by Billy Russell, Staff Writer

I think it was the time I saw Top Gun: Maverick–when the idiot to my left was texting during the most exciting point in the movie and the hillbilly behind me had taken his socks off and put his feet up on the seat in front of me–when I decided, “Fuck this,” and the magical allure of going to the movies disappeared for me. And it’s a bummer because I not only love THE MOVIES, I love going to the movies. I love the dark theater. I love the smell of popcorn. I love the expensive, low-quality snacks. You get swallowed up whole by a story when you go to the movies.

But after COVID, after we were all confined inside for almost two years, we forgot how to act like goddamned humans, and the theater went from a place you’d go to and share in this moment with an audience, to a place where idiots treat it as an extension of their living room. Full-on conversations. Phones out. Coughing. Laughing at parts that a) aren’t jokes, and b) aren’t funny.

I wrote extensively about two years in my life dedicated to going to the movies, and to lose that admiration of a place felt a lot like I’d lost myself. But, I just couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t confront fellow audience members anymore. I don’t have the strength in me any longer. I saw a social media post that my local art theater was showing Chungking Express (1994), and it occurred to me that Wong Kar-wai was a total blindspot for me. I had not seen a single one of his movies. All I knew was that he was acclaimed and beloved by film fans and some of the best directors alive. I decided, okay, let's do this thing. Let's see one of his most beloved movies on the big screen.

My wife and I get settled, the movie starts, but fifteen minutes in, this group of four young girls–maybe high school or freshmen in college–keep TALKING. And not a little bit like little whispers, but straight up TALKING.

If you know me, you know I hate confrontation. I hate it. My heart pounds. I wish I was somewhere else. But enough was enough, and I turned to them and asked, "Are you going to talk the whole movie?"

"Oh, it's just that she said, and we were saying, and then this other stuff."

"I don't give a shit, just stop."

They did, they stopped, and I was kind of getting back into film-mode, ready to slip into the movie, and I took my gum out that I was chewing and dropped it into my empty soda can, using it as a trash can. But the gum wouldn't come off my fingers. It was some weird gum I'd never used before. Some weird vegan, hippie, woo-woo bullshit. I brought my middle finger in to lend some support, but the gum got stuck to IT, too. So, I used my other hand to pick the gum off of those fingers, but it wound up getting stuck now to both hands. I started to panic a little, so I used a napkin to peel off the stuck bits, but all it did was break off pieces of the napkin, so I'd effectively tarred and feathered myself.

My wife kept trying to hold my hand, so I finally had to be like, look, I don't know what happened, but my hands are completely covered in gum and now they have bits of napkin stuck to them. And while I was whispering this to her, I was really afraid the girls I scolded were going to shush me or scold me now. I wanted to wash my hands, but I'd have to walk by them, and I couldn't stand to do it. I just watched the movie, hands on knees, palms up, unable to move much, lest gum get stuck to some other thing on me or near me.

As soon as the movie ended, I ran to the bathroom to wash up, but it did NOTHING. The water rolled right off the gum and just wetted the napkin bits. My wife drove home and I wound up getting it off of me with nail-polish remover.

And it’s this kind of stuff I’ve decided I don’t need any longer in my life, so I dedicated the last year to building a home theater for myself so I can have total immersion AT HOME, away from assholes. I can enjoy a movie in that full theater experience, without actually having to go to the movies. I know there are a lot of people out there that want the same thing, but let’s be real. The home theater crowd is filled with A/V nerds who are super gatekeepy, and there’s also a ton of misinformation out there. There’s simply too much knowledge to parse, with a lot of it unanswerable online, with either massive gaps or completely wrong answers. Based on all that I’ve learned, I’m going to break down the essentials, using my own equipment as examples. 

There’s tons I don’t know or can’t get into, specifically because I just don’t own that equipment—and there’s a ton more to home theater stuff I haven’t even dug into yet.

First, let’s get into VIDEO PRESENTATION.

What is HDR?

You want the absolute best video, right? Of course you do. We all do. There are a million types of TVs out there and they all promise the moon and the stars. So where do you go?

Firstly, most importantly, you’re gonna want a modern 4K television capable of receiving an HDR signal.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” you might be asking. “4K? HDR? What the hell is that?”

4K is just the amount of pixels your TV has. The more it has, the sharper the image. Before 4K, there was 1080p. A/V enthusiasts will likely roll their eyes at me hard, but I honestly believe there’s not a ton of difference between 1080p and 4K. If you showed me two images side-by-side, one of an HD image (1080p) and Ultra-HD (4K), I could tell you which is which, but I’d have to squint. It’s not the quantum leap in quality we had going from SD to HD.

The big game-changer in 4K comes with the application of something called HDR (high dynamic range), which basically improves color accuracy by allowing a wider spectrum of colors than ever before. Arguably, even more important to 4K video than the sharpness of the image is the implementation of HDR imagery, which allows dark areas of an image and bright areas of an image to happily co-exist without one struggling for dominance.

