How to buy the best home cinema system

The best home cinema systems bring the surround-sound of the cinema into your home, making you feel as if you’re in the thick of the action. We show you what to look for when buying a home cinema system.

What makes a good home cinema system?

Great sound quality

The best home cinema systems deliver top-quality audio, clear dialogue and realistic surround sound effects. Home cinema systems that deliver great surround sound quality help make you feel fully immersed in a film.

Easy to set up

Clear instruction manuals and auto set-up modes take the hard work out of setting speaker levels and delay times to suit your living room. If the amount of cabling is an issue, look for a system with optional wireless speakers.

Easy to use

Once set up, your home cinema system needs to be a breeze to operate. Look for a home cinema system with easy-to-control features and a well laid-out remote control.

What type should I buy?

All-in-one systems

These are the easiest way to get a home cinema system. They contain everything you need to get started; the amplifier, speakers, cables and instructions on how to hook it all up. A DVD or Blu-ray player may also be included. Packages are available as 2.1, 3.1, 5.1 and 7.1 systems, which refer to the number of speakers included in the setup. 

Separates

You can buy the components of a home cinema system separately – amplifier, speakers, and a DVD or Blu-ray player. This bespoke route may appeal to the committed audiophile or home cinema enthusiast wanting to perfect their set-up. It also easier to upgrade different components over time. Buying separates is, however, more expensive.

Sound bars

Sound bars cram several speakers into a long bar-shaped box that’s mounted below or alongside your TV. The sound to each speaker is then electronically processed in order to recreate a virtual surround-sound effect despite the lack of rear speakers. Although Which? tests on sound bars have revealed that they’re never as good as full-blown surround-sound systems, Best Buy sound bars are still a good option if you have limited space. 

What else should I consider?

2.1 and 3.1 systems

A basic home cinema set-up is the 2.1 system, which sees two speakers placed to the left and right of your TV set, and a subwoofer placed elsewhere in the room. 

A 3.1 system adds an extra front speaker that helps boost the sound of dialogue. You won't get true surround sound with either of these systems, but you should experience a significant improvement compared to built-in TV speakers.

5.1 systems

These deliver full surround-sound with three front speakers, two rear speakers, a subwoofer and usually a DVD and/or Blu-ray player.

7.1 systems

These add two more rear speakers to the 5.1 layout. However, the challenge of fitting so many speakers into your room means this type of system is only for the true home cinema enthusiast who has the space and budget to suit.

Could I go wireless?

Ditch all the speaker cable snaking round your living room by opting for a system with wireless rear speakers. These use a radio transmitter so the rear speakers can receive sound from the amplifier, although they still need to be connected to the mains for power.

How else can I get better sound when watching movies?

Blu-ray players not only let you watch movies in stunning high definition through a HD TV, they can also deliver high-quality digital surround sound when connected to a home-cinema system.

You can also hook up your games console to a home-cinema system for the ultimate gaming experience. Consoles such as the Microsoft Xbox and Sony PlayStation support Dolby digital surround sound, and many games have full surround-sound tracks to accompany the on-screen action.

source: which.co.uk

Top 10 Things You Need to Know About Choosing Between HD and UHD

Should you get an HD or UHD display for your home theater? There are several things to consider before making this important decision.

1. HD has a pixel resolution of 1920x1080, while UHD (also commonly but inaccurately known as 4K) quadruples the resolution to 3840x2160, but that additional resolution does not offer much visible benefit at typical screen sizes and seating distances. (Of course, you can see a big difference at the "pixel-peeping" distance depicted above, but few people actually sit that close to their TV.)

2. UHD will offer several other enhancements, including high dynamic range (HDR), wider color gamut (WCG), and high frame rate (HFR), but the details are still being worked out. These enhancements will have a much greater impact on image quality than increased resolution.

3. There are several HDR systems vying for acceptance by display manufacturers and content creators, including SMPTE (the only one that's an open industry standard), Dolby Vision, Philips, Technicolor, and BBC.

4. The only currently available consumer displays with HDR and WCG capabilities are the Samsung SUHD TVs, which implement the SMPTE HDR standard; the Vizio Reference Series will offer WCG and Dolby Vision HDR when it is released, presumably later this year. Also, the Panasonic CX850 andSony X940C LCDs and LG EG9600 OLED are scheduled to get firmware updates that add HDR capabilities—at least for streaming content—this year.

5. There is currently no consumer content with HDR, WCG, or HFR; Disney and Pixar have created HDR/WCG content for commercial cinema using Dolby Vision, and Fox has announced it will produce HDR content for the home market.

6. Streaming services Amazon, M-Go, Netflix, and Vudu have announced plans to provide HDR content this year, but they could use different HDR systems. Will HDR-capable displays be able to decode multiple types of HDR signals? We don't know yet.

7. The only way to stream UHD content at this point is via the display's built-in apps, the Sony FMP-X10 UHD server, or the Nvidia Shield streaming box; a Roku UHD streaming box is under development, as are others, I'm sure.

8. Ultra HD Blu-ray Discs will support the SMPTE, Dolby Vision, and Philips HDR systems as well as WCG when they—and the players needed to play them—start shipping by the end of this year. Those players should also support UHD streaming, presumably with HDR and WCG if available. To play UHD content with HDR from an outboard device, both the device and display must support HDMI 2.0a.

