Plan Ahead
You don’t want to be caught unprepared when your components start pouring in. You need to have the room at least half-planned out beforehand. Decide where you want the speakers to go, where you want the receiver to go, and where you want the TV or projector to go as well. Once you have everything in its place, you’ll want to measure the distance between the components and the distance from the speakers to the receiver.
Hooking Up
Hook up your equipment in a sequential order with regard to where everything is. First, hook up the speakers to the surround sound receiver, then hook it up to the TV. In this order, you make sure all the cables are properly positioned as well as properly bundled and ready to go.
Configuration
This is quite possibly the most important part of the whole set-up process. Before you start sitting back to enjoy your brand new setup, you need to make sure all the proper configurations have been set. If you’re using an HDMI connection, you’ll likely want to enable DTS HD or Dolby Pro Logic before you start listening. I like to tell my friends trying to get into building their own home theaters that a great system can sound terrible if improperly configured, and a bad system that’s configured adequately can often sound better than a no-configuration mid-range system. Simply put, you need to use your ears for this part of the process. You need to play something like a Blu-Ray movie or a particular song to be able to listen for the subtle nuances of the sound until you get the bass and treble just right – much like in a car stereo when you first configure it.
Once the configuration is done – you’re all ready to go. May I suggest the Wall-E Blu-Ray? Particularly for the one scene in which the spaceship with EVE touches down. I’ve heard my subwoofer rumble, but never like that. It felt like the ship was landing in our media room, not in the screen.
