By Danny Kumin

Nobody likes being bossed around. Nonetheless, sometimes it's nice to be told what to do - especially when it's by an expert. Unfortunately, we couldn't afford one, so cambridgesoundworks.com drafted me instead. Consequently, the following list of home-theater Dos & Don'ts are subjective, opinionated, narrow-minded, inflexible...and right. Follow them and you'll have a better home theater. Don't ask why - just do it!

Do

Do place the center speaker in the center. It sounds obvious, but you'd be amazed how many "center" speakers we find on one side of the screen, behind it, on a shelf three feet above it, or anywhere but where it belongs: on top of the TV (or in rare cases, below it if a suitable shelf exists), dead-center, pushed forward so the speaker overhangs the screen by a half-inch or so.

Don’t

Don't use your TV's built-in stereo speakers as a center-channel reproducer. I don't care if it's a $6,000 projection set or a $300 27-incher, and I don't care that there's an input on the back marked "center channel in" and instructions in the manual telling you how to hook it up. It's wrong, wrong, wrong; get a purpose-designed center speaker for film sound's most important channel.

Do

Do get a decent pair of dipole-surround speakers for movie playback. Yeah, yeah, I know DTS recommends direct-radiators (normal speakers), and a lot of the tweaks say matched-all-around suites sound better. Fugetabahtit. Movie theaters use diffuse arrays, film sound designers mix for them, and dipoles do the best job of reproducing this effect in your living room.

Don’t

Don't put those dipoles, once you get them, on the back wall, or on the floor, or at ear level. Place them along the sides, roughly even with the audience or a bit behind (or even a bit in front), and get them up high - a foot or two above seated-ear height but not bang up against the ceiling.

Do

Do make the effort to locate your front speakers properly. This means with tweeters roughly even with the top edge of the screen or just a bit below. How far apart? If you have a big screen (40-inch diagonal or more) in a typical room, figure no more than about twice its width (though for dinky sets, obviously, you'll have to go far wider); if you space the left/right pair too widely, the sonic image will tend to "fall off" the edges of the screen.

Don’t

Don't jury-rig speaker mounting. If this means buying proper stands, bite the bullet and do it. A solid mechanical foundation yields better sound. (And by the way, wall-mounting almost always results in inferior sound.) And for God's sake, don't put a rubber tree or a divan or something between the left-front speaker and the audience (you wouldn't believe some of the stuff we see).

Do

Do take the trouble to ensure all five of your satellite speakers (left, center, right, and left/right surrounds) are connected properly: in phase, with "+" (red) speaker outputs of your receiver or amp running to the "+" (red) post of the speakers, and the "-" (black) ones connected likewise, in all five cases. This is critical for surround imaging. Another note: If you're using outboard mono or stereo power amps of mixed brands and/or models, there's no guarantee that they all handle absolute-phase the same, so you need to experiment and confirm phasing. (If you don't know what I'm talking about find someone who does to help you out.)

Don’t

Don't waste your money on $100/foot garden-hose speaker cabling. Decent quality 16-, 14-, or 12-gauge (depending on length of run) stranded cable will work just fine. Use the money you just saved to buy a few CDs by struggling artists, or better yet, some tickets to their live dates or concerts.

Do

Do invest an hour or two in placing your subwoofer. I know its a pain (literally, if you have a big one), but it'll pay off. Start with the sub in one corner of the front wall, to one side or the other of the TV. In many setups, this is the right place. Experiment also with locations further from the corner but still along the front wall, seeking one with the best balance of bass extension and power and smooth subwoofer-satellite integration.

Don’t

Don't put the subwoofer behind the sofa, in a cabinet, in the next room, or in some other loony location. I don't care what size it is, or what its manual says about "virtually invisible" or "unlocalizable" bass. To work at its best, any subwoofer needs to be on the front wall, near the video image and the front speakers.

