WHAT TO LOOK FOR WHEN CHOOSING A SURROUND SPEAKER PACKAGE

LARGE OR SMALL FRONT SPEAKERS?

As you can see from the pictures here, most home cinema speaker packages lead up front with a pair of floorstanders for left and right, plus a centre, with standmounters for the rears. But really there’s a good argument for having standmounters all the way round. In surround you have a subwoofer handling the bass anyway, and there’s sense in having exactly the same speaker all round the room, because you can be sure there’ll be no tonal change as objects fly from one to the other.

There is a converse argument, however, for big music listeners, as when you play music in 2.0, the subwoofer will be out of circuit and then the floorstanders will provide full-range stereo more effectively than standmounters, if not always as tightly. But you could always program your receiver to deliver music in 2.1. So overall, we’re pretty ambivalent about floorstanders versus standmounts at the front; we’ve heard great results from both.

THE POWER IN THE PACKAGE

Our cheapest package here is getting on for three grand, and of course you’ll still need to power it, and our minimum recommendation for the job would be a receiver around $1500, and going higher will get ever better results out of your speaker selection. This, of course, is the other reason soundbars have proliferated: they’re cheap. But you really do get what you pay for in this regard: there’s no comparison in the results. High-quality speakers deserve a decent set of amplifiers, and better amplifiers deliver a sense of power and control that will make your movie sound truly massive.

THE SUBWOOFER

Subwoofers are usually annoyingly expensive, comparable to your front pair of speakers, and as a result we occasionally find packages which use a subwoofer which isn’t quite big enough or powerful enough to underpin the system. A small cheap subwoofer is worse than no subwoofer at all, and in professionaly-installed systems you’ll very often find two big subwoofers, even four, not so much to deliver eyeball-shaking bass as to deliver an even spread of bass across multiple seats. If you’re catering to just one or two seats, you can get away with one good subwoofer, and positioning it (see

tinyurl.com/subcal), becomes a whole lot easier.

MORE CHANNELS

These systems all sell as 5.1 packages, but of course it’s easy to add an extra pair of the surround speakers to bump that up to 7.1. If you’re wanting the Atmos experience —and why wouldn’t you — then most of the packages here have a solution on offer. Sometimes these are Atmos modules which sit on front/rear speakers and fire up to the ceiling, bouncing the height channels from there to the listening position. Better still are genuine ceiling speakers, either speaker boxes which can ceilingmount, or an in-ceiling design which requires cutting holes in your ceiling; either of these will also require running cables to their positions. The difficulties of this is why some people call in the professionals, and other realise that the Atmos module solution, while less accurate with its reflected soundfield, is a whole lot less messy and easier that the process of hole-drilling and cable-running.

MUSIC IN SURROUND

Music DVDs and Blu-rays have been providing multichannel music for years, but the more recent move to streaming of Atmos music by Apple and Tidal has created a whole new ballpark for surround sound music. Apple, in particular, is focused on the huge market of headphone users, aiming to deliver its ‘spatial audio’ via direct injection to your two ears. We far prefer the experience of plugging an AppleTV 4K into an AV receiver and blasting these Atmos music mixes out of a full-sized surround system. Depending on the mix, this can be quite the party. It does, however, benefit even more than movie soundtracks from having a good size of rear speaker, not tiny boxes. And it’s also worth remembering that Atmos music streams are, as yet, heavily data-compressed, so for the very best quality in surround music, discs are still the way to go.

CALIBRATE

Many receivers have some breed of auto-calibration, providing a microphone so that your receiver can run a series of beeps and whoops to discover the distances and sizes of your various speakers. Otherwise you can input this information manually. But do take the trouble to do so, as the distances in particular affect the timing of each channel delivery, and without accurate timing you may get the effect of power, but not the focus. Indeed even after auto-calibration we tend to make little tweaks until a well-designed soundtrack — or music mix — pops into focus at our preferred personal listening position. That’s when a movie system, just like a brilliant hi-fi system, gets real. And real exciting.