First of all, what are sound bars good for? Part of the beauty of a sound bar is how minimalist it really is, while still giving a noticeable amplification of audio performance. Another reason sound bars are so popular is that they are plug-and-play ready, without the need for receivers or any other component and all wiring is included.
Which sound bar is the best for you depends on a few factors. Some of those are the physical size, channels some sound bars have more than two speakers on the main unit , whether or not it comes with a subwoofer, and the Bluetooth capability. I want to take a minute here to note that I purposefully did not include any mention of wattage to the speaker selection above. Manufacturers often slap a wattage tag on their speakers that are misleading, noting the peak wattage in bold with the RMS wattage in fine print.
Wattage is important overall to ensure that your system is performing at its maximum capacity by matching the RMS power, but too much emphasis is placed on the wrong part of this. To clarify, the peak wattage is not the power you get when you play an audio track, it is the max power before the equipment fails.
The RMS power is what your unit will consistently produce during normal use, and of course the higher this rating the more room you have to operate before the system is maxed-out. It is a good idea to know beforehand how many different media inputs will be used so you can determine how many channels the receiver should have if going this route but these can be really added or removed post-build.
With the popularity of video streaming and smart TVs now, a hefty chunk of the media is already included in the unit itself, while add-ons like a Google Chromecast, Roku, or Amazon Firestick can be added without effort at any time.
For gamers, an inherent input would be the gaming console which for the Xbox One and PS4 actually doubles as a Blu-ray player , DVD player, and streaming center.
Of course the factors to consider would be the size of the TV, and the distance from the media center to the receiver or TV. Some exceptions to this would be when running multi-room audio systems, when additional speaker wire is a definite necessity. Note, all prices and products are accurate at time of article publication, although some may have changed or are no longer available. Greg is a collector of hobbies, steeped in a love for the outdoors.
Drop him in the woods and he's more at home backpacking, hunting, fishing, camping, and drinking out of streams than he is behind a desk pounding away at a keyboard. He's an avid homebrewing enthusiast and a craft beer fanatic. He enjoys testing out the latest drone tech and is a firm believer in the power of IoT and home automation tech to bring us into a more productive future or give way to Skynet, time will tell. I was really interested in the segments of your article that talked about the best way to plan out your sound equipment for your home theater.
Having in-wall speakers definitely sounds like the choice for me since I want our home theater to look as sleek as possible as a sort of lounge area as well. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.
All rights reserved. Close Search. Sound Systems With the visual element out of the way, the next step in constructing an epic home theater is of course the audio. What are Home Theater Receivers? What is Home Theater 5. Speakers The most obvious component to any home theater setup is of course the speakers.
What is Home Theater in a Box? The Low Down on Subs The one speaker element that simply cannot be removed is the subwoofer. Which Home Theater Speakers are the Best? Sound Bars First of all, what are sound bars good for?
Remove the screws that hold the case together and re-apply the diagramming advice from the previous step if needed. Whenever you remove screws or other small items from a case, or other computer assembly, store them temporarily in a paper cup, an envelope, or other small container so you can find them when you need to put things back together.
There will be plenty of opportunities to take things apart and put them back together later in this book! If you want to clean up, you might want to equip yourself with a can of compressed air to blow things clean before you put them back together.
Be sure that the power to your PC is completely off before disconnecting any cables. Figure shows the insides of a generic homebrew PC right after the case was opened and the inside cleaned. Note how the ribbon cables that attach various drives to the motherboard and a SCSI controller obscure much of the inside view. This figure serves as the basis for the rest of the tour, with callouts to help you identify various pieces and parts.
Pay attention to how and where they hook up, so you can replace them correctly. Most drive cable connectors use slots or guides so that connections seat properly only when inserted with the right orientation. But you must pay attention and be gentle when removing or reinserting cable connectors: excess force can damage the connectors on a drive, a controller, or your motherboard.
Notice that the power supply is clearly rated at watts at the upper right of its enclosure. A large black plastic fan assembly atop the CPU cooler covers the CPU, and three vertically aligned memory sockets appear to its right. There are three interface cards emplaced. From top to bottom they are: a graphics card, a SCSI controller, and a network interface card. All three of these sockets can support one or two devices, so although this PC uses only one device for each one, the number of devices could double were that necessary or desirable.
Notice that all items mentioned at the outset of this chapter in the first recitation of PC components are shown in Figure , or their presence is indicated by ancillary equipment as with the CPU cooler, which indicates the presence of a CPU at the same time it hides the CPU from direct view.
