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When large-screen television arrived in the 1970s, people involved with
audio equipment began to talk about a "marriage between sight and sound" in
home entertainment equipment — about "turning your home into a theater." A
few people took it seriously enough to create dedicated "media rooms" built
around projection video systems in their homes, but mostly it was just food
for conversation among the few audio people who were also involved with home
video (and among a still smaller group of self-styled "video freaks").
But then the VCR came into almost every living room, which has gotten us used to having uninterrupted, un-TV-like movies at home. Then also came Ray Dolby, father of "Dolby Stereo." After bringing high-quality sound to movies, he decided to make the movie theater the spectacular place it could be, and started by devising a way to put multi-channel sound optically and affordably onto movie soundtracks. That opened the way to the kind of all-involving, audience-surrounding, super-stimulating movie experience that people might want to imitate at home. And Dolby's translation of the movies' "Dolby Stereo" into video tapes and video discs using "Dolby Surround" has gotten Home Theater where it is today. Where is that? Well, if it isn't in your living room yet, it's probably not far away. Those subterranean rumbles that are coming through your walls from the house or apartment next door are a sure sign that your neighbors are "at the movies at home", enjoying runaway buses crashing around them and jets roaring by while our hero dangles from a helicopter and explosions bring terrorism right into their living room. If there are many people who think the aim of Home Theater is to attain the best possible reproduction of the sound of high-explosives, it's not their fault. Go into most mass-market electronics stores and the Home Theater demonstrations you'll hear can usually be described with one of two words: either BOOM(!) or CRASH!. But Home Theater is much more than that. It's a tremendously involving medium that can dissolve the limits of home video and make even a modest-screen video monitor the gateway to an expansive and enjoyable experience. It isn't just a "Terminator" and "Speed" and "Twister" vehicle for spectacle, but a medium that will put you right in the middle of an intimate movie like "Sabrina" or a drama like "The Madness of King George." It's also a stunning audio/visual experience like "The Matrix." And it promises also to be an opening toward still deeper experience of recorded and broadcast music in your home. If you haven't heard what it can really do, go to your nearest PSB dealer (see See and Hear Us.) and get the kind of demonstration that will reveal its true potential. What you will find there besides speakers like ours (we'll get to them, naturally) is the latest generation of video sources and audio/video receivers. Here is a quick rundown: The basic Home Theater source for most people used to be the stereo-equipped VCR. The video laserdisc was also prominent for quite a while. But now the hottest item in audio/video is the DVD (Digital Video Disc). It's a major improvement in picture quality over video cassettes, and is far more convenient and versatile than either cassettes or laserdiscs. The video and audio delivered on DVDs is processed with "Dolby Digital" encoding — the innovative replacement for previous "Dolby Pro-Logic" processing. Besides the left and right channels of sound provided on DVDs, Dolby Digital involves a separate center channel for dialogue and other central audio effects, left and right surround channels whose sound is delayed by a few milliseconds from that of the front and center channels, and a special Low Frequency Effects (LFE) channel, which is sent primarily (but not exclusively) to a subwoofer. The primary differences between today's Dolby Digital and the earlier (but still around) Dolby Pro-Logic is that the surround channels are wide in range and separate from each other (as opposed to the mono, restricted-range channels in Pro Logic), and that Pro-Logic did not have the ".1" LFE channel that gives Dolby Digital its "5.1" channel designation. The speakers reproducing the front channels should be the best your tastes would dictate for normal stereo music listening, and clearly should be the same model so that you don't experience apparent shifts from one channel to the other at times. One of the additionally important things about having our speakers for this use is that they are so closely matched model to model off the production line. The center-channel speaker carries dialogue and also a decent share of other on-screen sounds, special effects, and music Here again, a close speaker match — between the center-channel and the left and right channels.— is needed to prevent source-shift. And again the close timbral balance of our speakers is an important factor for full enjoyment. The surround channel in Dolby Digital is where the "atmospherics" of Home Theater come from — the breeze in the trees, the crickets chirping in the night, the random ambient sounds of life in general. It's also where the spectacular directional effects — like jet planes roaring from your front left to your rear right, or voices/gunshots/what-have-you from different directions — come from as they zoom in and out of your consciousness. It's worth understanding that the way the engineers (and you) use the surround channel constitutes the real art of Home Theater. Surround receivers come with level controls for adjusting the surround speakers. The objective is to allow you to adjust for speakers of varying efficiency and for varying room conditions. But it's tempting to use these controls to crank up the surrounds and make sure you're hearing your money's worth from them. Doing that, however, will get you nothing worthwhile. It will just produce strange, jumpy sound — and scorn from the audio engineers