set up and dial in, you want to use music that's different varieties, different types of music that you listen to and things that accentuate different areas. Vocals are really good for determining mid range and high frequency performance and for imaging. Something with good base. Natural mid base is great for helping with positioning how close are you to the wall, do you need to use port plugs? All of these things that I've done separate videos on, you can dial in now the front main left and right speakers just by doing that.
Now, what happens? Now when I have the front left and right dialed in, and you've listened to a variety of music, you've played with toe in, you've played with position. You're happy with the look of where those front speakers are, now connect the center channel. You've got now three speakers in the system. Go into your AVR menu and now turn on the center channel. For now, what we're going to do is we're going to just leave all the settings flat. I should've mentioned before that when you hook up just the front left and right, don't set up anything using auto setup. Don't use Odyssey, don't use the microphone, don't use anything. We're just trying to get positioning dialed in.
When you add the center, again, do the same thing, make sure that you set it for large so that all the base content for now will go into the center channel and not be steered away to a subwoofer that's not connected at all of the system. Okay. What I want you to do now is use a stereo recording, but use something, one of the processing modes in the receiver, like Adobe ProLogic to music. There's usually a setting for that and go back and listen to some of those same tracks you did with just the front main speakers. What you should hear is a better defined center image from that center channel. At this point, don't worry about the fact that the center channel level may be too high or too low relative to the main speakers. You're just listening for clarity. You're listening for base. Is there base boominess that seems to be coming from the center channel?
If you're really having trouble, trying to audibly separate it, go and disconnect the front left and right speakers, and just listen to the center channel in that mode. It may sound a little weird because some of the content is not going to be from a stereo signal steered to the center channel, but you're only listening for basic things like boominess, balance, things like that.
Now is a perfect, perfect time to disconnect everything, and now here's a little bit of a strange one. If you've got side rear speakers, rear surrounds at most channels, whatever it happens to be, temporarily connect each payer separately, one at a time to the front left and right outputs, and go back into the receiver, turn the center channel off. And so what you're essentially doing is you're listening to your surround channels or surround pairs as if they were front left and right speakers with a basic stereo signal. There's no processing going on. Make sure you go back and you set the receiver for just stereo and do the same thing if you have the opportunity, because they're not, let's say wall mounted or ceiling mounted to move those surround channels around a little bit, this is the perfect time to do that and get the balance where you want it.
Now, the last thing that you want to do is hook everything up now including your subwoofer. I would suggest going in and setting everything manually, so for your speakers, the appropriate crossover points given their sizes. 80 Hertz is pretty standard. Sometimes if it's a very small speaker, particularly surround channel, you might want to bump that up to 100 Hertz or 120 Hertz if your receiver has that. But the final step is to put everything together, connect it in the right place, and now you want to balance the sound of the subwoofer and get it to blend as good as possible with the rest of the system.
I hope you can see that by breaking down a complex multi-channel home theater system into little small chunks that we're familiar with, which is basically stereo or mano in the case of the center channel, it's much easier to focus on the precise adjustments that are required to get really excellent balance of speaker performance in your room. I hope that's not too confusing. Yes, if it's a new receiver, you're going to have to dig out or download that massive 600 page manual and go through it to figure out where all these adjustments and settings are. But believe me, if you use this technique to balance each set of speakers individually before bringing the whole system together, you have a much better shot of creating the ideal performance in your room. Hope that helps, and thank you very much for watching.