Imagine light from a movie theater projector going through a film strip. A dark area on a film strip has unlimited opacity and a light area would have unlimited transparency. Seeing a movie in a theater, front-projected, you have zero issues with this. The image has two extremes, and you think nothing of it. Picture a beach during sunset: One corner of the frame is bathed in light from the sun and the other corner is cloaked in shadows cast from a rock. 

On a TV, where it’s rear-projected, it’s not as easy to accomplish. A dark area may have blown highlights, or the bright area may be dimmed. The image the TV finalizes is in trying to find a happy medium between the two areas of light and dark. HDR–in conjunction with other tools most modern TVs have, such as local dimming–can replicate this image now. Basically, with HDR, you’re getting an image with more vibrant colors, brighter brights and darker blacks, in addition to any increased uptick in sharpness and resolution from the higher pixel rate.

What Kind of TV Should You Get?

I own a Samsung S90C, which is an OLED TV (organic light-emitting diode). Imagine every pixel as a teeny tiny little lightbulb. To accomplish that dark area of shadows, those teeny tiny little lightbulbs either don’t turn on at all to give you a true, inky black, or they can be as dim or as bright as needed, without affecting the entire image. I absolutely LOVE my TV and if you’re just looking for a straight-forward recommendation, I absolutely recommend it.

The one issue with the TV is that it doesn’t support a very popular type of “dynamic” HDR known as Dolby Vision. It has the most basic type of HDR, which is called HDR10 and its own type of dynamic HDR that’s called HDR10+ and is nowhere near as popular as Dolby Vision. 

Do I wish my TV supported Dolby Vision? Sure. Again, this is where it might get contentious. However, based on images I’ve seen elsewhere and other tests I’ve conducted, I think the hardware inside the TV is infinitely more important than the HDR encoding going through it. HDR10 on a great TV is going to look a hell of a lot better than Dolby Vision on a crappy TV. 

What Hi-Fi has a great piece breaking down the differences between HDR and Dolby Vision: Dolby Vision HDR: Everything You Need to Know.

If you’re dead set on a TV that supports Dolby Vision, go with my second choice, another OLED, the LG C3. Price is damn near identical, too. You can’t go wrong. While we may hem and haw about the differences in color and light disparity between the two televisions between certain movies, I don’t think anyone is going to argue that either image is going to look bad. They’re both going to look absolutely stunning.

Some of my favorite stuff about 4K/HDR re-releases in general is how accurate they’ve gotten to their original theatrical image, a recreation of how it was originally intended to look. Granted, there are revisionist releases that are mighty controversial, like James Cameron’s re-issues of Aliens or True Lies that remove the film grain from their transfers. I’m not quite as upset about those presentations as other people, but I will go on record and say I prefer a sharp image swimming in film grain to one artificially made to look like it was shot digitally sometime in the past few years. I love modern video, sure, and it’s made so many evolutionary leaps and can look phenomenal. But I love it when a movie shot on film LOOKS like it was shot on film. I prefer any remastering to honor its source material. 

Now, for me, the really fun part: Let’s get into AUDIO PRESENTATION. 

A Brief History of Sound

When I first started my home theater journey, I didn’t know anything about sound systems. I had a little 2.0 stereo sound bar and because I wasn’t using my TV’s built-in speakers, I thought I was fancy. When I looked into upgrading my existing set-up, I saw that there were three-channel soundbars, 5.1 soundbars, Dolby Atmos-enabled soundbars. And, y’all, I didn’t know what the hell any of that meant. What is five POINT one? What the hell is the point-one?

Well, I’ll tell ya.

Back in the day, for ever and ever, movies were mixed in monaural, or mono sound. Just one channel. Everything is mixed together. All your dialogue, sound effects and music have one channel and they’re gonna be stacked one on top of the other. And it worked amazingly for decades.

Eventually, there was stereo (two-channel audio) which allowed for movement back and forth on the front stage.

Quadrophonic sound came about in the late 1940s, got really popular in the ‘70s, and was strictly for theater use only. It introduced rear channels. Two channels in the front, two channels in the back. This gave an all-around bubble of sound. Mostly, the rear channels were used for music and other sound effects. Dialogue and the bulk of sound still came from the front.

The ‘80s and ‘90s is when the standard switched to 5.1 surround and this dominated for a LONG time. The “five” in 5.1 refers to the speaker setup—it takes the basic principle of quadrophonic sound and introduces one more front channel in the middle, which clarifies dialogue. You still have the two front stereo channels and the two rear stereo channels. But now you’ve got a “point-one” which refers to the subwoofer. If you have a proper 5.1 setup, you’ll have three channels in the front, two in the back and a subwoofer.

