System Equipment

When initially designing your home theater, there are many choices and decisions you must make. Each decision will be a trade-off between function, flexability, and cost. The following sections discuss the various types of equipment required to setup a home theater system.

Receiver vs Separates
VCRs vs Laserdiscs vs DVD

Receiver vs Separates

If you are starting from scratch, the biggest decision is what to use for the control center, the heart of a home theater system (a receiver or separate components). A home theater receiver puts almost everything you need into one physical box:

• audio and video inputs for VCRs, laserdiscs, etc. source selection
• Internal amplifiers for five speakers (3 front and 2 rear)
• Potentially a subwoofer output
• Surround sound decoders for Dolby Pro-Logic
• Surround sound decoders for Dolby Digital (aka AC-3)
• AM/FM tuner

Quite a lot of stuff packed into one box. Your trade-offs for the convenience of setup and operation include smaller amplifiers (usually 120W max), limited future expansion, and generally moderate specifications for any of the subsystems (decoders, tuner, etc.) Plan to spend around $1500 +/- $500 for a descent home theater receiver.

Recommendations for Receivers

To extend the useful/functional life of a new receiver, look for the following features:

• Line level inputs/outputs before the internal amplifiers
• Digital inputs for DVD

Separates

On the other hand, separates (sometimes referred to as components) give you the same functionality with better performance, greater flexibility and future expansion. The control center of separates system is made up of the following components (each is a separate physical box):

• Preamplifier (for audio/video source selection)
• Amplifiers for 5 channels (probably 1 or 2 boxes depending on the wattage required)
• Outboard surround sound decoder for Dolby Pro-Logic
• Outboard surround sound decoder for Dolby Digital (aka AC-3)

Recommendations for separates

Look for a preamplifier with a 5.1 input/output loop. This will allow you to patch in any surround decoder on the market. The cost of separates in significantly more (maybe $4000) but worth it.

There are certainly a lot of components that fall somewhere in between (integrated amps, preamps with embedded decoders, etc)--you just need to decide which functions are important and how well you want those functions to perform.

HiFi VCRs vs Laserdiscs vs DVD

There are several different type of source equipment for delivering surround sound encoded media. Your trade-offs included picture quality, sound quality, media rental and purchase costs.

The VCR has become a standard in home entertainment. For home theater, a HiFi or stereo VCR is required in order to take advantage of the surround sound encoded material on the tape. In all respects this is the most cost effective means for obtaining surround sound in a home theater. However, many of the audio and visual quality is lost. A SuperVHS VCR has better audio and video capabilities than a HiFi VCR, but the rental market has standardized on the basic VHS format. Thus no additional quality is obtained by using a SuperVHS VCR on a rental tape.

The Laserdisc is a videophile's dream.

The DVD is the latest technology to the home theater scene. DVD has many of the qualities of laserdisc and CD rolled into one.

The following table compares many of the major features found in home theater source equipment.

Format/Feature	HiFi VCR	Laserdisc	DVD
Video Quality	Good	Excellent	Excellent
No. of Horizontal Scan Lines	250	500	550
Video Encoding Format	NTSC (Analog)	Digital (No compression)	Digital (MPEG-2 compression)
Audio Quality	Better than Audio Tape	Better than VCR	CD Quality
Audio Encoding Format	Analog	Analog	Digital
Software Formats Available	Pro-Logic	Pro-Logic, AC-3, DTS	Pro-Logic, AC-3, DTS
Avg. Purchase Price	$175	$500	$250
Avg. Media Rental Cost	$3 - High availability	$5 - Low availability	$3 Median availability
Avg. Media Retail Cost	$15	$40	$20