Guide to home theatre on a budget

BY ROD EADSDOWN

It's easy to spend a lot of money on home-entertainment equipment. It's a lot harder to get a great result on a really tight budget and it's a job for which many buyers are totally unprepared.

Buying home entertainment systems is a lot like buying houses. You start with what you can afford and gradually build up, upgrading and improving as money becomes available.

This is why many enthusiasts may have a new screen hooked up to a five-year-old amplifier and 10-year-old speakers. And it's why clever buyers start off with a new sound system hooked into their old television.

Most go the other way. They blow their entire budget on a big screen with nothing but its in-built speakers to provide the sound. It gives them a decidedly second-class result. Screen-makers concentrate on vision; sound is usually a low priority. And sound is 50 per cent of the equation.

A telly's in-built speakers are small and lack the depth of bass that comes with larger units. Sometimes they're so clumsily located (placed where they'll fit rather than where they'll give the best result) it's hard even to get meaningful stereo out of them.

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» 10 tips for setting up your home theatre.

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So, assuming you already have a television and a DVD player and you're itching to get into home theatre, where should you start?

A few questions first.

Will you use the system for listening to music as well as watching movies? Lots of home-cinema systems do a great job with movies but are indifferent with music. If music is important to you, you'll want a system that does justice to both.

Do you really need surround sound? At the bottom end of the market you'll get far better sound quality from a two-speaker stereo system than a five-speaker-plus-subwoofer system at the same price. But do make sure your DVD player is set for stereo output rather than surround or you'll find the sound weird, with voices frequently drowned out by action or music.

How important are aesthetics? The bulk of satellite speaker systems, with tiny speakers and a separate and much larger bass unit, look good but lack mid-range sound. This is where voices fall and where most instruments spend most of their time. Rule of thumb: as speakers get bigger, so their sound gets better. There are lots of good-looking, larger speakers around these days.

How important is brand? We think it's critical. Not all home-entertainment equipment is created equal. We've heard from lots of readers who have discovered a total lack of warranty, service and parts support for some of the lesser-known brands.

Starting out ($1000 to $3000)

Let's say you have $1000. You'd be tempted to buy a 55-centimetre LCD television, or maybe an entry-level 106-centimetre plasma, and call it a day.

We'd go in the other direction, keeping the existing television and connecting it to the best stereo we could buy for the money - something like Yamaha's MCR-E810 or the slightly more expensive MCR-840, with an inbuilt iPod dock. Both of these have a DVD player and do a great job with music. Pretty good bass response, too.

This will give you high-quality sound with plenty of horsepower, so the next upgrade we'd suggest would be a larger screen. In almost all cases, we'd suggest an LCD screen for anything of 100 centimetres or less and a plasma for anything larger. We'd go with only the quality brands.

Cranking up ($5000 to $10,000)

Only now would we start thinking about moving the stereo to the bedroom or study and putting in a surround-sound system.

There are a couple of good one-brand systems from Sony (the HTDDW7000 is a fave) and Yamaha (love the YHT-592AU) as well as other companies but if you're serious, you'll look at a solid receiver from one of the big brands, driving a subwoofer and five good speakers matched to the receiver's power.

We'd suggest anything from the popular brands such as Sony, Panasonic, Yamaha or Pioneer but explore offerings from more specialised brands such as Marantz, Denon, Harman/Kardon and NAD. This is a matter of shopping the specialist stores (we suggest you visit at least three) and listening. You'll be amazed at how much your opinions have changed throughout the process.

Audition all equipment with music and movies you know and enjoy (it's a good idea to take some discs with you) and listen hard. Closing your eyes helps.

Once you're through this exercise, you'll have a good idea about what's involved in this whole business and you'll be far more confident in your own opinions.

Now you should be thinking about a full-high-definition screen of 125 centimetres or more, because you're unlikely to notice a justifiable improvement over normal high definition with anything much smaller. But you'll also need to budget for a Blu-ray disc player because no other source can do the screen's capabilities justice.

Get a player with video upscaling. It will bump up the picture quality of your conventional DVDs. They won't be as good as Blu-ray discs but they'll be pretty impressive. But Blu-ray's biggest gain over DVD is in sound quality, so your sound system has to cut it if you're to get full value from the player.

Becoming an enthusiast ($15,000 or more)

The law of diminishing returns kicks in at this point. From now on you'll spend a lot for sometimes rather minor improvements. But when you're an enthusiast, you notice and appreciate minor improvements.

For example, you'll start to worry about getting sufficient power from your receiver or amplifier. You'll consider a separate tuner because it provides a slight improvement in radio quality. You want a separate CD player in addition to a DVD or Blu-ray player because dedicated CD players do a better job with music.

But what you're fretting about most is the screen. It's just too small. And so you'll start to investigate installing a projection system that will fill an entire wall if you want it. Some of them are so good that the wall appears to be nothing short of a giant plasma panel.

Two points of caution here. First, it's easy (and common) to put in a screen that's too big. You shouldn't have to move your head to follow the action and if you have to then you'll feel like you're sitting in the front row at the movies. A frequent job among professional projection installers is going back three months later to reduce the screen size.

Second, you'll need a good-quality screen; a white-painted wall doesn't cut it. Shop around and you'll notice big improvements in the reflectivity (hence brightness) of expensive screens over cheap ones.

Allow room in your budget for a professional installer because setting up a projector and a screen is a finely tuned job. And remember the ongoing costs. Lamps last only 18 months to three years and they cost hundreds of dollars.

- © Fairfax NZ News