Perfect Your Home Theater Setup

Channel:

AARP Answers

Subscribers:

73,900

Published on January 30, 2020 12:00:00 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1eTsI0VCEE

Duration: 0:00

266 views

5

Get the most out of your home theater setup with these tech tips.

Want that new flat-panel TV to look and sound as spectacular as at the store? Follow these six tips to enhance the experience.

1. Update your cable box. Even if you have the latest TV, your picture will suffer from an old cable box whose resolution isn’t as good. Make sure your cable box is HD quality, or even better, 4K. Use HDMI cables to connect the box with the TV.

2. Tweak brightness and contrast. Try turning up contrast, and turning down brightness—it can fix a washed-out look. If there’s a lot of light in your TV room, pump up the brightness for better daytime viewing.


3. Use a calibration tool. Get a disk, like the THX Optimizer, which you can find with some Disney movies, or THX Tune-Up, an app for smartphones. It will take you through all the TV’s settings to give you great sound and video.

4. Disable the “soap opera” effect. Also called “motion interpolation,” this adds extra frames to make movement appear smoother. However, it can make the picture look more like video and less like film. If you prefer the film look, disable this effect.

5. Sit in the right place. Measure your TV diagonally… then double that. That’s generally the distance you want to sit for the pixels to create a good picture. So for a 60-inch set, sit 10 feet away. If you have a 4K Ultra HD TV, you can sit closer and it will still look great.

6. Add a sound system. It can transform your experience if you get a “5-point-one” system—that means it surrounds you with five speakers, plus a subwoofer, because it’s all about that bass. If you’re on a budget, a sound bar can give your audio a nice boost for a lot less.