Sound Module

Newest Accessories Make Setting Up Home Theater Products A Breeze

Multi-channel audio has become mainstream and vendors have created many types of basic and more sophisticated technologies such as wireless surround speakers, virtual surround sound to simplify the setup of home theater kits. I will look at the newest trends to understand which products actually work. I will also give some guidance for selecting the perfect components.

Whilst in the past setting up a TV has been relatively straightforward, the emergence of multi-channel audio has made installing home theater systems a good deal more complex by requiring a number of external speakers to create surround sound. The most commonly used 5.1 surround sound format requires setting up a total of 6 loudspeakers. These are one center speaker, two front side speakers, two rear speakers and a subwoofer. The more recent 7.1 standard raises this number to 8 by adding two extra side speakers.

Consequently the setup of home theater systems has turn out to be a fairly difficult process. A lot of houses are not pre-wired for surround sound. In addition, long speaker cables are often unattractive. Part vendors have designed several technologies to simplify the installation.

The first solution is building so-called virtual speakers by applying signal-processing to the sound and introducing phase shifts and special cues to those audio parts that would ordinarily be sent by the remote loudspeakers. The audio is next broadcast by the front loudspeakers together with the front speaker sound components. The signal processing is modeled after the human hearing. It uses the information about how the human ear can determine the source of sound. The signal processing has an effect that will deceive the listener into assuming that the audio is coming from a different position.

This technology reduces the quantity of required speakers and avoids long speaker wires but each person will process sound slightly differently due to the shape of the ear. The signal processing is based on measurements which are done using a standard human ear model. If the shape of the ear changes, sound will travel in a different way. Thus virtual surround will not work equally well for everyone.

One more approach for avoiding long speaker wire runs is to utilize wireless surround sound kits or wireless speakers. A wireless kit contains a transmitter and one or several wireless amplifiers. The transmitter connects to the source. The wireless amplifiers connect to the remote loudspeakers. This transmitter will generally come with line-level and amplified loudspeaker inputs. Ideally it should come with a volume control to adjust it to the audio source.

Some wireless kits come with wireless amplifiers that connect to two loudspeakers. This still requires wire runs between the two loudspeakers. Other products offer separate wireless amplifiers for each loudspeaker. Entry-level wireless systems use FM transmission or audio compression which will degrade the sound quality to some degree. More sophisticated wireless kits make use of uncompressed digital audio broadcast. Be certain that you pick a wireless system with a low audio latency, at most several milliseconds. This will make certain that the sound from all loudspeakers, including the non-wireless speakers, is in sync. Low latency is also important for good sync with the video. Otherwise there will be a noticeable echo type result. Most wireless products work in the 900 MHz and 2.4 GHz frequency bands. Some products utilize the less crowded 5.8 GHz frequency band and consequently have less competition from other wireless gadgets.

One more method, which is often named sound bars utilizes side-reflecting speakers. There are extra loudspeakers located at the front which broadcast the audio for the remote speakers from the front at an angle. The audio is then reflected by walls and appears to be originating from besides or behind the viewer. This method works best in a square room with minimum interior design and obstacles. It will not function well in many real-world scenarios with diverse room shapes though.

PUSH BUTTON SOUND MODULE (Do-it-Yourself musical chips)

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