Home Theater Installation - Connecting the Components

Audiophile Keith Harmon demonstrates the steps necessary to set up a home theater system - Connecting the Home Theater Components

Hi, this is Keith Harmon, and we’re back to hooking up our high definition home theater. We looked at all the cables in the last segment, so now we’re gonna look at how do we get all those things hooked up. We got three components here, a DVD player, satellite box, receiver, well, four if we count the speaker. So, when we look at hooking this up, we got a couple of options, so, let’s look at, we’re gonna do two options on this one, just, just so we can show different ways for it to hook up. So we’re gonna take this DVD player, we need to get the video. So, we take our red, green, blue composite to our component video, see even I screw it up, so don’t feel bad if you do, and we hook that in to component video one, the red, green, and blue. So now, we’ll gonna get component video from our player to the receiver and then we need to get the audio to, so we’re gonna take that audio, take the optical audio, put that into the optical audio one in. And we noticed this little plugs that over some of these that cover up those openings to keep them, keep dust from getting in them, sometimes it will have the automatic cover like this one that pops back from the opening. So, now I’ve hooked up the, the DVD player, it’s getting a high definition video and it’s getting digital audio. Now, instead of doing that, another thing we could do is just to do, and we wouldn’t do both of these, so I’ll go ahead and, and unplug that. Instead of doing that, we could do HDMI, so we plug the HDMI in here, gives us our digital video and digital audio, and we plug that in to the HDMI here, input one, and now we have HDMI. Now the important thing here to recognize, you got HDMI coming in, when you come out and go to your display, it’s only gonna come out of HDMI out. Don’t expect anything that comes in HDMI to come out of the component outs over here, there’s a copy protection that’s enabled with the high definition multimedia interface as well as the DVI that prevents you from getting outputs anything other than HDMI. So, next we look at our satellite receiver. Satellite receiver, again we need to get video and audio. So I’m gonna go ahead and get video, oh sorry, the digital audio, we’ve got the digital audio out, so we take our single RCA plug, plug that in the digital audio out and then we go down and find the digital audio in, coaxial in one. So now we’re getting our high definition sound, the digital sound, and then, you know, I said, well I wanna use HDMI, but, I can't, I don’t have an HDMI, but I have the DVI here. And what I can do is take a HDMI to DVI converter cable, plug that in and then you, then that will send the video only, digital video only to the input here. Now you gonna have to, now, later on, we’ll take a look at the set up video, set up menus in the receiver, and that will let you assign the HDMI one, to the digital set up box. HDMI two, would be assigned to the DVD player, so that all those things get sorted out inside the receiver, so that when it comes out of the HDMI out, you get the right signal when it comes out of the speakers you get the right signal. Lastly, we’re gonna look at hooking up the speakers. So we’ve got, a lot of times you’re gonna have just a bare cable here, so we look at taking that, stripping off the last half inch or so using your common wire stripper. And then we can either take that and plug that right in to this, UCN plug right into the speaker using these push plugs. Push on the red, insert it in, push on the black, insert it in, and now you have your speaker hooked up on one end of the cable. Then when we look at the, the other end of the cable, I’ll just use the same end again, we may want to hook up a banana plug. It’s a different style than the one we say in the last segment, and sometimes it’s a good idea to twist this around so they’re easy to fit in there. You take your banana plug, stick it in there, screw it down, we got your negative, we got your positive, again we make sure that you get those straighten out, which side of the wire is which. Now you have the banana plugs in, plug those in, red to red, black to black, you’re all set. Sometimes you’ll have ends, something like that, same deal here in the back of the speakers, just put the banana plug, plug that in, and you’re hooked up. One nice thing about that is, you may end up getting the speaker to the wrong one, the right to left, the left to right, the front left to the rear right, and get those mixed up, very easy with the banana plugs to change those around if you make a mistake. And, another little tip, once you do that, labeling your wires really help. You got, you got 5 or 7 wires out there, they’re usually gonna be the same, so, a nice label on those can save you a lot of headache. So, that takes care of all the hook ups, and the only other thing that we need to make sure that you do is when you look at these, some of the components will have vents on the top, especially your surround sound receivers that have the amplifiers in them. Coz amplifiers put out heat, and that, that component needs to breathe a bit so that that heat can come out, so placing another component on top of it like this, you’re gonna cover up all those vents, get extra hot, you’re cooking both the receiver and whatever’s above it, so, typically what you want to do is either have this on top or do something that have a shelf or something that’s gonna give this some room to breathe above it. And definitely make your equipment last lot longer. Another important component that you wanna have is a good quality line conditioner and a surge protector. This is a nice one because, because of the plug are on two different sides, so if you’re have any items that need to have the voltage converter, the big boxy things that’ll change the AC power to DC power, you can put that on either sides so you can fit more of them on there. And this is gonna protect your equipment, it’s got a 50,000 dollar connected equipment warranty, so you’re protected from that stand point, and it actually can make your picture better and your sound better because it’s gonna filter out all the, all the spikes in the voltage, the noise in the power, it can translate into noise and or lines, various lines or interference on your video signals. So, this is a good idea to have for, for those, those reasons at least.