Understanding Your Home Theater Audio Receiver

When you decide to go shopping for a receiver, the question will be whether you should purchase a home theater audio receiver or a stereo model.  However, for those who would like to enjoy surround you will need to go with the home theater audio receiver and not the stereo.  With a home theater audio receiver you will get digital processing as well as digital outputs and inputs.  Additionally, you will get speaker calibration automatically.  This means that your system will analyze the sound coming out of your speakers and adjust it automatically.

A home theater audio receiver is used to power your system and also acts as the surround receiver and decoder.  For those who are new to the home theater world, the choices out there can seem too much to take in all at once.  The first thing you need to do when considering a home theater audio receiver is to understand the concept of surround sound.  The surround aspect of your home theater system will have you enveloped in sound so that you will feel like you are in a commercial theater right in your house.  

How Your Home Theater Audio Receiver Decodes Surround Sound

When you carry out your home theater receiver comparison you will need to make sure that the system you buy offers you at least 5 channels in order to amplify your sound at 5.1 surround.  Your receiver should also make sure that you enjoy your video games, music, TV shows and movies. The newer receivers may also offer more options for the delivery of surround which will increase the power of your system.  Some of those newer receivers will also have in built High Definition formats.  

The sound you get when you turn on your system comes encoded with surround.  However, it needs to be decoded in order for the sound to go into the separate speakers to create the surround effect.  A home theater audio receiver will do this for you and you will find that most DVDs have this sound encoded in them.  5.1 is the current standard out there so if you get a 6.1 channel home theater audio receiver you will find that some of your movies will not be decoded.  This is because this is an extended format that is beyond the current 5.1 standard.  You need to ensure however, that the power of your receiver matches that of the speakers you have in place.  Check the sensitivity of the speakers in order to determine the receiver that matches them.