HD Envy News

For a full theater experience, your home audio is just as important as your home video setup. Speaker type and placement, room acoustics, surround sound… all of these things combine to give you a dynamic sound set to match your beautiful 1080p flat screen TV. But there are other things involved in pulling out the best possible sound from your media besides just the obvious speaker hardware. Keep your eyes peeled for Blu-Ray and DVD discs and players that are compatible with THX certification.

THX, or Tomlinson Holman’s Experiment, is a type of mastering process that the manufacturers of discs and players can use to get the true-to-the-director’s vision of quality, big budget audio you know and love. Your home theater will sound like the real movie theater if you are able to set up a system that plays THX certified movies. The high-fidelity THX sound, coupled with your 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound speaker layout, will make your next movie experience larger-than-life.

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Everyone wants to hear true-to-life sound when they’re enjoying the latest blockbuster, but how can you tell what sound format will give you ear-splitting, jaw-dropping, mind-blowing audio? Along with the advent of HD video came a whole host of HD audio to match. Blu-Ray discs and players offer special audio formats like surround sound and THX-certified sound. If you find yourself scratching your head when trying to decipher the difference between sound formats, read on.

There are some basic differences between all of the sound formats available for home theaters. Some require, for the best sound, multiple speakers. Others require at least five or seven, which make them surround sound. The two main audio companies that produce the majority of the sound formats for today’s movie DVDs and Blu-Ray discs are Dolby Laboratories and Digital Theater Systems. They are very similar, with two main differences: DTS audio is usually compressed at a lower rate than Dolby, meaning that it will sound clearer once it is uncompressed, but Dolby is more popular and more widely used across the board for both DVDs and Blu-Rays. And within each of these labels is a whole array of different sound formats designed for different experiences.

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