This is the 2nd set of 5 tips from home theater expert, John Colenback of Thorough-Tech.  John shared with me some key tips for making your budget go the farthest as you upgrade your home theater system and getting the most out of it.

See the first 5 expert tips for selecting a new HDTV

Tip #6: Allocate budget towards speakers vs. amplifier

When you need to make budget tradeoffs, John advises that you go for the better speakers with an average amplifier vs. the other way around. You’ll appreciate the nuances in audio quality that good speakers will deliver a lot sooner than any deficiencies from a good, but not great amp.

Tip #7: Teach your devices to talk to your new hi-def display

So you finally bought that sweet plasma you’ve been salivating over. Why does your gaming console or DVD player look so bad? You will gain a lot of quality by configuring your source devices to output the video to a format your display supports. For example, after you’ve connected your video cables, go then into the menu of the DVD player itself and navigate to the video menu. There you will find options such as changing your aspect ratio from 4:3 (full screen) to 16:9 (wide screen). You can also change the output resolution to the highest one your display supports — e.g. 720P, 1080i or 1080p. If you have an XBOX 360, be sure to set the switch on its audio/video cable to HDTV.

Tip #8: Take advantage of good audio (part 1)

You may not realize it, but your subconscious cares a lot more about good audio than good video. Pretty much every DVD player and AV Receiver out there supports Dolby Digital 5.1 audio. However some support DTS, which sounds even better. It’s easy to figure out; just look for the DTS logo on the front of your player and receiver. While your equipment will usually automatically detect and play whatever you are feeding it, you must select audio options from the DVD itself. A perfect example is Pat Metheny’s “The way up”. By default, it plays Dolby Digital 5.1. When the main menu shows up, go into the audio options and choose DTS. You will absolutely hear the vast improvement. If you’ve bought a BluRay player, you will be treated to Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD. Sorry PS3 owners, you don’t get the uncompressed audio when you play BluRay discs and a firmware update won’t fix that.

Tip #9: Take advantage of good audio (part 2)

Many source devices such as DVD players and Gaming Consoles support digital audio. If you are running all your devices into an AV receiver instead of directly to your TV, you will want to take advantage of using either digital coax (look for the orange RCA port in the back of your equipment and use a 75 Ohm cable) or digital optical (look for the little trap door that might have a red light shining behind it and use an Optical or Toslink cable). By using these instead of the red and white analog stereo audio cables (2-channel over 2 cables), you get full digital sound with each speaker receiving exactly what it was supposed to (6 channel or more over just 1 cable). The only time you would want to use both analog stereo and digital would be when you are running distributed audio to the rest of your house, which in most cases requires analog. If you are using an all HDMI system for your video, then you won’t need any audio cables, as HDMI carries both audio and video (in most cases).

Tip #10: If you’re opening up the walls, run the right cable

If you’re remodeling, while you have the walls open, run as much cabling as you can: audio, video, data and voice. Most importantly, do your homework and run the right cable. The two most common mistakes are (1) running coax cable above the fireplace instead of component and HDMI, and (2) daisy-chaining speaker cable from room to room for the distributed audio (how to blow up your amplifier.) The coax should be run to your cable or satellite receiver, not your TV. You then run component and/or HDMI from there to your TV. When running speaker cable to all the rooms in your house, they must each come from one location, where the amplifier will be. What’s more, each pair of speakers should have a volume control in the same room. So cable for each set of speakers should go from the amp location … to the volume control … to the speakers. From there we get into impedance matching, but that’s another article. While you’re at it, run some Cat6 or Cat5e from your Internet Router to your equipment, as more and more home theater gear is including Internet connectivity.

If you’d like specific advice on your home theater system, you can reach John at john@thorough-tech.com or (206) 841-8123.