Home Theater Speaker
In a typical home theater setup, there should be six home
theater speakers: two front speakers, two surround speakers, a
center speaker and a subwoofer for the lowest frequency ranges.
There are two ways to obtain all these speakers: buying each of
them seperately, or buying a home theater speaker set.
Home Theater Speaker Sets
If you're low on budget, you should think about one of these.
But remember: don't spare on speakers, they're very important.
There are lots of cheap home theater speaker sets on the market,
but you shouldn't buy one of them, because these are of poor
quality. Usually, sets manufactured by well-know brands
(Klipsch, Bose, for example) produce a decent sound. This way
you'll still not spend as much as you would on separate
speakers. If you're thinking about buying one of these sets,
read our article on home theatres in a box.
Going One By One
So, you're serious about your future home theater, and want to
spend a little more on the speakers? Buying speakers separately
has many advantages: it's the best quality you can have, and
another, often overlooked advantage is that you can don't have
to buy the whole set at a time, so if you haven't got the money,
you can still have high quality speakers in your setup.
Your front speakers should be the strongest members in your home
theater speaker setup. If you have a small room, choose
bookshelf speakers. Larger rooms will require larger speakers;
in this case, powerful floor-standing speakers is the choice to
go with.
I often hear that it is advisable to have the exact same
speakers for surround and front. This is true, but it's not very
practical: movie sound mixes don't use surround speakers as much
as they use the front speakers. So, you can choose smaller and
less-powerful speakers for your surround setup, it won't make
significant differences anywhere except your wallet.
The surround and front units were good, old-fashioned hi-fi
speakers used for a home theater setup. The case is different
with our center speaker. It's a special speaker with unique
frequency response. If it's possible, have the center speaker
from the same brand as the surround and front speakers. This
unit is also often overlooked, but it's very important, because
this speaker is used for voices and talking in a sound mix.
The subwoofer is used to reproduce the lower frequencies.
Sometimes, it's optional: the front speakers can be powerful
enough to rock the house, and an additional subwoofer is not
needed. However, in larger rooms, it's inevitable. Subwoofers
require lots of power, and in most cases, they require their own
power input (these are called "active subwoofers").