Product Description
With this consumer’s guide, buyers of home theater systems will be taken through the technology and components of home entertainment and learn how they suit their individual needs. Consumers will discover the best compon… More >>
Home Theater for Everyone: A Practical Guide to Today’s Home Entertainment Systems
This book is the best book I have read on Home Theater. It has more information on Audio and Video than most in-depth books on either respective subject. It is well-written, easy to read, and the explanations are detailed, yet easy to understand. He could have left out a little of the THX bias, but it is understandable, everyone lets some personal bias slip a little now and again. Note-he does admit many manufacturers of the best equipment and best values on the market do not participate in the THX program for various reasons. This book cuts through almost all of the misinformation this industry is notorious for being saturated with. I highly recommend this book for any music lover, movie lover, or anybody else for that matter.
P.S. Once you get started on this one, you might not be able to stop.
Rating: 5 / 5
This is a terrific book that explains the nuts and bolts of Home Theater equipment & terms in plain english. It was written just as DVD’s were coming out and Dolby Digital was an emerging, but as yet, unestablished standards, but the author’s views and forecasts of these products have been right on, so there’s not any misinformation.
He clearly favors high quality equipment over mass merchant stuff (e.g. Rotel over Pioneer), but doesn’t provide specific opinions or guidance on individual brands or pieces. The author merely suggests what to look for in a quality AV equipment (e.g. binding posts for speaker connections on receivers rather than simple push clips), then suggests that you read reviews in his magazine, Fi. This review refers to the first edition.
Rating: 5 / 5
For someone who is new to A/V and Home Theater and wants to ramp up the initial learning curve quickly this book will come in very handy. He explains all the various standards and formats, general tips on choosing what to buy, and finally how to setup your system once you have everything. At the back of the book Harley provides a fairly comprehensive glossary and scattered throughout are warnings for what to watch out for when looking at various specifications. However if you are looking for really in-depth information this book is not the place to look and I’m not even sure such a book exists. If you plan on replacing that old stereo setup with the reel-to-reel tape and quadraphonic sound then I highly recommend reading this book to get you going down the right path.
Rating: 4 / 5
Bought this yesterday 7/20/2002. Updated for the latest technology (e.g. THX Ultra 2 – 7.1 discrete channels), this book is pretty much all you need to help you through the complex maze of today’s home theater. Not only did it help me understand the technology for the front projection system I’m design for a dedicated home theater system in the basement, it helped me understand more about my current HT set up. For example, I *finally* was able to fix that persistent buzzing noise that appears intermittently for the past several years in my front and rear loudspeakers. I also learned (to my great horror!) that my DVD player wasn’t set up correctly, so all these years I thought I was listening to Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound (unless I was watching a rare DTS movie), I was actually listening to it in Dolby Surround! My gosh, a few menu items to change on my DVD player and my system went from sounding pretty damn good to completely awesome!
If there is anything missing from this book it’s that I’d like to see a chapter on room design (e.g. room size, recommended projection screen size for viewing distance, more information on acoustic treatment, etc.) Otherwise, this is all you’ll need for understanding all those home theater magazine reviews. Make sure you get the version that’s been updated for 2002!
Rating: 5 / 5
Home Theatre for Everyone? Well, maybe. I didn’t like the fact that the author ignored the reality that most “home theaters” are actually dual-purpose living rooms, family rooms or bedrooms, and are not dedicated rooms that can be set up according to exact specifications. In this sense, the book is less than “A Practical Guide.”
This book did not include discussion of using direct-radiating speakers (normal speakers) as surround speakers rather than dipolar or bipolar speakers. I’m quite certain that most home theaters are using direct-radiating speakers as surrounds, but this is not addressed and is not shown in the speaker setup diagrams.
I also found it extremely annoying that the author would say things about how certain speaker or component companies produce inferior products, but then refuse to mention names! Example from ‘Build and Sound Quality: How to Spot Overpriced Underachievers’: “The company that makes Speaker A is marketing-driven. They don’t care what the speaker sounds like, only that it offers perceived value and sells in large quantities.” And in that same section: “Speaker B is made by a company founded by dedicated enthusiasts who strive to create the best-sounding speaker possible at a given price level.” Now how is that helpful? I’m guessing that the Speaker A company is an advertiser in Robert Harley’s home theater magazine and he doesn’t want to [make them mad]. This book would be so much more valuable to someone new to the hobby if they were told which brands to avoid and why (but I guess that wasn’t the author’s objective).
One last problem I found was that the author would quote very specific prices or price ranges for certain components, but not mention that this was “as of December 1999″ or even “2000 prices.” Someone reading this book in a few years (or even now) could be very misled by this. Example from ‘How to Choose a DVD Player’: “Budget machines start at about $200, with most players falling in the $400-$600 range.” Obviously, a mass-market electronics product such as a DVD player is going to fall in price over time, and in fact budget players now go for $99.99, with most players falling in the $150-$300 range.
Despite the few flaws mentioned above, this book is actually a very good, detailed introduction to the world of home theater. I was especially impressed with the descriptions of the various audio formats that exist (which can be confusing), and also with the discussion of front projector technology.
Note that this is the 2000 edition which is probably fine to buy through the year 2001 or so (since relatively recent technologies such as progressive scan DVD players and DLP projectors are discussed), but the book will probably be showing its age and due for an update by 2002.
Rating: 4 / 5