Affordable big screen televisions and high definition have changed the average person’s attention level when it comes to their home video and audio components. It’s hard to walk by a large high def display at an electronics store and not want that experience in your home, and the masses have jumped in head first.

Once you’ve augmented your home video capabilities, the thoughts of many turn to improving the audio experience. For many of us, the audio end of the home theater experience is even more important than the visual experience. After all, the driving motivation behind better audio is music, and even less musically obsessed individuals are sure to figure out that their new system changes their level of aural interest once they hear some of their favorite music on more capable equipment.

Just throwing money at better equipment doesn’t guarantee satisfaction, and some care needs to be taken to make sure that you are giving your equipment the initial attention it needs to provide you with the best performance it is capable of. Here are some tips that will help you squeeze the best performance you can out of your new audio equipment, for both movies and music.

Ok, first and foremost I just want to touch on in-wall and in-ceiling loudspeakers. In-wall and in-ceiling speakers are great for those whose wives dictate what can and can’t go in the home, and for those who are trying to recreate the interior design of James Caan’s character’s home in the 1975 movie Rollerball.

For those of us not living with those restrictions, just stay away from in-wall and in-ceiling speakers. They make two fatal compromises for convenience’s sake. One, they either don’t have any enclosure to speak of, or the enclosure they have is inadequate. Think of loudspeakers in terms of stringed instruments. Enclosure space is a crucial part in the equation that determines the sound they produce, and in-wall and in-ceiling speakers ignore this function for form’s sake. Two, room placement is very inflexible. You do not want your sound emanating from a flat surface, and you can’t position flush mounted speakers so they can “breathe”. Loudspeaker placement is crucial to good sound, and the only options you have for placing this type of speaker is choosing the location to cut the drywall to mount them.

The room your system is in is a very important variable in your system’s sound. Open door space or the lack of, ceiling height, flooring surface and objects in the room all affect your system’s performance. Some rooms sound great with little to no effort, some rooms require a little work to realize your system’s potential, and some rooms require a lot of work just to get acceptable performance. There are two mandatory steps we need to take to integrate our audio system with our room, and some optional tweaks that can assist in difficult spaces.

1. Loudspeaker placement I really can’t stress how important it is that you take the time to play with placement in your listening space. Inches can mean the difference between merely adequate and “holy crap, the musicians are in the room with me”.

Start with the left and right soundstage, or your mains. To begin setup, forget about 5.1 altogether and pop in a cd you are fond of in stereo mode. The hard and fast rule is that your loudspeakers should sit anywhere from 7 to 15 feet apart. Experiment with this distance. What you want is a stereo image that places the musicians in the room with you. If you can localize specific sounds to one speaker or the other, keep trying. A singer’s voice should sound like it’s emanating from the space between the loudspeakers.

You will also need to experiment with the distance between the loudspeakers and the wall behind them. Some speakers don’t mind being close to the wall, others will want breathing room, lots of it. If the bass is boomy, you are too close. If the bass is anemic, you’re too far away. Space between the loudspeaker and wall will also affect imaging, so pay attention to what happens to the musicians location in the space of your listening room while you make these adjustments.

Once you have the speakers set at a distance that produces the best sound to your ear, play with toe-in. Start with the loudspeakers parallel to the wall behind them, and move them incrementally until each is pointed right at your listening position. Some speakers like to point straight ahead, others right at you, and more often than not they do best somewhere in between.

Your rear speakers are less finicky about placement, and depending on your room you may be limited in your placement options anyway. Just don’t forget if you are using bookshelf speakers to use stands that place those speaker’s tweeters at approximately the same height as your mains, and give them enough room away from the wall so that their ports can breathe freely if they have rear facing ports. Placement behind the seating position is best, but if the seating is against the back wall of the room, you’ll be ok having the rears in the corners.

For the subwoofer, corner loading works best. Try to position the sub in the left or right front corner of the room, and play with it’s proximity to the two adjacent walls until you find the position that produces strong, but not boomy, bass output.

I know this may sound like a lot of work, but trust me, the difference in the quality of sound filling your room will astound you in a well set-up room. It’s worth taking the time to tweak.

Now that we have your loudspeakers in position it’s time to calibrate. Check back next week for Getting The Most Out Of Your Home Theater Audio, Part 2.