Pat Hurley

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.

Video displays use one of two scanning methods to draw the picture on the TV screen: interlaced and progressive. All HDTVs are progressive-scan displays — so even if the signal being sent to the HDTV is interlaced, the HDTV will convert it to progressive scan for display on the screen. Here's what you need to know when comparing the two scanning methods: Interlaced scan: Traditional TV systems (such as NTSC, the standard TV system in the United States) use an interlaced scan, where half the picture appears on the screen at a time.

Many home theater A/V receivers include multizone functionality, which lets your receiver control your home theater and provide music to multiple rooms. A multizone receiver is a good way to get started down the whole-home theater path. Multizone A/V receivers run the gamut from fairly simple to very sophisticated.

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.

Many cable companies now offer video-on-demand (VoD) as part of their digital cable services. With VoD service, you pay for individual movies and shows, and watch them on your cable-connected TV — similar to the concept of how pay-per-view (PPV) works. But the similarities between VoD and PPV end there, because: VoD movies aren’t run as scheduled broadcasts (like every hour on the hour PPV movies).

Most A/V receivers use IR systems for their remote controls. Because IR can't penetrate walls, you need a wired system that can carry IR signals from remote locations in a whole-home entertainment network back to your home theater. You need this wired system as a way to control remote devices when you're watching (or listening to) them in a different part of the house.

The amount of power needed for your home-theater receiver depends, in part, on the speakers you choose. Given a certain amount of power, different speakers have different sensitivities, a measure of how loud they are. The standard measure for speakers' sensitivity is how many decibels the speakers produce with 1 watt of power at 1 meter’s distance from the speaker.

Hooking up speakers is prettyeasy after you've carefully positioned the speakers in your surround-sound home theater. To hook up speakers, you just connect the speaker wires to the appropriate outlets on the A/V receiver. Before you plug and play, though, there are a few points to remember. Keep your speakers in phase.

Much of surround-sound terminology boils down into numbers such as 2.0, 5.1, and 7.1. These surround-sound numbers sometimes refer to the playback system’s speaker configuration and sometimes to the audio signal format being delivered. The first number represents the number of speakers or main audio channels involved, and the 1 or 0 after the decimal point indicates whether the system has a subwoofer or supports a low-frequency effects channel.