SPL Meters

Radio Shack Spl Meter

SPL meters are an important part of establishing your home theater system. These SPL meters can help you determine the sound levels in different parts of your home theater room. THX is an audio and video certification process that is commonly used in home theaters and home theater products. The THX process meets a certain standard of quality. This certification is meant to ease home theater buying by identifying products that meet or exceed the high standards set by Lucasfilm’s THX department. THX is is often confused with Dolby Digital or DTS formats. You do not need THX, but if your budget affords the luxury of buying THX-certified components you can be assured you are buying quality products.

Sound Engineering Using Spl Meter

When you’re using an SPL meter, you’ll want to make sure you are using quality products. If you’re using a THX audio system, you’ll look for DVD discs that are marked THX Digitally Remastered. Movies are created in mixing studios that are significantly larger than the typical home theater. Your home theater room is not even close to the size of room for which the original soundtrack was prepared.

When you’re using an SPL meter, you’ll want to look at using a 5.1, 6.1, or 7.1 channel format for your home theater system. The 5.1 format uses five speakers. And there are newer formats that use six and seven speakers. Just as you have a left, right, and center channel in the front of your home theater, THX EX uses a right rear, left rear, and rear central channel. The use of a rear center channel provides more seamless transitions when a sound moves from one side of the rear speakers to the other.

Very few DVDs are encoded with THX EX formats. But these emerging formats are gaining support. If you can afford it, buying a receiver with the THX EX surround decoding provides even more realistic sound, but most budget home theater users will choose to go with 5 1 channel surround sound. THX EX surround receivers are also backward compatible, meaning they also play standard 5.1 Dolby Digital material.

SPL Meter

Yet another surround format, DTS ES, goes a step further by incorporating a rear center channel that is discrete, not matrixed. The new formats that use rear center channels will slowly trickle into the budget home theater system, but at this point, they exist mainly in high end systems. The rear center channels do offer improvement in sound, but there are only a select number of movies that actually take advantage of this technology.