What is a Home Theater System?

The goal of any home theater is to reproduce -- or surpass -- the movie experience you get in a theater at home. You want a big picture and great sound. So a home theater system is one that lets you reproduce the movie experience. At minimum, that requires a TV, a media player like a Blu-Ray or DVD, speakers, and a receiver or control unit for the speakers. There are a number of smaller items you'll need to make it all work, such as remotes, AV cables, mounts and/or stands, and power protection. More ambitious home theaters include dedicated seating, projection systems, even video servers. Gallery Furniture is ready with everything you need. From high definition televisions to sound sound systems to mounts, stands and entertainment centers to home theater seating, you will find it all at Gallery Furniture. And if you demand even more we have it -- our design experts can create a home theater room tailored to your requirements and install it in your home. Televisions and HDTVs There are ... more

A Home Theater System consists of a main monitor or television, with a large screen HDTV or High Definition Television Set, a DVD Player or some other digital video and audio output source, a Dolby Digital Amplifier/Receiver, and a 5.1 (five speakers and one sub woofer) or higher surround sound speaker system. Although you can receive very nice virtual surround sound from a built in audio system in your HDTV, a multi-speaker system will give you the "theater" type feel and really immerses you into the "movie" or HDTV content. Each speaker, in a surround sound setup, produces different sounds. There are basically four channels and five main speakers plus a sub woofer in a typical 5.1 surround sound audio system. These include a center speaker usually designed for the dialogue (voice speaking) and "up front" sounds,, two front left and right speakers, which are for the front stereo effect, and two left and right speakers for the surround sound effect. The main front speakers are what pro ... more

A home theater system uses a combination of audio and visual components to recreate the experience of a professional movie theater. The set-up may be as simple as a DVD player fed through a stereo system and a larger television set, or as elaborate as an entire room professionally wired with multiple speakers and a projection screen. A home theater system may even include theater-style chairs and an elevated floor for optimal viewing. To understand the mechanics of a home theater system, it's important to understand the original movie theater experience it hopes to duplicate. Professional movie theaters have two or three large amplifier units located to the left, right and center of an expansive movie screen. There are also several satellite speakers embedded through the auditorium, including the back. Movie sound editors separate the audio track into as many as six different channels -- the audience may hear dialogue in the front left, center and right channels for instance. Other sou ... more

What cables do you need for a Home Theater System? Buy Online The Home theater systems, also known as Home entertainment systems are electronic devices designed to fully integrate all your entertainment needs. Contained within a convenient, space-saving design, the home theater systems combine an interactive digital cable receiver, a DVD/CD/MP3 player and a audio/video digital receiver with hundreds of watts per channel and an AM/FM stereo receiver. Usually, the cable-ready home theater systems deliver high performance home entertainment that exceeds the standards of the most demanding electronics enthusiast while offering the convenience of plug 'n' play installation. They also provide the gateway to interactive services such as video-on-demand movies, Internet access, local source information, electronic programming guides, more channels of impulse pay-per-view movies and events and more. The Home Theater Systems give you more control and more choices for better entertainment. Typica ... more

A video source is needed to produce the images coming from other components in the system that are providing the programming. This is most typically accomplished using a television, whether that's a more traditional tube TV or what's becoming more popular and prevalent in home today, LCD and Plasma televisions. More expensive and sophisticated home theaters take advantage of a projector and projector screen to produce larger images than most televisions are capable of producing. Interested in learning more about next generation television units? Click here to learn more about LCD's and Plasma's. Looking into a projector for your home theater system? Click here to see our projector buying guide. ... more

Looking to recreate the movie sound in your own living room? Surround sound is a movie recording technique that, when paired with a home theater surround speaker system, puts the viewer in the center of the action with sounds that move front to back, and side to side. Surround sound isn’t about louder sound, rather, it is more about sound that envelops the listener by creating ambience and providing directionality to off-screen sound effects. Surround sound is created by multiple speakers linked by a receiver. However, the easiest path to take is a home-theater-in-a-box system. Packaged for you, these systems include a receiver, built-in surround sound decoding, speakers, a subwoofer, and many also include a DVD/CD player. ... more