Pat Hurley

USB is a serial bus standard that allows you to connect peripheral devices to a PC. In a home theater, USB can be found on the back of many computer-like source devices, such as MP3 servers and PVRs. Following are some details on USB connections and devices: Most printers, external modems, handheld computers, portable MP3 players, and other PC peripheral devices connect to PCs via USB.

Connecting source devices into your home theater is as simple as using the right cables to connect them to the back of your A/V receiver. (The A/V receiver or controller in a home theater provides a central connection point for all the wires in your home theater.) Take a look at the back of any typical A/V receiver, like this one.

The A/V receiver is the hub of a home theater. An A/V receiver is the electronic component that controls and drives your home theater experience. Before you can evaluate A/V receivers, you need a good understanding of exactly what an A/V receiver does. Among the tasks assigned to the A/V receiver are the following: Connects and switches your audio sources: Every audio source in your home theater should connect to your A/V receiver.

The concept of aspect ratio can be difficult to grasp, but easy to understand once you see it. Aspect ratio is the ratio of the width of a display compared to its height. For example, the aspect ratio for widescreen displays is 16:9 and the ratio for traditional TVs is 4:3. For home theater purposes, you should go with a widescreen (16:9) display — that’s the right aspect ratio for DVDs, high-definition TV programming, and even many video games.

Typically, you position a subwoofer along the front wall of the room. Moving all of the bass sounds to the subwoofer gives your front speakers the ability to focus on mid- and high-range frequencies. (The subwoofer can handle all the low-frequency bass sounds in a home theater.) Consider the following when deciding where to place the subwoofer in your home theater: You may hear people talk about low-frequency bass sounds being nondirectional, which means that you can’t really locate where they are coming from by ear.

Properly placing the front speakers in your home theater is key to creating the desired sound effects. The front speakers — left, right, and center — provide the bulk of the sound you listen to while watching programs or movies. One of the key jobs of these front speakers is to provide a realistic reproduction of dialogue — you want people in the middle of the display to sound like they’re right in front of you, and those on the left and right to sound like that’s where they are.

Speaker cables connect the outputs of the power amplifier or the amplifier section of the receiver to the speaker. These cables carry the high-powered electrical currents required to move the internal components of the speaker (the magnets that move the drivers). You need one pair of speaker cables for each speaker in your home theater (except the subwoofer, if it's an active system that uses an analog audio interconnect cable).

The speaker enclosure (typically, a box) is critical in a home theater system. There are two major types of speaker enclosures, sealed and ported. Either way, a speaker enclosure should handle vibrations with ease and add little sound interference to the sound emanating from the speaker drivers. With all the shaking that speaker drivers do, if you have a flimsy speaker encasement, it’s going to make a lot of noise, fall apart, or both.

Position the surround sound speakers in your home theater the right way to add a third dimension to your audio. Properly placed surround sound speakers (sometimes called rear speakers) maximize the home theater experience. Many receivers label the surround outputs as Rear, so people imagine that these speakers need to be along the back wall, behind the listening position.