All of them are also mentioned in one way or another in the preceding list that calls out various elements of the figure. The sections that follow take a closer look at these various elements and give you a chance to understand what role they play in a PC and its operation. The other is at the lower right, where the empty fan housing is situated. In a hotter running PC, it would be a good idea to install a fan there as well. But as you learn in the next chapter which deals with HTPC requirements and in Chapter 3 which covers cases and power supplies , aesthetics, form, materials, extras, and layout can all be important when choosing the right case for any PC — but especially for an HTPC.
The power supply is a key PC component because it converts alternating current from the wall socket into direct current using a transformer and also delivers various voltage levels to PC devices common voltage levels inside PCs include 3. A power supply must be able to provide sufficient power to handle all devices at peak load. Each device on a PC is rated in terms of peak wattage. On the PC depicted in Figures and , total peak wattage for all devices is about watts, or 40 percent lower than the peak wattage for the power supply.
If you build your own PC, this kind of planning becomes your responsibility. Though there are plenty of smart chips elsewhere on the motherboard, on interface cards, and even built into storage devices, when you run a program on your PC, it loads and executes on the CPU. That explains why CPU speed and power ratings are so important, and why those who build computers often spend hundreds of dollars on such chips.
Those in the know can recognize a vintage CPU from this description, one that today is pretty much obsolete and more deserving of pity than respect. Windows XP Professional requires only a MHz CPU or better, but even so this relative old-timer pokes along as compared to its more modern brethren. CPU issues are raised again in the next chapter, when important trade-offs between quiet operation and performance are covered.
They also provide a key focus in Chapter 5, which takes CPUs as its primary subject and keeping them cool as a secondary subject.
Everything Lives in Storage PCs come equipped with many and varied forms of storage. Even CPUs incorporate some relatively small amounts of storage where they keep upcoming data and instructions close at hand so they can grab and use them quickly, and as a place to store the results of current computations or operations.
On a computer, storage may be organized into a hierarchy by speed and size, where items that persist over time reside primarily in bigger but much slower storage devices. While programs are executing or data is being processed, however, it tends to flow through smaller, faster elements in the hierarchy at extremely rapid rates see Table Pre-fetched instructions and read-ahead data stored for imminent use.
Local data and operating context maintained here. RAM Where programs that are running and data being used reside, sometimes in whole, often in part other parts may be on disk, particularly large programs or data sets too big to fit into RAM.
Disk Where programs reside when not running, and where data, documents, and other items reside when not in use. Optical media Where programs or data reside when not stored on disk, or as archived for protection, distribution, or playback as with music CDs or movies on DVD.
Tape Archival medium designed for backup, long-term storage, or to meet records retention requirements. Seldom, if ever, used on most PCs. Disk drives are faster than optical or floppy drives, so the former are used for active data storage, whereas the latter tend to be used for archiving, program or data distribution, and playback of large recorded works such as music on CD or movies on DVD.
Storage essentially provides room for computers to work in at the smaller, faster end of the hierarchy and room for computers to store programs and data in at the bigger, slower end of the hierarchy. But nearly all elements in the hierarchy are important the advent of very large, cheap disk and optical drives is slowly but surely pushing tape out of this picture and hence nearly all of them get significant coverage in this book.
Everything on its way into or out of the PC travels through the motherboard at some point or another. These days, more and more functions that used to require interface cards are built into motherboards. Users with special audio requirements or who want the highest possible fidelity may still elect to disable onboard sound and install a high-end sound card instead.
Except for servers or other PCs that require lots of network links or extremely high performance, hardly anybody installs network interfaces in PCs any more. For typical desktop use at home or in the office, PC buyers are happy to save money and use built-in capabilities instead of buying additional interface cards.
For a Home Theater PC, this certainly applies to networking if the right kind is available , but it may not apply to sound, depending on how the HTPC will be used. Graphics and video cards are covered in Chapter 9, sound cards in Chapter 10, and network connections in Chapter User Input: Keyboard, Mouse, and. For most home and office desktop users, a keyboard and a mouse are the only user input devices needed. Computer Output: Monitor, Printer, and.
For most home and office desktop users a or inch cathode-ray tube CRT or liquid crystal display LCD is adequate; power users may up the size of the display to 19 inches or beyond. Some gonzo types may even elect to use multiple monitors so they can multitask more effectively, or simply because modern Windows versions let them do so.
Many computer users also have at least one printer available to them, often attached using the universal serial bus USB or perhaps a parallel printer port although this is less common nowadays, even modern PCs still include parallel ports in the battery of standard connectors. Whether that printer is a laser or an inkjet or prints in color or monochrome, most offices and households keep at least one printer around. Things change on an HTPC, as you learn in the next chapter, both in terms of displays think TV and home theater and in the lesser likelihood that a printer is attached to such a PC although there may be one attached to another PC somewhere else on the network.
