Worth a read

Building the home theatre of your dreams
ROD EASDOWN
November 25, 2009



Setting up the home theatre of your dreams takes time, money and patience but you'll never regret it.

My mate Neil began lusting after a plasma screen as soon as he heard about them 10 years ago. The stumbling block was always his wife, who couldn't see the point of spending all that money on a big screen when they already had a perfectly good television.

Through the years the prices of plasmas plummeted but Neil's requests to buy one were always met with his wife's standard rebuttal: they're too expensive.

Then, on a one-week visit to New Zealand, Neil happened to buy the right lotto ticket and came home $NZ200,000 ($160,400) richer. The first thing he did was throw away his return ticket on Jetstar to get a "proper" airline seat and the second was buy a plasma. His wife's standard objection was suddenly as empty as the old TV cabinet.

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Screen size - how big is big enough?
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The install - stuff you need to know
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Four days after it was installed I rang her to ask what she thought. "You can't drag me away from it," she said. "It's wonderful, simply wonderful."

Now this is not a one-off story. I know this because the same thing happened at our place. My partner couldn't see any point in cluttering up the wall with a big plasma when we had a perfectly good, if rather dated, 68-centimetre Sony. Right up until Pioneer lent me a road-test unit for a couple of weeks.

All went fine until the guys turned up to take it back. She was inconsolable. So, once again, I floated the idea of buying one and the response, in summary, was: "Yes. Oh yes, yes, yes!"

From my experience, therefore, by far the most difficult part of getting a home theatre is gaining the permission of the person with whom you share the house. And once this particular mountain has been climbed, you may be tempted to assume everything else is a doddle, to which I would respond: "No. Oh no, no, no!"

If you're going down the five-speaker-plus-subwoofer surround sound route - and why wouldn't you? - you first have to figure the best way to work all those speakers into your living room. Despite the many options here (satellite speakers, normal speakers, in-wall and in-ceiling speakers; you can even buy speakers disguised as rocks), it's a task fraught with difficulty, especially since you also have to find enough vacant wall for your large flat-panel screen.

At our place we had to ditch a cabinet and turn everything through 90 degrees to put the screen on a formerly useless free-standing wall, which presented a challenge so great the installer declared it impossible. Then his boss came out and told him how to do it.

Valuable lesson one: when an installer excavates a speaker cable channel up a single brick wall and into the ceiling, do check who is cleaning up. Otherwise it will be you.

Valuable lesson two: when an installer excavates, he does not concern himself with filling the channel back in. That's a job for a plasterer. So now you need a plasterer. After the plasterer you will need a painter.

Valuable lesson three: surprisingly few installers are licensed electricians. If you need an extra power point, your installer may not be able to assist. But what's another tradesman at this point?

Valuable lesson four: check that your installer is familiar with audio installations. Otherwise you may find the speaker cables he inserts are little better than electrical flex.

Once the cables are laid, you'd assume all that's between you and home cinema nirvana is hooking everything up. You're about to learn that nothing in home cinema is ever this easy and this is where it really pays to buy your equipment through a specialist supplier rather than what these specialists sniffily refer to as box shops.

Such people know one brand of amplifier goes all huffy when it's connected to another brand of DVD player. They know how to get around the decidedly perplexing set-up menu system of a variety of 7.1-channel receiver I hesitate to name for fear of being sued to Tokyo and back. They know that some flat-panel screens need far more ventilation than others and cannot be mounted over fireplaces.

After a jolly good laugh, they can even figure how to incorporate your old and much-loved laserdisc player in the system.

And, if they're any good, they'll keep coming back until your Blu-ray player's intermittent refusal to provide any sort of vision with its sound is sorted.

Valuable lesson five: deal with a local business; you'll be going back there a lot.

Installation cost me just over $1000 and, given the work required and the follow-up when all the glitches happened, it was worth every cent. My overall budget, however, proved a tad optimistic.

Observing my own first law of home cinema, I spent as much on the sound as on the vision. My magnificent 127-centimetre plasma cost $5000 and I spent that much again (maybe a little more) on speakers, amplifier and Blu-ray player.

Valuable lesson six: the free movies that come with some Blu-Ray players aren't worth a cracker.

I can't say how glad I am that I bought a sound system with genuine horsepower. The sound is sensational, especially from Blu-ray discs. Sure, there are lots of cheaper, one-brand surround sound systems available but their shortcomings are only revealed at home. One is that they often won't go loud enough and another is that they can sound pretty thin. It's a fact that the bulk of people buying their second home cinema spend vastly more on sound than they did first time around.

The marketing manager at importer Audio Products, Holger Pfeilmaier, has noticed this. "An increasing number of people are realising that a big screen is only part of a modern home cinema," he says. "The focus has started to shift to the other core ingredient - spectacular sound."

So $5k for the screen, $5k for the sound and 10 per cent again for the installation. Total $11,000. So how come I wound up spending more than $14,000? Well, things cropped up.

The Blu-ray player, for example. We tried three before we found one that didn't get emotional about the cabling of my system. I didn't like that one so I paid as much again to upgrade to a better-quality one that not only worked but gave a palpable improvement in both sound and vision quality.

I had to buy expensive HDMI cables because manufacturers never put them in the box, despite breathlessly declaring how many HDMI connections their product has. Should this be valuable lesson seven?

There was also the matter of my partner disliking the cabinet I'd picked and opting for something smaller (thereby doubling the number of speaker stands needed) and considerably more expensive. Which is valuable lesson eight: in all matters pertaining to aesthetics, your partner is right, you are wrong.

There was the painter and the plasterer, of course. And all that other unpredictable stuff, like the slab of beer for the painter when he went above and beyond the call, the surge protector the installer thought was a good idea and some neat conduits that look like skirting boards, which I didn't even know existed when I embarked on this odyssey.

My home cinema has now been up and running for a year, and flawlessly for the past 10 months. Valuable lesson nine: if you watch action movies late at night and have neighbours, you'll need to get some headphones.

I love, love it, love it. Even more importantly, so does my partner. And she'll love it even more when I get rid of that stack of remote controls cluttering the coffee table and replace them with a single smart remote that controls the lot.

Valuable lesson 10: No home cinema sounds as good as a happy partner.

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Source: smh.com.au