How to Install a Home Theater - Finding an LCD TV Mount

Audiophile Keith Harmon demonstrates the steps necessary to set up a home theater system - Home Theater Installation - Finding an LCD TV Mount

Hi, it’s Keith Harmon with Smart Wired Home and we’re back with how to select and install a home theater. Right now we’re gonna talk about how to mount a plasma or an LCD display on the wall. This is kind of the display, the end result that we’re looking for, to have the TV up on the wall at a comfort listening height and you can decide where that should be, you know, as it fits in your décor. And actually we also have the in-wall speakers on either sides as well as a in-wall subwoofer to give it a nice clean look, so really no clutter in this install. Anytime we’re talking about mounting something on or in the wall, we’re worried about the construction, so hence the picture that we have here. When we look at the construction, we worry about the 2 by 4 studs littering the wall. We need to find those and we’ll show you how to do that in a minute. But the important thing here is that you really wanna get, find those studs because the plasma TV is 50 inch plasma would run right about 90 pounds. So you really wanna make sure that you are in, you’ve got some nice big screws tightly in one of these studs in the wall to make sure that it doesn’t end up on your floor and then perhaps in the repair shop after that. So, let’s talk about what different kinds of mounts are available. When we’re looking at the slacking amount, there’s a lot of different ways that we can get the TV up on the wall and a lot of different features that are available. One of the more interesting ones is the articulating mount, that mounts up on the wall, again right into your stud, and then the TV that’s mounted at the end can point in a number of different directions. That, this is one for a very small TV, but they also make them in much beefier configurations for, you know, 50 inch plasmas as well. Those, when you do that, because of all that force playing away from the wall, you really wanna make sure that, that not only that you find a two, maybe three studs to mount to, that you really make sure that that’s mounted well, because you’re gonna, it’s gonna be a lot of force on that, and don’t, don’t chins on the mount as well. Anyway, so that’s one to be able to point around in different directions, you also wanna keep in mind, if you do choose that one, that you probably wanna have a speaker that mounts on it or using your TV speakers which we generally don’t recommend, because they’re generally of not very good quality. But that, as you move around the sound will point in different directions. Another one was, is a two piece mount, most of the larger mounts are two piece mount, where you put one panel up on the wall, and then you simply hang the mounting brackets on there, which go into the TV. This one is a tilting mount, so as we see that, when the TV can either be straight up flat or it can be tilted up and down and adjusted here. So, it won't, once this attaches to the back of the TV, we can then hang it on the wall and then adjust the angle that we want the TV, so, especially if it’s high up on the wall, it will come down, and if it’s low in the wall we want it to be more flat. Another version of this mount is what we call flash mount, where we wouldn’t have the tilting capability, but would just go straight against the wall, flat against the wall, the advantage of that is that the TV ends up much closer to the wall. You got to keep in mind, you know, with the tilt mount or the articulating mount, the mount is gonna take up about four inches of space, TV’s gonna take about another four inches of space for a total of about eight inches, maybe 7 and a half inches out from a wall to, by the time you get to the face of the TV. So a lot of people are, you know, looking at that flash mount thing, it’s more important for me to get that TV closer to the wall, you know, keep it, keep it cleaner. Also, there’s newer TVs that are coming out that are less than four inches, there’s some that are below three inches now. So that’s one of the features that you can look for in a LCD or a plasma, it’s how deep is the panel itself as well as how, how wide is the frame that goes around it. We’re seeing a lot of, you know, if you have three inch wide frame and versus a one inch wide frame, you might have a 42 and 46 inch TV that are actually the same physical size, but, one of them has a lot more picture. So, that’s kind of an overview of some of the different styles of mounts, and once you decide which one you want, then we can talk about how to actually mount it up on the wall.