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When trying to recreate the theater experience in your home, there’s really nothing quite like a surround sound system. Movies are immediately more immersive, games become realistic, and songs slap harder when you’ve got 360 degrees of sound pulsating and vibrating through your house and body.
What You Need to Know When Shopping for a Surround Sound System
From the stock photos, these systems can look pretty simple – just a subwoofer on the floor, and 4-6 other speakers scattered around the room. But finding the best surround sound system requires some research first.
Components: Normally, a regular two-speaker stereo setup with a left and right channel is simply called a 2.0 system. Once you add in a third, center-channel speaker, it becomes 3.0. This third speaker is where surround sound starts, and is the most important component of the setup, handling most of the heavy lifting.
The LFE (Low Frequency Effects) channel, better known as the subwoofer, is where you’ll get all the bass-y low end punch to really rumble and rattle the room. Adding in the ‘woofer now makes it a 3.1 system, while adding in dual LFEs brings it up to a 3.2.
Finally, surround speaker placement is crucial. You’ll need at least two (bringing it up to a 5.1 system, or a 7.1 with two more additional speakers) for a true surround-sound experience, and these are typically placed off to the side, slightly behind where you’ll be sitting.
Audio Configurations: Knowing the different audio configurations is necessary too, such as DTS or Dolby Digital. Both are companies that make the digital sound signal that’s sent to your receiver, and help direct certain sounds out of certain speakers – for example, bass going to the subwoofer, or a car driving up from behind you going to the rear speakers. There are varying levels of sound quality signaling, and it all depends on how you’ll be watching or listening to your media. Dolby Digital and DTS are fine for DVDs and some games, but for streaming and especially for Blu-Rays, you may want to consider a system with a higher signal capability.
Sizing: We’ve rounded up some of our favorite surround sound systems here, with both large setups and all-in-one units too. The system you pick will depend on the space you have allocated to it at home. The larger surround sound systems come with speakers you’ll want to liberally space out around the room. For those in smaller apartments, or looking for something for their office, a more compact unit could be best.
Not only will a surround system enhance modern music, movies and games, but a great setup can also breathe new life into your old media too, letting you hear your soundtrack and effects like never before.
We’ve selected four systems here to get you started as you search for your perfect surround setup.
