11 Mistakes You Might Be Making When Installing A Home Theater System

Film enthusiasts and sports fanatics alike flock to big screens and immersive hi-fi sound setups. These entertainment tools bring the viewing experience to an entirely new level, and the pinnacle of these big, booming systems is a home theater. The addition of a home theater to your living space can immediately elevate your entertaining area. There's just something lackluster about even the most impressive television set once you've experienced all that a home theater with surround sound has to offer. From deep bass to precision high notes that impeccably cut through the mix, combined with a high-tech TV (think: UHD TVs or 4K resolution support — similar in quality, but not the same thing), you'll be working on a whole different wavelength than your peers. Selecting a TV — likely from a list of major brands such as Samsung, TCL, or LG — is only the start of this journey, however.

While the installation of a new home theater is an exciting adventure, there are lots of little decisions to make when installing your new home theater. More importantly, many of these tasks and choices involve at least baseline knowledge and skill. There are plenty of areas where a novice cinephile can get hung up, leading to a less than perfect viewing experience. With these pitfalls in mind, avoiding them is easier, resulting in a much better end product.

Potentially the easiest and most impactful mistake on this list: Buying your home theater components without compiling a balanced purchasing list. A home theater, when fully realized, includes a wide range of pieces. There's the TV, of course, and your surround sound setup plays a huge role in the overall experience. But the audio system itself is made up of a range of individual parts, something a new home theater installer might not immediately be prepared to manage.

It's important to think about your total budget and explore ways to maximize the end result with a bit of give and take in different areas of the room. A fully kitted out surround sound system paired with a lackluster television set and sparse decorations will provide a booming sonic experience, but it won't do much for the overall ambiance. With that being said, perhaps the simplest mistake is thinking about your sound system in discrete pieces rather than assessing how they fit into the consummate whole. 

It's easy to go all out on speakers or an amplifier, leaving the other parts of the equation little room in the budget. Buying an amplifier that supports multiple subwoofers and a dizzying array of speakers placed around the room is a waste of money if you are opting for a 5.1 surround sound system, for instance. There's no exact science on building out a great home theater for your particular needs, but general wisdom suggests spending roughly twice as much on your speakers as your amplifier to pair up compatible systems and get the most out of your installation.

Once you've installed your television and surround sound system and deactivated motion smoothing — a setting that creates the "soap opera effect" — you'll want to start watching movies and sports as soon as possible. Enthusiastic viewers may be tempted to try and replicate the intensely bright settings they saw on the televisions displayed at the store. Similarly, for those prone to watching movies and television that showcase darker color palettes, boosting the brightness might seem like a solid approach to getting the most out of your system.

Home theater owners should be careful not to enhance the brightness settings too much, though. Doing this all the time can quickly burn out the screen. Exposing a television to intense brights for too long can permanently damage their color quality through overexposure. Importantly, damage runs the gamut from colors to whites and even into black and gray shades. This means that no matter what you might be watching, the damage will seep into the picture quality. It might be tempting to try to eke out that brilliant display you saw in the store, but remember that overdriving the brightness is a technique used to sell TVs — not one made for preserving them and enhancing long-term enjoyment.

Another lighting issue that comes into play starts beyond the TV screen but affects it nonetheless. Every room in a typical household will feature some kind of illumination. Even a home theater needs backlights or overhead lighting to allow for routine navigation throughout the area. Moreover, if your system is situated in a room not entirely enclosed within your home, it will likely have a window facing out into the world beyond. Most homeowners won't want to alter this exterior element of their property, so it's important to find another way to deal with the potentially negative effects of natural light flooding into the space.

Installing blackout curtains or other light management tools around your windows will help reduce any glare effects that might otherwise impact your viewing experience. When it comes to lighting the room itself, dimmable overhead models are often a favorite. This allows you to enhance or reduce illumination at will, making the area bright when necessary and introducing better mood lighting when it's not. Colored backlighting is also a nice touch, but be sure to test out configuration options to avoid interference with the screen itself.

