What Exactly is a Home Theater?

2009-08-14T18:40:00.000-07:00

A home theater is a room specifically designed to watch picture perfect movies and shows using the latest technological advances. CHT's goal is to compliment your life style by demystifying the home theater and delivering to you:

The Best Picture
The Greatest Sound
The Most Comfortable Environment

More precisely, a good home theater design is the combination of electronic components and room design developed to recreate the experience of watching a movie in a theater, but without leaving home. Home theater systems are made up of multiple electronic components and usually include furniture as well. Here is a summary, and then each component is defined:

Display Device: Home Theater Projector
Surround Sound Decoder: Home Theater Receiver or Preamp and Amplifier Combination
Home Theater Speakers: Usually 5 or 7 depending on the size of your room
Subwoofer: Another type of speaker, but for bass, explosions and sound effects
Sources: Signal Components, DVD players, etc.
Wire and Cables: To connect all the gear and to get signals to the speakers
Surge Protection and Power Conditioning: To protect your system from damaging electrical disturbances

Home Theater Definitions

Projector: An optical instrument that projects large images onto a screen.

Receiver: An electronic component that "receives" sound signals from source devices and transmits these sounds to your speaker surround sound system. One can think of a receiver as a traffic cop through it you select what source you wish to listen to and the receiver directs it appropriately.

Preamplifier and Amplifier Combo: Same as receiver, but can be provided in two components rather than one for a higher fidelity.

Speakers: Also known as loudspeakers, are devices for audio playback. Typically a theater has at least 5 speakers. Left, Center, Right, and two side surround speakers. In some larger theaters two additional rear speakers are added on the back wall. In components and speaker systems, a channel is a separate signal path made up of the following:

Center Channel: The center speaker in a home theater setup carries the primary amount of information and all the dialogue. Ideally, center speakers are placed within one or two feet above or below the horizontal plane of the left and right speakers and above or below the display device, unless placed behind a perforated screen.

Left Channel: The left speaker carries the left audio channel information.

Right Channel: The right speaker carries the right channel audio information.

Side Surround Speakers: Speakers located beside the listener that reproduce the surround sound channels of surround-sound-encoded audio programs.v

Rear Surround Speakers: Speakers located behind the listener that reproduce the surround sound channels of surround-sound-encoded audio programs.

Subwoofer: A loudspeaker dedicated to producing bass (sound with low frequencies.) Subwoofers typically add that shake and rumble to your home theater.

Sources: Source components are devices that provide audio & video signals to your theater system. DVD players, Cable Boxes, Satellite Receivers, video games and digital media servers are all great examples of sources.

Wire and Cables: Wire and cables connect the entire system together. Examples of wire and cables necessary to outfit a complete home theater would be:

Speaker Wire connects the speakers to the amplifier (a minimum thickness of 14gauge copper wire is recommended)

Coax or RG6 Wire is typically used for Cable TV, DSS.

CAT-5/6 Wire: Category-5 is a communications wire used for many applications. Networking, telephones, infrared communications and keypad communications are some basic examples of the many uses of cat-5.

RGB Wire: Cabling for getting higher quality video signals (such as component and high definition to the display device. RGB wire can have anywhere from 3 to 6 wires inside one cable.

HDMI Cable: (High Definition Multimedia Interface) sends both audio and video on one cable. HDMI also supports the highest quality video available on the market today.

Surge Protection: In today's world electronics and electronic systems have become very expensive, even at the inexpensive level. Surge Protection helps to protect your expensive electronics from lightning, power surges, brownouts, blackouts, and many other possible dangerous signals that can come in through the electrical systems in your home.

Power Conditioning: Modern electronics have become increasingly better at displaying very high levels of detail in video and audio images. Noise on your electrical system from appliances and various other devices plugged in throughout the home can easily become magnified through your home theater system. Power conditioning takes the incoming electricity, cleans all noise and interference off the line and then provides clean pure power to your electronics system for a much-improved viewing and listening experience.

Theater Chairs: Theater chairs come in all sizes, color, firmnesses and styles. Many chairs have motorized options and some have heaters. We also have custom cabinet craftspeople and interior design consultation available to help you design a home theater that looks as good as it sounds.

Blu-Ray Disc Revolution – A Useful Guide

2009-08-14T18:30:00.000-07:00

Introduction
Blu-ray, also known as Blu-ray Disc (BD), is the name of a next-generation optical disc format. The format was developed to enable recording, rewriting and playback of high-definition audio and video (HD), as well as storage for large amounts of data. The format offers more than five times the storage capacity of traditional DVDs and can hold up to 25GB on a single-layer single-sided disc and 50GB on a dual-layer single-sided disc (production of dual-layer dual-sided discs which increase the maximum storage capacity of a Blu-Ray Disc to 100gigabytes are also in effect) This extra capacity combined with the use of advanced video and audio codecs will offer consumers an unprecedented HD experience.

Why do they call it Blu-ray?
Because Blu-ray Disc players use a blue -laser beam to read data from discs, rather than the older red lasers used for DVDs. A blue laser can be focused more tightly, so disc makers can pack more data on a disc the same size as a DVD.

Will Blu-ray replace DVDs?
Yes, that is the expectation. The Blu-ray format has received broad support from the major movie studios as a successor to today's DVD format. They have released over 1,000 titles in the Blu-ray format. Many studios have also announced that they will begin releasing new feature films on Blu-ray Disc day-and-date with DVD, as well as a continuous slate of catalog titles every month.

Will Blu-ray be backwards compatible with DVD?
Yes, so you don't have to worry about your existing DVD collection becoming obsolete. The Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) expects every Blu-ray Disc device to be backward compatible with DVDs.

Why should I upgrade from DVD to Blu-ray?
The simple answer is High Definition TV (HDTV.) If you've ever seen high-definition (HD) video on an HDTV, then you know just how incredibly sharp the picture is and how vivid the colors are. In fact, HD offers five times the amount of detail compared to standard-definition (SD). That's where Blu-ray offers up to 50GB of storage capacity and enables playback, recording and rewriting of HD in all of the HD resolutions including 1080p. The format also supports high-definition audio formats and lossless audio.

In addition to the greater video and audio quality, the extra storage capacity also means there will be plenty of room for additional content and special features. This combined with the new BD-J interactivity layer adopted by Blu-ray will bring the menus, graphics and special features to a whole new level. The advanced interactivity combined with the networking features of Blu-ray will also allow content producers to support new innovative features such as downloading extras, updating content via the web, and watching live broadcasts of special events.

Thanks to the greatly enhanced HD video and audio quality as well as the advanced interactivity and networking features, Blu-ray represents a huge leap forward in the DVD viewing experience and will offer consumers a stunning HD experience.

Can you really see the difference between Blu-ray and DVD?
People can easily see Blu-ray's improvement in picture quality because the video resolution, called "1080p" constantly (or progressively, hence the p) redraws 1,080 lines across the screen (each line containing 1,920 pixels), surpassing the best HDTV broadcast or cable signals."

What do I need to watch Blu-ray?
To start you need a BD player, an HDTV and a good HDMI cable to connect them.

Blu-ray versus HD movie downloads?
Current movie downloads can take two hours or more to arrive, and even those labeled high definition do not match the quality of Blu-ray. Blu-ray is going to give you to the best-looking high-definition video quality you'll see anywhere — better than video-on-demand or downloading, or HD cable, or even HD satellite. Blu-ray offers the best video and audio quality available, with the most advanced bonus features.