How to Calibrate Home Theater System Speakers

To optimize your home theater system, you should calibrate your speakers to fit acoustically with your home listening environment. Speaker calibration is a relatively simple procedure that shouldn’t take more than 20 minutes, and it will change your home audio system's output quality dramatically. Follow these steps to calibrate your home theater system speakers.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• Surround sound speaker system
• Sound meter

1. Connect the speakers to the receiver, and then set them up around the room according to the manual instructions. The set-up will depend on your particular system.
2. Set a sound level meter to "C Waiting" and "Slow Response."
3. Position the meter in the spot where you plan to listen from most often, and stand somewhere that isn’t between the speaker and the meter. Getting in the way of the meter will give you a bad reading and your home theater speakers will not calibrate properly.
4. Play a movie on your home theater system at normal volume. Playing a movie at an extreme volume will cause an improper calibration.
5. Point the meter at each of the speakers and open the menu. On the menu, there will be options such as "front," "rear," and "side" for each of your speakers. Select the appropriate option for the speaker you are calibrating.
6. Play a test tone on your meter, and adjust the knob until the display reads zero decibels. Repeat this step for each of the other speakers in your system.
7. Adjust your speakers’ channels on the receiver to match the readings given to you on the meter. Doing so will ensure optimum performance from your speakers.
8. Adjust your subwoofer to blend in with your speakers by simply sitting in the room and playing around with settings until you’ve found a satisfactory setup.

Tips & Warnings

• Make sure you’ve got the red and black cables in the appropriate jacks. If you mix them up, the acoustics will still make sense, but will sound awful.
• Write down the values for each speaker’s channel in case the settings are changed or erased. Keep it with the speakers’ original box and warranty.
• Consult your speakers’ instruction manual for optimal spacing and placement.

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