Expert Advice for Setting Up Your Home Theater Speakers

Are you trying to set up a new home theater system or some speakers? The easiest way is to hire a qualified installer to help you. However, you may consider doing the setup yourself. I am going to outline the basic setup procedure and give some tips to help avoid some common problems.
Your home theater system will come with usually 5 or 7 speakers - 1 central speaker, 2 front speakers, 2 rears and 2 sides (in case of a 7.1 system) as well as a woofer. It also includes a central component. This component will drive all of your speakers. This component is also called surround receiver and acts as the central control of your home theater system.
Locate this receiver in a place that minimizes the speaker cable run to each speaker. Choose a location that is not far away from your audio source or TV because you will need to connect the receiver to your source.
It is not too difficult to make the connections between your receiver and TV or DVD player by using a fiber optical cable. Connecting your satellite speakers takes a little bit more work though.
You won't need as much speaker wire if your speakers are wireless. Some kits come with all-wireless speakers while others only have wireless rear speakers. For all other speakers, start by measuring how much speaker cable you require. You may want to add some extra length for safety. In most cases, you won't be able to run the cable in a straight line to your speakers. You may need to consider carpets, furniture etc. Thus make sure you include all of these extra bends in your calculation. If you are planning to drive a lot of power to your speakers then make sure you pick a cable that is thick enough to handle the current flow. Your subwoofer usually will be an active woofer. This means that it will accept a low-level audio signal. You can connect your woofer via an RCA cable.
The satellite speakers each connect via a speaker terminal which is usually color coded to help ensure proper polarity. Most speaker cable will show one strand in a different color. This is essential since it will help ensure the correct polarity of the speaker terminal connection. Simply attach the different-color strand to the speaker terminal which is colored. Similarly, each speaker output of your surround receiver is color coded. When attaching the cable to your receiver, observe the right polarity once again. This will keep all of your speakers in phase.
If you are using wireless speakers, there will be a short audio delay incurred during the audio transmission to the speakers, also known as latency. Ideally, all speakers have the same latency and thus are in perfect sync. If you have both wireless and wired speakers, the wireless speakers will be out of sync with the wired speakers. Therefore you will need to delay the audio going to the wired speakers by tweaking your receiver. The amount of delay should be equal to the latency of the wireless speakers.