Even the relatively old model photographed for Figures and requires airflow of 50 cubic feet per minute cfm over its poky CPU. More modern CPUs require even more airflow, as do the bigger power supplies necessary to feed them the electricity they consume. The same is true for more powerful graphics cards, which now include fans to cool their fast and powerful GPUs graphics processing units as a matter of course. In general, the more stuff you have inside your PC, the more important cooling becomes.
Cooling deserves even more attention in HTPCs than in ordinary desktops for all kinds of reasons. This will allow you to understand how and when the various parts of the PC come into play. Either way, when you first switch on the power, the power supply comes up and begins to feed voltage into the rest of the system — in fact, as you look at the insides of your PC you can see exactly where that power goes by following the wire bundles from the power supply to their destinations.
In the machine depicted in Figures and , power goes to four places: the motherboard, the CD-ROM drive, the floppy drive, and the hard disk. The interface cards draw power from the motherboard, which delivers power through its onboard circuitry to the interface card sockets.
Likewise, the CPU and RAM also draw power from the motherboard, as do all other devices built into or mounted onto the motherboard. The one on the back is usually built right into the power supply, whereas the one on the front is controlled through the motherboard. In that case, the switch on the front lets you turn the machine on when you want. That explains how and why some machines can power themselves off when you perform a Windows shutdown. If it helps you to think of POST routines as a mandatory pre—boot-up check, feel free to look at them that way.
During the POST phase the little speaker you saw attached to motherboard and the bottom right of the case in Figures and really comes into its own. Here and now, it suffices to say that when something goes wrong during the POST sequence, beep codes permit the PC to inform you about its status and provide clues as to the source of the problem s involved.
A more detailed look at the POST sequence runs as follows: 1. Its job is to provide continuous power to the CMOS even when the PC is shut down, to keep current configuration data available for the next boot-up. CPU performs a memory check on the motherboard, and checks its memory controller, the memory bus, and all installed memory modules no beep means memory hardware checks out OK.
Only if your PC reports OK status on all checks mentioned here will it actually begin the boot process. Lots of potential sources about POST beep codes are available online. One especially good one is at www. The boot loader reads the first sector of the boot partition into memory which is known as the Boot Sector, not to be confused with the MBR and then turns control over to the program that begins there.
The program in the Boot Sector looks for the operating system kernel, loads it into memory, and starts it running. This is the point at which the real software boot process begins, and the boot loader ceases operation. After those selections are made or a timeout expires, operating system boot-up begins in earnest. Windows then begins to load and execute operating system kernel files, which make up the core of the operating system. COM to execute. It probes the system completely to build a list of all installed hardware components found.
EXE, which in turn completes loading basic services needed for minimal operation. At this point, Windows switches from character mode only text characters show on screen, as in the command window to graphics mode and displays a graphical screen with a status bar to show load progress. When the final operating system load completes, Windows displays a login window. Only after a user logs in to the system successfully is Windows boot-up considered complete.
After that, the PC is yours to do whatever you want it to, subject only to the limits of your imagination, the Windows operating system, and the programs at your disposal. If you want to know more you should definitely read this run-through. In this chapter, you learned what kinds of parts and components the two types of PCs share; in the next chapter, you learn how the components in an HTPC can differ from their more ordinary counterparts, as well as what kinds of parts an HTPC is likely to incorporate that an ordinary PC might not.
This chapter explores those differences in more detail, and this should help you understand why a typical HTPC has more components than a desktop PC, and why so many of its requirements diverge from those for desktop PCs as well.
Some TV cards also include FM receivers and can play radio stations as well. These are just the items that are more or less typical in an HTPC that appear less frequently in desktop PCs if at all. In the next section, you can get a sense of how HTPC requirements can influence the selection of other items that are common or required in any PC.
Most HTPC buyers prefer horizontal cases to match the other components in their entertainment systems — not to mention problems inherent in shoehorning a tower case into a typical entertainment center. This means power supplies and other cooling gear inside the case become subject to substantial noise constraints. A living or family room situation and entertainment use argues that a TV set is the most likely display that an HTPC will drive. In this case, component video outputs deliver the best results, with S-Video in second place.
This means CPU coolers and other fans must be as quiet as possible. It also means that storage devices such as hard disks and optical drives must be selected not just by type or capacity, but also by the amount of noise they produce. Some of the processing involved requires substantial CPU and memory resources, which in turn suggests that more powerful CPUs and more memory are preferable.
