Choosing Main Speakers for a Home Theater

Video Transcript

"Hello Reggie Hayes here with Expert Village. Now, we're talking about speakers and the first thing to determine is what your system is. Now, systems can be comprised of either, you have probably heard of these before, but a 5.1, a 7.1 system, a 6.1 system. What does all that mean? Well, it's really simple. The point one is going to be the sub-woofer. I've got one sitting here at the end of the couch, that's what the point one means. Really simple isn't it? Now the other ones, the four, the five, six and seven, what do those numbers mean? Those are the number of speakers in the system. Now, I'll show you a diagram here. Basically, what it is is you have two main speakers, you have a center speaker, and in a 5.1 system you have two rear speakers. That's five speakers plus one sub-woofer, 5.1. In a 6.1, you have center rear speaker. Now this is going to be for a larger, more of a bigger scale entertainment room. Then in a 7.1 system, you have speakers along the middle and speakers along the rear. That makes three across the front, two speakers in the back, and two in the middle, plus your sub-woofer is a 7.1 system. So you're talking about main speakers. Your main speakers are going to carry the brunt of the weight, they're going to carry the most sound. So you want to choose a main speaker that's going to match the size of your room. You don't want a speaker that's going to be too big, because if you choose some of these big floor models what's going to happen is the cone is going to be so big and it will push so much air as we learned earlier that the bass is going to overpower many of the words, and many of the frequencies and things like that. So what you want to do is, and if you have a room that is too big and you choose a really small speaker or even like the satellite speaker that's up here on the top, what happens is they don't push enough air and they make your ears sound a little, they almost disturb your ears a little bit. So what you want to do is you want to choose a speaker that about right for your room. And as we stated earlier, this is a twelve foot wide room, so we're going with speakers that are sort of medium range. They're not really big but they're not really small. And they offer enough speaker capacity, enough square inches on the cones to push just enough air to give us a nice, well-balanced sound. So up next, let's talk about how to choose the right rear speaker."