Crossover settings are found on most surround sound systems. They send low frequencies "down" to the next speaker rather than allowing a less effective piece of the system handle specific sound production tasks.  It's easy to think that surround sound speakers are kind of a plug-and-play technology, especially when you purchase an expensive system that promises amazing acoustic results. But the reality is that to extract these dazzling performances from your home theater, you need to dial in specific preferences and settings across numerous points in the playback experience. Remembering to set crossover parameters can make a huge difference in your overall viewing and entertainment experience.

They work similarly to the way that two separate guitar strings can produce the same note at different positions on the neck. Yet even playing the same sound, a thinner string creates a sort of tinny, hollow tone while a thicker one offers a richer aural alternative. In many instances, frequencies at the low end of a speaker's range are just better handled by a different component of the system. Sending them to a more advantageous sound production option makes for a crisper and richer sound overall, and not just in bass ranges. Experts suggest setting crossover thresholds at about 15Hz above the lowest frequency each speaker can technically handle. You'll want to play around with this, however, and a different threshold may work better for your ear and space.

Another common sound settings error that home theater operators can easily make involves the speakers situated closest to the television. On a five-speaker setup, you'll have two front speakers, a center channel, and two surround speakers. Someone new to the world of home theater mechanics might set their three forward speakers at the same (perhaps lowered) volume output in fear of creating an overwhelming wall of sound that drowns out the remaining surround speakers.

The center channel, however, provides all the dialog delivered by on-screen characters. Setting your three speakers at the same level can therefore drown out all of the speech in a movie or television show. Instead, you'll want to amp up the volume on your center channel a bit. This simple change makes all the difference in the overall performance of your home theater system and can completely fix muddy dialog issues or muffled sounds that fall into the same range of human voice. You might also consider activating the phantom setting if the problem is particularly bad, allowing the two front speakers to mirror the center channel.

Aesthetics are important in developing your home theater setup. The perfect design is one that mirrors your style and sensibilities. Someone who wants a crisp tone with vintage looks might opt for speakers in antique-styled cabinets. Others might prefer a more modern look and select gear that showcases sleek lines and perhaps a minimalist visual style.

No matter your aesthetic choices, one mistake that homeowners commonly make when setting up their speaker system is attempting to hide speakers in pieces of furniture. Placing them inside cabinet areas or shoving them tightly into corners of the room will negatively impact their sound quality. Speakers are physical devices that require free space around them in order to function at peak performance levels. Moreover, the actual speaker is already placed inside its own housing. Sandwiching these machines into tight spaces muffles their output and can dampen the vibrations they produce with unpredictable or hamstrung bounce-back off the room's geometry. Instead, you'll either want to give your speakers the space they need to perform at their best or opt for a system that can be installed inside wall and ceiling surfaces for a recessed look.

The positioning of your speakers isn't the only mistake that you might make when setting up a home theater. If you already have a few lying around, you might think that you can repurpose any of them for use in your new system. In some cases, this might work, but there's one case where repurposing will produce a notably inferior acoustic texture — using outdoor speakers in an interior setting.

Speakers designed for use in exterior spaces are built to produce additional treble tones. In an indoor setting, the sound produced by a speaker system has an opportunity to bounce off of the ceiling and the four walls surrounding the setup. This allows for a rounder, richer sound to resonate throughout the room. Deep tones have their moment to shine alongside higher pitch frequencies that cut through the mix with intense clarity and decisive precision. 

Exterior speakers are a little different because their environment is characterized by completely opposite characteristics. They tend to have little to no infrastructure available to create this sonic bounce-back effect. Outdoor viewing areas might include one wall and a partial ceiling, but they may be totally free of helpful obstructions that can redirect sound waves. Their treble ranges are boosted in order to account for this unique environment, and when placed indoors, the resulting audio is thin and unpleasant.

