What am I supposed to do with all these wires?  If you have ever found yourself asking this, or think that some day you might, then this guide is for you.  Too often the excitement your new home theater has promised is halted by the frustration of setting it up.  Setting up your own home theater doesn’t have to be a nightmare; the basics are rather straight forward and can be preformed by anyone. Take your time, follow this guide and you will be enjoying your handy work in no time, hopefully in surround sound!

There is a good deal of mention about different types of connections in this guide, please read the companion guide, A Quick Reference to Connections, in the article archive if you aren’t familiar with all the connections common in home theaters.

Components:

            Your personal needs, wants, and resources, will ultimately dictate what components you are able to add to your home theater.  This guide is primarily concerned with the set up of whatever components you choose.  If you need help choosing components there is a list of local home theater specialty stores on 10bestTucson.
 

In & Out-

            These terms are simple to understand but important to a correctly setup a home theater.  It is critical that you understand what it is you want form each device in your home theater, then using this knowledge you can set up the inputs and outputs.  Don’t worry if this sounds complicated at first, it is actually quite simple if you just take your time and think about everything before starting to plug things in, let’s look at the DVD player for instance.  What do you want from the DVD player?  A movie of course; and a movie is made up of pictures and sound.  As we all know the DVD player alone is unable to show you a movie, for this a television and speakers are also necessary.  Knowing this we can determine what it is we want from each device, for instance we want the DVD player to output video so that it can be seen on the television.  In order to make this happen the signal, in this case video, must travel from the DVD player to the TV.  How this translates into exactly what cable to plug in where follows directly from what we have already determined, we want the video from the DVD player output to the TV, so a connection on the back of the DVD player labeled video out or output, must be connected to the same type of connection on the back of the TV labeled video in or input. 

        This is the basis on which all home theater connections are made, once the idea of, in & out, are clearly understood setting up your system becomes much easier.  For another example let’s look at the audio portion of the DVD player.  There will also be numerous options on the back of the DVD player for sound, to utilize them decide what device you want to produce sound in your system such as the speakers built into the TV or surround sound speakers.  Suppose you want the sound to come out of your TV, you would connect the Audio Out on the DVD player to the Audio In on your TV.  Note that if your TV has more than one input the audio and video must be from the same device if they are on the input channel on the back of the TV for instance Video1 input and Video2 input will each have their own dedicated audio input as well.  If instead you want the sound to come out of surround sound speakers there a few extra steps but the result is better sound, this will be discussed below on the section on receivers.

Receivers-

            The receiver is an integral part of the home theater system; it allows you to combine all your separate components into one unified system.  With a receiver you can switch between sources such as a DVD player, CD player, video game console, or VHS and have all the audio come out of the same set of speakers and all the video on one TV, but not all at the same time.  A standard receiver, like the one pictured below, contains a large number of inputs and outputs to allow you to connect all the components of your home theater together.  This is where that firm understanding of In & Out comes into play; you must understand what you want from each component and then simply follow the appropriate labels to proper instillation.  To help here is a walk through instillation of a DVD player.  As stated you must decide what you want the components to do, for this example I want all the devices to have their sound come out of my home theater speakers and I want all of the video displayed on one TV.  For the audio I would connect the Audio Out from the DVD player to the Audio In on the receiver.  Note that there are a few choices when it comes to which type of connection you will use for both audio and video on all of these devices, you must choose which type works best for you, but regardless of the type of connection you will follow the same rules as discussed above for inputs and outputs.  After I have connected the audio for the DVD player I would connect the Video Out from the DVD to the Video In on the receiver, just as with the inputs on the TV the video and audio inputs on the receiver must be on the same channel if they are from the same device.  On the back of a receiver these channels are often labeled as, video1, video2, DVD, CD, Tape, Satalite and so on so matching devices to the same channel is relatively simple.  The only complication comes from channels that have multiple choices of inputs sometimes require you to select which one you choose to use.  This is done differently on each receiver so refer to your particular receiver’s user guide if necessary. 
        Now your DVD player is connected to the receiver but you aren’t done yet, you still have to get the picture to the TV and the sound to the speakers.  So what must be understood is that now the receiver has the signals you want and you want to get them to the devices mentioned.  To do this you would connect the Video Out from the receiver to the Video In on the back of your TV, the Video Out connection that you choose must be the same type of connection as you are using on the source device, for example if you chose to use the component video from the DVD player to the receiver you must use the component video from the receiver to the TV.  An advantage or receivers like the one pictured below is that if you also connected a game console and a Blueray player to your receiver with component video you would not need to run any more cables from your receiver to your TV.  To change between them you simply have to push the bottom on the receiver that selects a different channel for instance video2.  For the audio portion we desire to get the sound from the receiver to the speakers, to do this you simply connect speakers to the system and select the correct channel on the receiver, in this case the channel is DVD.  Those are the basics of the receiver!

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