How to build your home cinema 5 1 2 1 22°-30° 0° 22°-30° 3 90°-110° 135°-150° 3 90°-110° 135°-150° 4 4 De-cluttering cables (At least) six speaker cables, a few HDMI leads and probably an Ethernet chord, plus assorted interconnects and USBs… there’s big potential here for your system’s cabling to get really messy. That’s why, in a hi-fi environment, wireless active speakers like Xeos and Focus XDs work so well. Sadly, cables are the wheelie bins of home cinema systems: ugly essentials. But there are many ways to minimise spaghetti: cable-ties, media centres and sock-like tubes all work – and you can even hide cables inside or behind walls (see p84). Just be wary that, because power cables carry higher currents than speaker cables, running the two parallel to each other could cause interference – and thus unwanted noise in your music or films. If your room or set-up dictates contact between the two, though, any crosses should ideally be at right-angles. Fine tuning You’ve laid your last metre of wire. It’s now time to calibrate the system. Most modern home cinema amplifiers have built-in automatic calibration software, which fine-tunes your system by mapping out your room and calculating your speakers’ sizes, distances and response levels within it using weird- sounding electronic noises. All you have to do is plug in the included microphone, place it in your listening position(s) at head-height, and follow a few on-screen instructions. Clever software indeed, but don’t take it as gospel and always check the results afterwards, manually making adjustments if need be using a sound meter app on your phone. Remember what we said about making sure the speakers are equidistant: check that there aren’t any decibel level outliers, too. Happy? Then there’s only one thing left to do: wake the neighbours. ■ Issue 02 25
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