Home theater

The concept behind home theatres is to simulate the audio and video effect, some what near to theatre effects. Let’s focus only on audio in this post!

In theatres (I am talking about good theatres like PVR, INOX in Bangalore), you would observe that, the sounds are properly routed in different directions matching the scene being shown on the screen. Even if you close your eyes, you can tell, where the cinema character is standing, or from what direction the bike is coming or whether the car took right turn or left turn. This is called sound reinforcement. The tracks are prepared by combining the sounds recorded from different directions. While cinema shooting, the dialogs are recorded using multiple microphones, from different directions, each called as a channel. Then all these channels are mixed using technologies like Dolby, DTS etc. And while showing the cinema, these channels are separated and rendered in different speakers put in respective directions, thus creating the true effect.

Home theatres try to do the same reproduction of the recorded tracks in a living room or TV room, in your home. Hence the home theatre systems will have multiple speakers and subwoofer(s). But in reality, it is not possible to get the same effect as in theatres in a home, because of factors like, room acoustics, lighting and adequate speakers. In theatres, they use array of loudspeakers in each direction, so that, from any seating position, you will not miss the effect. Whereas in home theatre, most of the systems, provide best effect only in some seating region called “sweet spot”. Outside this region, the cinema effect diminishes. A good home theatre is the one that provides large “sweet spot”. There are several technologies attempting to make the home theatre systems sound best in any seating position in the room, where it is installed. Companies like Bose, Yamaha, Pioneer and Onkyo are struggling to make this happen.