who so carefully adjust surround recordings in the first place for natural ambiance and whatever prominent effects a scene may call for. Some engineers go for more conspicuous effects than others do, but it's nobody's original aim for the surround speakers to constantly assert their presence. The idea, which is worth some enjoyable hours of fooling around when you set up and start to live with a Home Theater system, is to adjust the level of the surround speakers to achieve the most natural, not-too-obtrusive "surround envelope" you can. That's best for music too. It All Depends, of Course, on the Speakers The sound of Home Theater critically depends on the quality of the speakers you use. You knew we'd say something like that, but as soon as you've thought about it for a moment, you know it's true. If you have heard the "Home Theater in A Box" systems that are now common in mass-merchandise stores, you probably have heard speakers so poor that you may have wondered what the Home Theater fuss was about. Home Theater is about super-realism, and you won't encounter it for real until you hear it via speakers like ours. Our guru, Paul Barton, has been involved in Home Theater from the outset. He's also a real fan of the medium — and of the full-bore Dolby Digital experience that's available in the best movie theaters. And for the past several years, he has been adding to the endless hours he spends at the National Research Council's test facilities in Ottawa to make sure that the timbral balance of PSB speakers is so close that you can make a knockout Home Theater combination out of virtually any of our speakers without having to be concerned about the dreaded occurrence of source-shift (the random jumping back and forth of sound images between unmatched channels). You can mix and match PSB speakers for Home Theater with confidence that they will work beautifully together — with speakers as all-out as our Stratus Gold-i as main systems and speakers as unpresumptuous as our Alpha Mites for surround systems. Though we offer many like-with-like combinations, such as the Stratus C6i center-channel and the Stratus SubSonic 7 as logical partners for the Gold-i, you can put together a dozen or more combinations that will sound wonderful together. For those who prefer to have us specify complete systems that we think are great ones, there are two that we'd like to call to your immediate attention: Our all-Alpha system may be the most amazing value available. Take two Alpha-A/V's (the video-shielded version of the Alpha) for main speakers, add an Alpha Midi as the center-channel, and use a pair either of Alpha Minis or Alpha Mites as surrounds, and you will have an amount and quality of Home Theater performance that you will not easily believe. Then add an Alpha SubSonic 5 subwoofer and you will have spent what is probably the most amazing under-$1,000 in audio/video. We think many people who have spent three or four times that amount will be seriously chagrined when they hear (maybe in your living room) what they might have done instead. And then there's the "Stellar System" highly recommended by Lawrence B. Johnson in Stereophile's Guide to Home Theater. It consists of Stratus Silvers up front, a Stratus C5 in the center, and a pair of New Stratus Minis as surrounds. Johnson, a regular contributor to Stereophile and a classical music critic for the New York Times, chose this as reference system for his work not for its Home Theater performance alone but for the way it sounds with recorded music. His studio, he says, is where Beethoven and Schwarzenegger hang out together, and the system there "has not simply evolved, it's been honed." Pointing out that "From the top to the bottom, designer Paul Barton's speakers represent exceptional value and rare musicality", he calls the Silvers "wonderfully musical loudspeakers with a well-tempered middle voice that gives way to a naturally rounded top end", and goes on to praise "the instantly embracing sound" that results from combining them with the C5 center-channel system. "The family likeness between the sound of the Silvers and that of the C5 is stunning," he says. He then says this: "While much is made of the importance of timbre-matching, I've seldom found that concept to be so effectively practiced as Paul Barton has managed here. In the opening scene of Patriot Games, for example, when you first hear Harrison Ford's voice on his own answering machine at home, then — in the same conversation — switch to "live" half a world away, but with Ford off-screen to the left, then actually pan to him speaking, the C5 tracks the changing acoustics with eerie realism and in perfect flow with the towers to left and right." Johnson chose the New Stratus Mini for surrounds for the way they "carry out the formidable resonance and presence of the Silvers and C5." And while he says his own bent for music's sake and out of satisfaction with the Silvers' bass is toward using this system without subwoofers, he suggests that anyone insistent on subwoofers should use two for proper impact, and suggests our SubSonic III powered subs. We've quoted him as we have not just to plug his and our "Stellar System," which costs a considerable amount of money, but to give you a small sense, as in the reference to Patriot Games, of what well set-up Home Theater is like. No words will really do for Home Theater. It's something you must hear for yourself, on equipment that does it justice. Whether you go as all-out as the Stellar System, or choose to be amazed at what an all-Alpha HT system can do, or choose to put together any of many combinations of our startling Image Series speakers, we are confident that our speakers will give you an unmistakable illustration of what great Home Theater is all about. Our Recommended Home Theater Systems. Anniversary Timeline | Guestbook | Warranty Registration | Terms of Use | Image Protection 
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