This requires making trade-offs between power and noise, because more power produces more heat and requires more cooling, which in turn inevitably causes more noise. It incorporates all kinds of special features and functions, from an interface designed to look good on a TV set and work well with a remote control to a set of capabilities designed to handle digital music, photos, movies, TV, and radio with ease and simplicity.
The following list of items derives from an appreciation of where an HTPC is likely to be situated as much as it does from a technical analysis of the kinds of things it must do.
Both have quiet passages in which the noise from a typical desktop PC can be noticeable, if not distracting or downright objectionable. The best-looking TV uses as much digital technology as possible. This may mean older TV sets should be replaced with newer ones that handle digital and analog inputs with equal facility. Many users simply connect their HTPCs to multichannel home entertainment systems; others simply attach multichannel speaker systems to their HTPCs and do away with the other stuff.
The notion of a trade-off means that you must trade one thing against another. The concept of an engineering trade-off means you must sacrifice one thing to gain another any time you select the elements in a real solution. Where HTPCs are concerned, one such trade-off pits computing power and capability against noise. You must balance things like total CPU power, memory and storage capacity, computer graphics handling capability, and the addition of more bells and whistles to your system against the increases in noise that they bring to your listening or viewing experience.
Most experts appear to value quiet over raw power. Our own experience has been that a quieter but less powerful HTPC produces a more positive listening or viewing experience as well. Only you can decide how to balance this particular trade-off for yourself.
This is a polite way of warning you that building a more powerful, capable system costs more than building a less powerful and capable one.
It uses a tower case and offers a middle-of-the-road collection of components and capabilities. In the sections that follow, you find separate discussions of each system, followed by a concluding section that compares primarily in Table , which lists their components side by side and contrasts these two offerings in the discussion that follows the table. First, you can see two unused PCI slots at the lower left beneath the graphics card and above the TV card.
Second, you can see one unused 3. Notice all the individual cables you can see snaking out of the power supply, down the rear of the drive bays, and at the bottom of the case. Finally, check out the enormous fan on top of the CPU cooler. Big is better when it comes to fans, because they can move more air when turning more slowly and slower rotation means less noise.
This is a decent-looking PC inside, and the tower case does leave plenty of room for air to circulate and for other components to be added later on. The unit accommodates only two interface cards in a riser from the motherboard at the lower right. Both expansion slots are taken: one for the graphics card, the other for the TV card.
Finally, notice the total absence of loose wire bundles. All wires are neatly enclosed in nylon mesh sleeves, no bare wires anywhere are longer than they need to be. This is a highly sophisticated build-out, and probably the nicest looking set of purchased PC innards we have ever seen. Only a serious case modder would care enough to create a better looking layout than this!
Why then would anybody want to double their outlay? The company name, Hush Technologies, says it all: this PC is as close to silent as any device with one or more disk drives can get. Apparently, for some media fans this degree of quiet is worth paying a hefty premium to obtain. A typical computer user sits no more than 30 inches away from most monitors and is often closer; a typical entertainment center user sits at least 48 inches away from most TV sets and is often further away.
Microsoft uses very large characters and created a special font to make MCE menus and selections as easy as possible to read. Selecting a program to watch is as easy as using up and down, right and left buttons to land on the right item, and then pressing OK.
Lest you be tempted to think such capability only works for TV, take a look at the My Music screen in Figure MCE uses the Internet automatically to retrieve the metadata titles, album art, artist information, and so forth and constructs these listings automatically for its users. The left-hand menu controls what information is displayed; the right-hand grid makes it easy for users to pick individual entries to play, record, or dig into further.
In fact, MCE setup and configuration is itself designed to work by remote control. Figure shows one of many TV settings that users click through when they set up their systems for initial use or make configuration changes later. The green selection indicates the action to be taken.
Those who wish to use a keyboard and mouse can do so inside MCE to employ shortcut keys or cursor selections to drive the interface.
But those users intent on using a Media Center PC only for media need never interact directly with conventional Windows. As the budgets for the three projects will attest, these build projects cover a range of costs from the low end of the price range to its middle.
But the principles that guided component selection favored quieter operation versus more raw computing power, but also favored mid-range prices rather than always seeking the quietest and more expensive options. We have you covered. Our Home Theaters have a common trait Simplified, user friendly function and control. A new part of the Home Theater experience is mobility, and being able to access all your media away from your home. With the smartphone and laptop influx in the past few years, you are now able to view all your favorite home TV shows, recorded dvr, sports, movies, videos, music, pictures and documents on the go.
We are here to show you how. Are you ready for the 3-D explosion?
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