9. Many people argue that a UHDTV can make HD look much better than it does on an HDTV, but that depends on the quality of the display's upscaler, and many others maintain that the increased resolution by itself does not improve the picture quality very much at typical screen sizes and seating distances.

10. Because of all the current uncertainty, I generally recommend that mainstream consumers and enthusiasts with limited means wait to buy a UHD display until the dust settles in a year or two. This recommendation does not necessarily apply to fervent early adopters who replace their display every couple of years anyway; in fact, it's because of them that we see so much progress in the development of all consumer-electronics products.

source: avsforum.com

12 Tips to Tune Up Your TV

   If you care about picture quality, you can greatly improve the performance of just about any display by following these 12 simple steps.

   As most AVS Forum members know, watching a TV as it comes out of the box is not ideal—it's typically too bright and too blue for the best image quality at home. A professional calibration will ensure that it looks the very best it can, but that can cost several hundred dollars. This is unreasonable for many buyers, especially if the TV was relatively inexpensive—say, less than $2000.

   Does that mean you must live with a bright, blue flame thrower? Not at all—there are several things you can do to greatly improve the picture quality without spending more than a few bucks. Here are 12 tips to help you tune up your TV, which will typically get you 70-80 percent of the way to the best possible picture quality that TV can produce; if you want that last 20-30 percent, you can always hire a pro calibrator—and those of us who are picky about picture quality do so gladly if we can.

   

To perform these tasks, you'll need to open the TV's menu system and find the cited controls, which often go by different names in different manufacturers' products. I can't include all the possible names here; I've tried to use the most common names, but you might have to do a bit of sleuthing to determine what the manufacturer of your TV calls these controls.

1. Select the most accurate picture mode. In most TVs, this is the Movie or Cinema mode; in some, it might be the Standard mode, and a few even have a Calibrated mode. After selecting this mode, you might think the image looks dim and dull, but give yourself some time to get used to it; the picture will look much more natural and realistic than the out-of-box mode.

2. Select the warmest color temperature. In most TVs, the color-temperature settings are often labeled Cool, Normal, and Warm or High, Medium, and Low. The Warm or Low setting is usually the closest to reproducing what the content creators intended. In the Movie or Cinema picture mode, the color temperature often defaults to Warm or Low.

3. Turn off all "'enhancement" functions, such as dynamic contrast, edge enhancement, and noise filters. These usually do more harm than good to image quality.

4. Turn off overscan, which slightly upscales and crops the image. This is a holdover from the CRT days and is no longer necessary; in a digital display, it softens the image. In the TV's menu, this parameter is often called something like Picture Size or Aspect Ratio, with selections that include various zoom settings; select the setting that displays each pixel exactly as it is in the video signal.

5. Turn off frame interpolation, which sharpens motion detail by synthesizing artificial frames between the actual frames in the video signal. But it also creates the soap-opera effect, making movies look like they were shot with a video camera. This parameter goes by many different names; here are some of the more common ones:

LG: TruMotion
Panasonic: Motion Picture Setting
Samsung: Auto Motion Plus
Sharp: Motion Enhancement
Sony: Motionflow
Vizio: Smooth Motion

6. Turn on backlight scanning or black-frame insertion to sharpen motion detail without frame interpolation. Some models do not offer separate frame-interpolation and backlight-scanning controls, but combine them into one control; in this case, turn it off to avoid the soap-opera effect. This parameter goes by many different names; here are some of the more common ones:

LG: TruMotion Clear Plus
Panasonic: N/A (combined with frame interpolation)
Samsung: LED Motion Plus, LED Clear Motion
Sharp: AquoMotion
Sony: Motionflow Impulse
Vizio: Clear Action

7. Adjust the backlight (LCD) or cell-light (plasma, OLED) control according to the amount of ambient light in the room; the image should not be too bright to watch comfortably over extended periods. Backlight scanning and black-frame insertion can dim the picture considerably, so the backlight should be increased if you use this feature.

8. Use a setup disc to adjust the TV's five basic picture controls (brightness, contrast, color, tint, sharpness). For newbies, the Disney World of Wonder(WOW) Blu-ray is excellent; for more experienced users, I recommend Spears & Munsil's HD Benchmark or Joe Kane's Digital Video Essentials: HD Basics. Each of these discs costs around $30. Another option is the AVS 709 HD program available here to download for free. The THX Tune-Up app for iOS and Android devices is very convenient, and it's also free.

9. Follow the directions for whichever disc or app you choose to set the brightness (black level) first, then contrast (white level). Go back and check the brightness again; these controls can be somewhat interactive, so you might need to go back and forth a few times to get them both right.

10. In most cases, set the sharpness control at 0 or off; higher settings apply edge enhancement that does more harm than good to the image. I've seen at least one TV in which a setting of 0 softened the picture quite a bit, while a setting of 1 was fine.

11. Setting the color and tint controls requires you to look through a blue filter at the test pattern or, better yet, setting the TV to display only blue, not red or green. Unfortunately, the blue filters that come with various setup discs aren't always accurate for all types of TVs, leading to misadjusted controls.

12. With digital TVs, the tint control rarely needs adjustment, so leave it alone. If your TV has a "blue-only" mode, use that to set the color control; if not, use the blue filter that came with the setup disc or carefully adjust it while looking at content with natural skin tones; they should not look sunburned or sickly green.

source: avforum.com