Using your Home Theatre System

Learning how to use your home theatre system should not be a chore.

My husband and I own an Audio, Video and Home Theatre Sales and Installation Business, Image Audio, and work out of our home. I cannot tell you how many times we have gone to a potential new customers home to consult on a new home theatre installation and the homeowners are confused and even nervous about operating a home theater system. How frustrating must that be!

Well, I am here to help. In this blog I will explain in simple, easy-to-follow steps how to turn your systems on to: watch television; watch a movie or listen to CD's.

Let's start with the basics. We will begin with watching television.

To start this process of watching television, we need to make sure all of the products we will be working with in this scenario are turned on. Make sure you have all of the remotes as well - the cable box/satellite remote; the television remote and the AV Receiver remote.

In our business we rarely sell a system that does not include a Universal Remote Control - A one button solution that turns on the receiver, television and cable box and sets them all to the proper settings for you. They do make using your Home Theater System very easy and you will only have one remote on your coffee table. If you would like more information on Universal Remotes, you can contact us through our website.

Every Home Theatre System will have a Surround Sound Receiver, sometimes called an AV Receiver. This is the core of the system. They are basically big audio and video switches that funnel all of the audio and video for each function (television watching, music listening or movie watching) out to the television and speakers.

It is essential that the Receiver be turned on and set correctly or nothing will work properly. Each receiver will have all of the functions you need to watch or listen to the various activities. Depending on the make of the Receiver, (i.e., Denon, Sony, Panasonic), you will be able to either turn a function knob or push a hard button to select what it is you would like to do - TV, DVD, CD, etc.

In this blog, we are going to concentrate on turning on our system to watch television. Our first step has been to:

1. Turn on the AV Receiver
2. With the Function Knob or Hard Button, Set the Receiver to TV (depending on the model of the receiver it could be indicated as: TV/SAT; TV/DBS, TV/CABLE)

The receiver is now on and set to the proper settings - now on to the television settings.

Each Television no matter what type of television (Plasma, LCD or the new LED) will have the required inputs that we will need to select for watching television.

Since you have already turned on the television, you need to grab the television remote control. On the television remote there will be a button called either Input or Video Source (some remotes will have the specific button input (HDMI 1; HDMI 2; Component; Video 1; Video 2)), You will need to know what input the installer used on the television for the watch tv function OR if you cannot remember, you can push the Input button on the television remote control to scroll through all of the televisions inputs until a Television picture appears - you have found the correct input!

Grab the cable box remote and select the channel you desire; grab the AV receiver remote and turn up the volume to the desired listening level and you are good to go.

The goal today was to turn on and watch television using your Home Theatre System. Obviously, there are many other things you can chose to watch/listen to depending on your home theatre installation.

If you decide you want to watch a movie, follow all of the above steps (no need to turn on the cable box) set your receiver to DVD on the function knob and set your television input to whatever input DVD is plugged into (you can do this by toggling through the inputs using your television remote).

If you want to listen to a CD - no need to turn on your cable box, or television, just turn on your CD Player and your AV receiver and set the function to CD, push play on your CD Player and you are listening to your CD's.