Do

Do use the lowest crossover frequency you can without sacrificing subwoofer-satellite integration. Unfortunately, a lot of today's pint-sized sats don't have much real deep-bass output, so you pretty much have to cross over at 100-150 Hz (in which case keeping the sub physically near the speakers is all the more important).

Don’t

Don't run your subwoofer too "hot." Nothing bugs me like home theater overboom - deep bass should be more felt than heard. If your ears can locate the subwoofer during a movie it's almost certainly too loud.

Do

Do make sure you have a working digital connection between your DVD deck (or laserdisc player) and AV receiver. (What's that? You don't have a DVD player? Do make one your very next purchase.) You'd be surprised how many digital components are taken home and connected the old-fashioned way - analog - only, which limits users to Dolby Pro Logic surround, which many mistake for Dolby Digital. If you want to enjoy digital 5.1 surround, you've got to make the digital connection.

Don’t

Don't buy an AV receiver or processor with too few digital inputs. Three digital ports is more or less the minimum these days, but four, five, or more is a better - with Digital Television receivers, digital-out gaming consoles, and digital-output MiniDisc and MP3 players all competing for ports, a lot better.

Do

Do make sure you're actually listening to Dolby Digital on every DVD you play: Lots of discs default to their lowest-common-denominator PCM-stereo tracks, which your receiver/processor may automatically reproduce in Pro Logic - and lots of folks won't notice until halfway through the film if ever. (Don't feel bad: it's happened to me, too.) On far too many DVDs you have to enter the disc menu and manually select the "English/Dolby Digital 5.1" option (or whatever).

Don’t

Don't be afraid to experiment with surround-sound on regular TV. Plenty of broadcast/cable shows are Dolby Surround-encoded specifically for your Pro Logic delectation. But lots of others produced with plain-old-stereo soundtracks sound great in surround, too - and frequently, the ads are the coolest-sounding part.

Do

Do make the effort to optimize your TV screen. The way it came out of the box is almost certainly dismally short of its true video potential. The best advice: Earmark a few bucks for a test-and-setup disc such as the Avia DVD or Video Essentials DVD or LD, and spend a good few hours going right through it - picture-wise, this is the best investment you can make.

However, I realize nobody's actually going to do this, so here's the short form: First, turn off any auto-fleshtone or video noise-reduction features (and leave them off - they're all but certain to suck). Access your TV's picture controls, and turn "Detail" down to a third or lower, and "Brightness" or "Picture" down well below where it's probably set now. Turn "Color" all the way down and watch in black & white for a while, to accustom your vision; now set "Contrast" or "Black-Level" up or down to where it reveals decent shadow-detail in both dark scenes and dim corners of bright ones, but without washing out true blacks. Now crank "Color" back up just to where things look natural, but not "hot" and over-saturated with bleeding edges (likely well below where it was). Even this minimal setup will improve 95 percent of America's TVs - now go get a test disc and do it right.

Don’t

Don't make these common screen-setup mistakes: placing seating too far away (three to five times screen-diagonal is usually about right); locating the screen in the line of reflections from windows or other light sources; locating the screen too high or too low.

Do

Do install some proper seating. Especially with rear-projection big-screens, eyes need to be more or less vertically aligned to the screen, so sitting too low (or too far to one side) degrades what you see. Sprawling around on the floor on a pillow may be the family habit, but it doesn't work for real home theater.

Don’t

Don't make your screen do battle with a too-bright room. Once you've set it up properly, a dim - but not dark - room is what it needs (unless you're using a front-projection setup). In typical rooms, something like a couple of 25 watt lamps washing down the front wall, well to either side of the screen is usually about right. If your room lighting has dimmers, this is easily done.

Do

Do keep dropping back in on cambridgesoundworks.com. We'll get a real expert next time - we promise!

Daniel Kumin writes about AV, pro audio, and music technologies for more than a dozen national magazines. He is a Contributing Technical Editor of Stereo Review's Sound & Vision magazine.