Home Theater Speaker Wiring

Now that you've built your own DIY home theater speakers, you probably cannot wait to hook them up, grab popcorn and soda to enjoy your favorite movies!

Before we get to that point, let me show you how to wire-up and configure your home theater.

There are mainly two basic ways to wire your home theater:

Setup A.) Audio Video amplifier with built-in Dolby/dts decoder

Step 1. -- Make sure your DVD player is connected digitally to your amplifier's decoder circuitry. Use a 75 Ohm coaxial SP/DIF cable or choose the optical route via Toslink. In some cases, using optical is mandatory - especially when you must fight nasty hum and ground loops. Using computers as home theater units is cool but they're also a notorious source of interferences!

Step 2. -- Your A/V amplifier already takes care of decoding multichannel tracks on your DVD. All that's left is locating the following speaker terminal pairs labeled "Front", "Rear", "Center", "Surround" etc. Then simply wire each speaker to its appropriate terminal. But what about the subwoofer? Because it's an active device with its own amplifier, all you need is a line cable from "Sub Out" to your subwoofer. Done! Was that too hard?

Step 3. -- Finetuning and software setup. Your A/V amplifier might ship with a microphone and onscreen setup utilities. Follow the manufacturer's instructions and familiarize yourself a good bit
with the details.

Setup B.) DVD player with built-in Dolby/dts decoder

Ahh...so you're an audiophile who doesn't want to sacrifice sound quality of your reference stereo gear...or you seek a simple system. Whatever the case - the surround decoder circuitry in your DVD player already provide analog outputs for front, rear, surround and subwoofer channels.

Why not use them?

All you need is a couple of line cables with RCA connectors. Wire them to your analog multichannel (pre)amplifier inputs and another set of RCA cables to your multichannel poweramp (in the case of separate standalone components).

I know, you'll end up with dozens of cables on the rear of your amplifiers but you get better flexibility as a tradeoff. Swapping components becomes a piece of cake and quality of dedicated amplifier components is usually higher,too.

From your power amplifier you hook up your speakers as outlined in the third step above.

Need more instructions?

Obviously I couldn't cover all possible home theater wiring scenarios. But I think you now have a broad understanding and reading manuals will help you get the job done quickly. It's really not that hard.