How to Buy a Home Theater System

Movies can provide an immersive experience, as sight and sound blend together to take you to a place far, far away. For years you could get that complete escape only in a cinema, with its huge screen and monstrous speakers. Now, with a home theater, you can enjoy a full-fledged cinematic experience in your living room. This guide looks at three key components of a home theater system: the display, the DVD player, and the speakers.

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The Big Picture
A wide-screen TV, a DVD player, and surround-sound speakers can turn your living room into a film-watching haven.

The Specs Explained
You can choose from a wide variety of components to create a home theater. Bigger is not always better, however; find out how to evaluate the specs here.

Home Theater Shopping Tips
Now that you know which components and specifications are available, you can sort through the options to set up your own customized home theater.

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A home theater can do a remarkable job of mimicking the multiplex experience. DVD players and newer televisions can produce detailed high-resolution pictures, offering realistic portrayals of everything from the largest explosion to the smallest teardrop. And thanks to a high-quality surround-sound speaker system, you'll almost feel the rotor blades whirring by as you watch a helicopter pass overhead. With the right setup, your living room will become a movie-watching cocoon.

To get the crisp picture, you'll need a DVD player or one of the new high-definition HD DVD or Blu-ray Disc players. DVD video outputs up to 540 horizontal lines of resolution, compared with about 200 lines on the VHS tapes your VCR plays. And you can see the difference, as the higher resolution produces a noticeably smoother and clearer picture. Most major consumer electronics companies, including Panasonic, Pioneer, Sony, and Toshiba, make DVD players. These same companies also make the newer high-definition players that are capable of more than four times the resolution of standard DVD models when playing high-definition discs.

Prices for basic players range from $50 to $150, but you can pay a lot more for DVD players with lots of features. The overall picture quality, however, will usually be just as good on a current low-cost model as on an ultra-deluxe one. All DVD players can read music CDs; most can play MP3 music on recordable CDs, and video on one or more of the various recordable DVD formats (such as DVD-R and DVD+R). Some high-end models can also play one or both of the high-resolution, multichannel audio formats, DVD-Audio (DVD-A) and Super Audio CD (SACD). At the top of the heap are players for the new high-definition videodisc formats, Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD, which currently sell for $300 or more; you'll need a high-definition television to take full advantage of them, though.