Buying Audio Components to Complete Your Home Theater

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By Kurt

Great audio components will ensure you hours of entertainment to enhance your home theater experience. This is the part of your home theater system that adds life to the movies you watch. Just imagine watching 'Spiderman 3' without audio. Even if you were watching it in 3D, it wouldn't appeal to you as much. So what do you look for in an audio components for your home theater?

Multi-format playback

Your basic CD player will do, but if you can splurge on an audio component capable of multi-format playback, then do so. This will allow you certain flexibility when it comes to playing music and video content that were recorded on different formats.

Speakers

Speakers can make or break your home theater audio components. You could have the most sophisticated audio components on the market but if you played your DVD using some mediocre speakers, you'll turn a really good movie into a B-rated disaster and a B-movie into something worse.

So how many speakers do you need? If you're on an extreme budget, a set of two front speakers will do a decent job but if you want a real home theater experience, get front speakers, a center channel speaker, surround speakers, a subwoofer and throw in a single (or a pair of) rear surround speakers.

Front speakers are a primary source of audio while surround speakers allow you to hear the sound in a 3D-like environment. Was that a real bird you heard chirping next to your left ear? No, those are just the surround speakers doing their job.

The center channel speaker is the unit you place either below or above the monitor screen and is responsible for reproducing music, dialogue and other sound effects. The subwoofer is dedicated for bass sounds and is the one that makes your heart thump heavily during really scary scenes.

Receivers

Receivers are responsible for making sure you hear what you're supposed to hear. They often include a radio tuner. Stereo speakers use two channels to amplify sound and send the sounds from the source to the speakers. Home theater receivers, on the other hand, are capable of providing output for multiple speakers and can decode surround audio sounds from sources like HDTV, multi-channel audio CDs and DVD movies.

Amplifiers

If you're a certified audiophile, you'll want a pre-amplifier, an amplifier and an equalizer to complete your home theater audio components. These will require a lot of tweaking on your part, but if you know what you're doing, amplifiers will add a little extra in your home theater experience that you otherwise woouldn't have if they weren't around.

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