And it sounds AMAZING. 5.1 surround was the golden standard for home video from Jurassic Park all the way until now. There are crazier setups that exist, but they’re not as common, and those crazier setups are all backward compatible with 5.1 surround because it’s the most prevalent in terms of physical releases like DVD and Blu-ray, plus streaming. Check the back of a DVD case and under audio description, most of the time you’re gonna see a 5.1 listing. Or, if it says Dolby Atmos, don’t worry, the Dolby Atmos signal will conform to a 5.1 setup (or even stereo, for that matter) with zero issues. And if you’re using TV speakers, a 5.1 signal will play the two front stereo channels.

Why Doesn’t My TV Sound Like That?

Part of the reason people complain about DVDs having shitty sound quality that varies wildly in volume is because it’s a 5.1 signal playing through a stereo setup on a TV or even a 2.0 soundbar. It’s missing that dedicated middle audio channel, so sometimes dialogue will sound like a whisper and then BAM! A truck crashes into something, and it’s rattling your skull. You can solve this by upgrading your system—you don’t need a 5.1 setup, but a 2.0 soundbar will solve this. If you don’t feel like having external audio, cool. Just check the DVD and under audio setup options, see if they’ve included an optional mono or stereo mix and it’ll be better configured for your TV.

Modern Surround Sound Options

Now, we’re gonna get into 3D sound like DTS: X and Dolby Atmos which add height speakers to the overall mix and soundstage. They’re yet another decimal point, so you might see something like 5.1.4, which means it has five standard channels, subwoofer, plus four HEIGHT speakers for elevated sound effects like helicopters, alien spaceships coming in for a landing. 

Beyond that, movies that offer DTS: X and Dolby Atmos are mixed differently. Instead of a sound engineer deciding, “Alright, this off-screen phone ringing is gonna ping the rear left speaker,” they’ll mix the audio in a digital 3D space, so it creates a total immersion of sound. The source of a sound effect and its aftermath will trigger speakers based on how it’s programmed in the engineering space and may trigger multiple channels. A gunshot, for example, may originate from the front left of the soundstage, echo through the top speakers and all the way through the rears.

This, of course, was possible with a 5.1 surround setup too, but 3D spatial audio attempts to project sounds in a more sophisticated way so that they don’t appear to be occurring from the speakers but from where the sound engineer imagines the sounds themselves on the stage. There’s the overall addition of dimension and height, and it’s way cool.

If DTS: X and Dolby Atmos are what you’re looking for in your home theater, my current recommendation is with my current system, which is the Samsung Q990D. I chose the Q990D specifically because of its compatibility with my Samsung TV through something called Q-Symphony which utilizes the TV’s speakers. You’re gonna read a lot of differing opinions about Q-Symphony online, with some folks loving it and some folks hating it and saying it’s a gimmick at best.

In my experience, and in my various tests, I find that Q-Symphony aids in the “height” dimension of Dolby Atmos movies. The Q990D supports 11.1.4 audio so it has two height speakers in the front and two in the rear, so it sounds great on its own, but Q-Symphony adds an extra punch to the height dimension and it LEGITIMATELY projects sound effects from above. It’s really cool.

For non-Atmos, I just use the sound system by itself, and it’s excellent. I feel like with non-Atmos content, the addition of Q-Symphony can dominate the front stage a bit and distract from the rear speakers. 

The main reason I wanted to write this piece is because of the sheer amount of research I had to do in putting together my home theater system. And while I actually really loved the research portion, it was frustrating because of how many things either didn’t have an answer anywhere online or, if you found an answer, it was straight-up wrong. There’s a lot to know in putting something like this together, and with that much knowledge, there’s a lot of arrogance and a lot of gatekeeping, and it’s so frustrating to try to gather information and be treated with disdain by someone who, I don’t know, feels that you’re not worthy of this information that they have.

This information is for EVERYONE. This guide is by no means exhaustive, but it’s a start. Follow this and you’re gonna have a stellar picture with movie theater quality audio. And if you have issues going to the theater like I do—because people are the absolute worst—I wish you luck in your journey. 

And, most importantly, don’t take my advice as gospel. Don’t take ANYONE’S advice as gospel. Use it as a starting point. I have various settings on my TV and soundbar that I stole from someone else and then tweaked to my own specifications. I used their helpful advice to get to a good place and then improved it to my own tastes. You may do the same with my advice—use it to get a baseline of knowledge, and once you start learning enough about this stuff to develop your own eye and ear for what looks and sounds good, make your own modifications to it. 

Great sources for calibrating your equipment can be found by Googling your equipment model number plus Rtings.com recommended calibration settings. I’ve also had a lot of luck mimicking people’s setups and modifying it to my own ear on the forums found on AVForums.

I’d love to hear from anyone who’s decided to put a home theater together for themselves, so just reach out to me directly at scrappybilly@gmail.com.