In the same way that repurposing speakers can produce mixed results (often with less than desirable outcomes), so too will a mismatch of brands. Every make is built with its own unique specifications. While they offer the same general product, minor differences in the manufacturing process, materials used, and other small tweaks result in slight variations in the way each speaker produces sound waves. Timbre matching is only truly possible with speakers that come from the same brand. It might seem like a good idea to mix speakers that offer different characteristics, especially if some are on sale at different points in time and you want to create a customized or budget friendly home setup. However, mixing brands like this will result in minute variance in the way your system produces sound as a whole.

The problem might seem small, but dissonance can be extreme and intensely noticeable. Unfortunately, there's no way to rectify this variance without ditching some of your speakers and bringing in replacements to round out a collection that's all from the same brand. In order to avoid disappointment in the overall sound and save yourself the hassle of starting from scratch (as well as shouldering the financial burden), always stick to one speaker brand — and stick with the same models, if possible.

Speaker wiring is perhaps just as important as the brand you select. Improper cording can lead to fragile connections that may become loose over time and limit the output potential, making your devices sound garbled, quiet, or just plain bad. This can even create safety issues in the home theater and beyond, depending on the way your property is connected to the room. Finally, the type of wire you select can make a big difference. Using cording that's too thin can substantially limit the electrical signals carried to your speaker system and lead to the same sonic reductions as a poor connection. 

For most home theaters, 16-gauge wiring is likely the best choice — this is the standard and will serve most purposes admirably. But if you've installed your home theater system with 16-gauge wire and are experiencing reduced output, then the issue may not be the wire itself but rather the distance involved or the size of your speakers. Thicker wire is required to carry signals over lengthy distances and to more substantial equipment. 

Anything under about 50 feet will typically work perfectly well with the standard 16-gauge option, likewise for standard speakers — even large options within the general catalog of most manufacturers. For over 100 feet or when utilizing a specialty system, you'll absolutely need to move up to a heftier cable. Fourteen-gauge wire is a great starting point, but for the most demanding jobs, you might consider jumping straight to 12-gauge.

Wiring issues can also be exacerbated by poor cable management. Allowing these important conduits of electrical current and signal information to get tangled up paves the way for long-term problems with your home entertainment system. The longer your cable distance, the more problematic this can become. Unruly wiring can sometimes allow for the introduction of signal interference throughout your home theater space. This can lead to a host of issues that aren't easy to resolve, let alone identify in the first place. It may demand a total rewire that sees you crawling through the attic or punching fresh holes in the walls or ceiling that significantly add to your to-do list.

Another issue that comes into play here becomes worse with added distance. Wires that aren't properly cared for can become tangled up and pull when load is applied to another part of the network. The longer your total cable and wire coverage is, the more chances of trouble. Any part of the system that features moving parts or fixtures you need to manipulate often can lead to unnecessary stress on other elements of the cabling. If you aren't careful, you could even end up breaking the protective outer layer of a loose wire somewhere in your system.

Once you've placed each of the system's components in its initial position, speaker calibration is an important step in tuning your home surround setup. It can be a very frustrating challenge, and some people simply give up on the task midway through or avoid it altogether, reasoning that their configuration is good enough as it is. But anyone who has invested the time and energy into building the perfect home theater will want to make their way through this final hurdle. The rewards are absolutely worth it. Moreover, there are tools you can download to your phone that perform a system calibration, streamlining the task and cutting out some of the more painful calculation requirements.

Essentially, a calibration of your home theater speakers is a series of precise measurements that allow you to position each individual device in the perfect spot around the room. Once you've calibrated them, the location you decide to place your couch, chairs, or any other viewing essentials will be situated at the perfect point within the room to receive the audio elements of your chosen media. Calibrating your speakers delivers the absolute best in sound quality right to the spot you plan to view the screen from. Skipping this step can ultimately see your device working out of sync with one another, putting a damper on the effectiveness of your carefully crafted system.