What the heezy? We’ve been traveling for 3 months and no freaking land!

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Canadian winters can be long and brutal, especially for someone who much prefers the sun and sand for snow and short days. I’ve learned that to enjoy winter you must either take up winter sports (no thanks) or spend time at home relaxing. Pretty much, make your home fun! It’s been over a year now that we were finally able to afford one of those monster TVs, so I thought it was time to enhance the experience with BIG sound. I had a hard time deciding which tv to get originally, since there were so many terms I had never heard before, plus there were a million and one choices. Confused was an understatement for sure!
So I’m ready to go purchase one of them there surround sound things… choices galore , lingo I don’t understand and a range of prices. This is even more confusing than when I went to get the TV. Honestly, my head is spinning. If you’re in the same situation as me, here’s some info I found online.

Understanding surround sound lingo

For the most part, the entertainment industry boils down a lot of the surround sound terminology into numbers, such as 2.0, 5.1, and 7.1. Sometimes these numbers refer to the playback system’s speaker configuration, and sometimes they refer to the audio signal format. You may find the lingo confusing, especially when the speakers don’t match the audio signals. In these numbers, the first number represents the number of speakers or main audio channels involved, and the 1 or 0 after the decimal point tells you whether or not the system has a subwoofer or supports a low frequency effects channel. Systems that end in 1 have a subwoofer or an effects channel.

Here’s a rundown of the different numbers that you may encounter and what they mean:

* 2.0: Normal stereo, which has a left and a right channel, is 2.0 in surround-sound speak.

* 5.1: This is the primary format for creating and delivering surround sound. Movie theaters, digital television, DVD-Video and Audio, and even the latest game consoles use this format. Source signals have the five main channels and one LFE bass effects channel. Playback systems usually have five main speakers and one subwoofer.

* 5.1-channel ready: Such an audio system has six discrete inputs to accept a 5.1 signal from a signal source such as a 5.1-channel DVD player. These products can’t necessarily decode signals to a 5.1-channel output. You can best ferret out true 5.1 systems by reading reviews of the devices before you buy.

* 6.1: 6.1-channel systems have an additional surround channel called theback surround channel. This channel drives a speaker (or preferably two) situated right behind the viewers, which in essence provides the same smooth flow in the back sound field that the center speaker enables in the front speaker group. Dozens of DVDs are encoded with extra back surround information for this back surround speaker, and these DVDs also play perfectly well on regular 5.1 systems.

* 7.1: Not to be outdone, some technical whizzes have taken the 5.1 or 6.1 channel encoding on a DVD and used some computer horsepower to create two, independent back surround speakers for even more surround sound, making it 7.1. 7.1 isn’t a true surround sound format (there are no DVDs on the market with 7.1 channels of sound).

* 8.1 and beyond: You may hear about even higher designations, 8.1, 9.1, 10.2, and so on. These systems belong in the realm of the home theaterphile, and if you’re evaluating such gear, you probably have a home theater consultant standing next to you, so just follow his or her recommendations.

Bass management

Bass management is how your home theater manages the low frequency sounds. Better A/V receivers and other controller devices have several options for how you want to handle the bass sounds in your system. If you have nice tall speakers that have a very effective bass range of their own (often called full range speakers), you may decide to pass all bass frequencies to them. If you want smaller speakers that can sit on a shelf, then the bass frequencies might fall to the subwoofer (a speaker designed to play low-frequency sounds).

You don’t have to have a subwoofer to take advantage of the LFE (Low Frequency Effect) channel that some DVDs have encoded because many normal left/right speakers can take these cues from your receiver and play the sound accordingly. But having a subwoofer gives you that stomach-rattling, vibrating-room effect at just the right times.