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By Noel Lee
In recent years, two-channel stereo audio systems
have rapidly evolved into multi-channel audio/video home theatre systems. But
this evolutionary process, while advancing the cause of a heightened
entertainment experience, has inadvertently spawned an organizational monster: a
tangled web of interconnections that can make installing and hooking up a system
your worst nightmare.
Fortunately, this monster can be tamed. In this
and future columns, I will show you how to connect the various components of
your home theatre system quickly, accurately, and, best of all, easily. Along
the way, I'll give you some helpful hints on things that I have learned and
products that I've personally tested.
Let's get right into the issue of accurate
hook-up. It can be confusing to connect a stereo pair of loudspeakers correctly,
and even now, with clearly labeled connections and properly marked cables, we
still often seem to get it wrong. Nevertheless, using the correct cables and
properly hooking up a system is understandably crucial to how that system will
sound and perform; especially when it comes to surround sound.
With a matrixed four channel (Right, Center,
Left, and Surround) Dolby Pro Logic system, which uses sophisticated algorithms
to derive four channels of sound out of a two channel feed, proper phase and
channel identification is critical. In normal stereo, reversing the right and
left channels is no big deal. In multi-channel surround, such errors can
seriously degrade the system's overall sound and performance. And with the new
discreet five or six channel digital sound of today's home theater systems, the
chances for error increase exponentially! The possibilities become mind-boggling
once you begin to seriously contemplate them: left reversed with right, center
instead of left or right, surrounds reversed, or any of the connections
(including the subwoofer) wired out of phase ("+" reversed with
"-").
Given the complexities of today's multi-channel
surround sound systems, this schematic, using the same color-coding system
(i.e., red and black) that was developed for yesterday's two-channel world
rapidly becomes a brain-twisting exercise. So unless you're especially fond of
this sort of mental gymnastics, or have plenty of time to spend unraveling the
ensuing Gordian knot, you'll deeply appreciate the "official THX Home
Theater" color-coding system that I developed with the folks at Lucasfilm's
THX division to eliminate this perplexing problem.
Our coding system enables at-a-glance
identification of all six channels, even by the most inexperienced users. You
can easily tell the difference between positive and negative channels by the
color of the rubber insulator boot. Negative channels have black insulator
boots, and positive channels have white or color boots. The "Monster Home
Theatre" cables even provide identification inside the cables after you
strip off the outside jacket. To make things even easier, the cables are also
labeled with channel, positive and negative markings on the outside cable
printwheel.
Now, you may say, there's nothing very
revolutionary about this: it's all very simple. And that's the point: to make
your life and your home theater run a little more smoothly. For this reason, I
hope that our color-coding system will be adopted across the industry, not just
in THX systems, so that one standard can be established to minimize confusion
for years to come. And that, my friends, would certainly be a monster of a
different color.
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