What is a home entertainment system? And why do I need one?

There are many answers to these questions and all of them are correct.

To some a Home entertainment system could be something as simple as a bedside CD /radio that plays music with enough clarity and volume to be heard above those daily sounds around us. To others it could be a multi million Rand Home theatre system complete with video projector, huge screen and thunderous audio, although most of us would find our own personal definition somewhere in between these two extremes.

On the question of why do we need a home entertainment system, if we’re absolutely honest, we probably don’t need such a system.

But and here is the important part, a good system (not necessarily a big or expensive one) can take us out of our daily grind for a short while each day and place us in a magical and mystical world where anything can happen. We can let beautiful music wash over us and cleanse our soul or we can escape into another world where Terminators rule.

What’s more we can do this at our leisure and comfort (no broken seats or leftover popcorn on the floor) and we are the masters of deciding when and where our audiovisual escape will happen.

Building an entertainment system need not be too expensive either and here we recommend choosing a few quality components that you can add too later rather than spending all your money on lots of cheap components that wont be able to deliver on the promises made on the box.

Why Calibrate?

Home theatre systems are high performance machines that just like racing cars need to be tuned to deliver the ultimate experience.

On the video side, we need to calibrate or “tune” you TV or projector as the settings used in store and most pre sets were designed to attract buyers in shops and not necessarily to give the best image quality when you get your TV home. What’s more, these settings can degrade image quality, shorten the display life, waste energy and lead to viewing fatigue.

By properly calibrating your TV you will see the film the way the director intended, see more detail in the darkest or lightest parts of the picture, view more natural looking colours and flesh tones, and you may even extend the life of your TV or projector.

Calibrating the audio side of your system offers similar benefits and once again, with sound levels properly adjusted, you will hear all the sounds from a movie exactly as the director meant them to be heard.

Proper set up and calibration will also ensure each speaker plays only the frequencies it is supposed to play and this also leads to cleaner and clearer sounds that you can listen to for longer without listening fatigue, and by reducing distortion speakers will last longer too.

A properly calibrated (audio and video) system will also perform better than a more expensive yet un- calibrated system and this means that it may be far cheaper to calibrate than to upgrade.